Unsettling Exiles: Chinese Migrants in Hong Kong and the Southern Periphery During the Cold War
by: Angelina Chin (Author)
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Publication Date: 25 April 2023
Language: English
Print Length: 320 pages
ISBN-10: 0231209983
ISBN-13: 9780231209984
Book Description
The conventional story of Hong Kong celebrates the people who fled the mainland in the wake of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. In this telling, migrants thrived under British colonial rule, transforming Hong Kong into a cosmopolitan city and an industrial and financial hub. Unsettling Exiles recasts identity formation in Hong Kong, demonstrating that the complexities of crossing borders shaped the city’s uneasy place in the Sinophone world.Angelina Y. Chin foregrounds the experiences of the many people who passed through Hong Kong without settling down or finding a sense of belonging, including refugees, deportees, “undesirable” residents, and members of sea communities. She emphasizes that flows of people did not stop at Hong Kong’s borders but also bled into neighboring territories such as Taiwan and Macau. Chin develops the concept of the “Southern Periphery”―the region along the southern frontier of the PRC, outside its administrative control yet closely tied to its political space. Both the PRC and governments in the Southern Periphery implemented strict migration and deportation policies in pursuit of border control, with profound consequences for people in transit. Chin argues that Hong Kong identity emerged from the collective trauma of exile and dislocation, as well as a sense of being on the margins of both the Communist and Nationalist Chinese regimes during the Cold War. Drawing on wide-ranging research, Unsettling Exiles sheds new light on Hong Kong’s ambivalent relationship to the mainland, its role in the global Cold War, and the origins of today’s political currents.
About the Author
Review Stimulating and provocative.-- "China Quarterly"Unsettling Exiles introduces the Southern Periphery of the PRC: a place of permeable borders, political exiles, unwelcome migrants, unidentified corpses, idealists, grifters, and wary state apparatuses. Chin gives close and compassionate attention to people creating lives in circumstances they did not choose, all the while imagining a future China they could call home. A powerful argument that understanding the center requires acknowledging the loyalties, longings, and traumatic memories of those on the periphery.--Gail Hershatter, University of California, Santa CruzBold and exquisite, this book exhumes from history a "Southern Periphery" at the doorstep of the People's Republic of China. Nurtured by the visions and voices of forgotten exiles, refugees, and deportees falling through the cracks of conventional analytical categories--nations, borders, citizenship, and diaspora--the legacies of this unique political landscape still reverberate today.--Ching Kwan Lee, author of Hong Kong: Global China's Restive FrontierDoes geography shape destiny? How have the borders of land and sea that bind Hong Kong to China shaped the fates of Hong Kongers, many of whom fled CCP authoritarianism and found no other home amid the racist legacies of decolonization and the Cold War's political divides, which fueled Hong Kong's insecure sovereignty. Published in the aftermath of China's sweeping National Security Law, Chin's nuanced study of Hong Kongers' limited mobility and precarious immobility throbs with poignant hindsight.--Madeline Y. Hsu, author of The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model MinorityIn Unsettling Exiles, the story of postwar Hong Kong is not simply one of socioeconomic perseverance but must also be understood in the contexts of the trauma and sense of dislocation experienced by many who had, for a variety of reasons, left China for the British colony. In so telling the story, Chin offers not only to place the experiences of many in Hong Kong in the broader context of what she refers to as the "Southern Periphery" but also to connect the challenges Hong Kong has faced since the 1997 handover to a longer history of fear, despair, and disillusionment.--Leo K. Shin, founding convenor of the Hong Kong Studies Initiative, University of British ColumbiaIn this pioneering and captivating book, Angelina Chin shows how Cold War Hong Kong became a dumping ground for Chinese refugees, deportees, and a host of other "undesirables." Instead of finding cosmopolitanism and success, as the triumphal "Hong Kong story" goes, these exiles often faced despair and marginality. Unsettling indeed!--John M. Carroll, author of The Hong Kong-China Nexus: A Brief History
About the Author Angelina Y. Chin is associate professor of history at Pomona College. She is the author of Bound to Emancipate: Working Women and Urban Citizenship in Early Twentieth-Century China and Hong Kong (2012).
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