The Uneven Development of the International Refugee Regime in Postwar Asia: Evidence from China, Hong Kong and Indonesia

This article contrasts three different refugee populations in Asia in order to draw attention to an aspect of the early UNHCR that has so far escaped the attention of refugee scholars. Existing research on the history of UNHCR emphasizes the agency's Cold War origins and its evolving role in international politics. However, this article suggests that when it comes to understanding the UNHCR response to refugee crises in Asia in the 1950s, a Cold War perspective alone is insufficient. What emerges from this study is that the early UNHCR was both a Cold War era institution and a colonial era institution. UNHCR's approach to refugee problems in Asia in the 1950s was shaped not only by a Cold War calculus but by a lingering colonial atmosphere, one in which it was taken for granted that ethnic Chinese were both unwelcome and barred from most western countries, and in which solutions to refugee problems in Asia were instead sought in older colonial understandings of the mass deployment of Chinese labour on a global scale to meet the needs of distant economies.