There were many excellent presentations at the 5th World Congress of Taiwan Studies at Academia Sinica in May, with a session on Cold War and Mobility standing out. Three papers were presented, each by the author of a landmark book on displacement, migration and refugeeism.
First was Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang (楊孟軒), whose work The Great Exodus from China (reviewed in Taipei Times, Oct. 08, 2020) examined the social impact of mass migration from China to Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War. Yang spoke about the 15,000-plus Dachen Islanders evacuated to Taiwan in 1955.
David Cheng Chang (常成), who spotlighted the 21,000 Chinese POWs in the Korean War — two thirds “repatriated” to Taiwan — in his book The Hijacked War (reviewed in Taipei Times, April 28, 2022), also spoke. He introduced the case of two interpreters whose careers intersected from World War II through the POW camps and the Liu Ziran Incident (劉自然事件) of 1957, when the killing of an ROC soldier by an American officer sparked riots.
Finally, Chang Wen-ching (張雯勤), whose 2014 book Beyond Borders documented Yunnanese migrants to Burma, presented a case study on Republic of China (ROC) policy toward Vietnamese boat people following the Vietnam War.
The presentations connected to the present, with Yang noting that “because of its troublesome history,” Taiwan’s refugee policy remains premised on “the selective use of refugees for political purposes” rather than “global humanitarian” concerns.
“It’s for us to reflect on this history and [ask] if Taiwan has a coherent refugee policy,” Yang said. “The answer is no.”
This is reinforced by contributions to this collection, which focuses on Taiwan and Japan. As in the Cold War years, China looms large in the decision-making of Taiwan’s authorities, though for different reasons.
The Dachen Islanders were initially heralded as “righteous warriors” by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government. Similarly, the first Vietnamese refugees were ethnic Chinese and used for anti-communist propaganda.
In contrast, Hong Kongers seeking asylum following the 2019–2020 anti-extradition bill protests were portrayed as a security risk, particularly in the pro-Taiwan media.
Articles about these refugees and the influence of media depictions on society are analyzed in a chapter by Cody Wai Kwok Yau (丘偉國), a political scientist at Soochow University.
DELIBERATE AMBIGUITY
Parsed into categories such as “political migration,” “migration safety” and “insincere assistance,” in 259 articles across five Chinese-language newspapers, the analysis finds pro-China media “tended to … criticize the [Democratic Progressive Party] DPP government’s assistance, whereas the pro-[Taiwan] media tended to highlight national security and management cost issues related to immigrants.”
A technique called sentiment analysis is then used to “grasp public sentiment towards refugees,” with +1 given to words with positive connotations such as “assistance” and -1 to negative terms such as “illegal.” The analysis finds the proportion of articles in pro-China media conveying negative sentiments lower (21.83 percent) than that in Green-affiliated titles (35.04 percent).
Elements of this analysis are confusing. The most “negative” article for pro-China media, for example, is a United Daily News report criticizing then Minister of the Interior Hsu Kuo-yung (徐國勇) for “abandoning judicial sovereignty” over the case of Chan Tong-kai (陳同佳), a Hong Kong national accused of murdering his girlfriend in Taipei in 2018 before fleeing back to Hong Kong.
Likewise, the “insincere assistance” charge from pro-China critics arguing DPP measures were “old wine in new bottles … offering no new or helpful mechanism,” and deliberately ambiguous to avoid controversy. Apart from these cases representing political point scoring, it is unclear how “negative” portrayals of government policy equate to negative public sentiment toward refugees.
PLUGGING THE GAP
Ulterior motives aside, KMT criticism is legitimated in a chapter by Chen Min-yen (江旻諺) and Candia Tong (唐紋) of Flow Hong Kong (如水), founded in 2020 as the first magazine for diasporic Hongkongers in Taiwan.
Their article shows how Taiwan’s civil society organizations (CSOs) stepped in when the government failed “to establish a refugee resettlement institution that provided emergency living assistance.” Despite assurances from then president Tsai Ying-wen (蔡英文), preparation was nonexistent, with no official channels for receiving applications.
For the first year, resettlement was led by CSOs who struggled “to develop feasible operational models” partly because of the “safety risks” that led political refugees to cautiously rely on “existing social networks” rather than “widespread appeals the community.”
Despite this, the CSOs established procedures for “a civil shelter mechanism,” including a standard interview process and negotiations with the government over residency.
Finally, the Mainland Affairs Council announced a scheme to take over from the CSOs. However, details remained “undisclosed,” on the grounds of protecting applicants’ identities. While CSOs acknowledged these concerns, they objected to the lack of transparency. Showing how opaque the system remains, the authors “pieced together” a model of the review process based on available information.
ARBITRARY REJECTIONS
This murkiness continued in a third stage, the “quasi-asylum mechanism,” with details known only through press reports based on interviews with applicants. Yet official legislation was still not forthcoming, as premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) stubbornly cited “the completeness of existing laws.”
And there’s the rub: Taiwan does have regulations to accept refugees. In the case of dissident Hong Kongers and Macanese, the relevant articles provide a legal basis for assistance but say nothing about “procedures, working frameworks or the legal right of the applicants.” Similar provisions exist for Tibetans, whose “living experience” is discussed in another chapter, Burmese and Thais.
While these measures are flimsy, there is at least some recourse to legal assistance. Not so for refugees not tied, however tenuously, to the old ROC.
As noted in a chapter on common challenges for Japan and Taiwan, by renowned human rights scholar Bonny Ling and Mariko Hayashi of the Southeast and East Asian Centre, a London-based refugee organization, Taiwan incorporated the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) into domestic law in 2009.
Under international law, the ICCPR is interpreted as prohibiting refoulement where there is a threat to an asylum seeker’s safety. By rejecting a legal path toward residency, Taiwan is contravening its own laws.
Various bills for a refugee act have stalled in Taiwan’s legislature since the first was introduced in 2005, with little progress since a 2016 draft. Extant cases show that the authorities favor ambiguity and opacity, allowing them to arbitrarily reject applications.
In her chapter on public opinion in Taiwan, Czech scholar Kristina Kironska highlights the lack of public dialogue and surveys on the refugee issue and notes that, among Taiwan’s elites, “the picture is somewhat similar.”
Until this changes, the passage of a comprehensive refugee act remains a pipe dream. Still, with its emphasis on global human security, this book is most welcome.
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