Transcending the South China Sea via a “Place of Exception”: Taiwan’s Resettlement of Indochinese Asylum Seekers

In this presentation, I center Taiwan as a site where a key Cold War diaspora, refugees from Indochina were processed, resettled and even permanently hosted. These assistance efforts by the Republic of China’s ruling Nationalist (Guomindang) Party government began shortly after the Fall of Saigon in April 1975 and increased in line with the peak of the “boat people crisis” in 1978. Over 10,000 refugees from Indochina passed through Taiwan before most were resettled in a third country. Whereas Jana Lipman has written about UNHCR refugee (processing) camps in Hong Kong and across Southeast Asia, there are no English-language discussions about the two camps on Taiwan’s Penghu Islands (some 30 miles west of Taiwan).

Three years later, the Taiwanese public read the Nanhai (South China Seas) Blood Letter, written in Vietnamese and translated to Chinese for initial publication in the Guomindang’s Central Daily News on December 19, 1978. Published 3 days after the United States and the People’s Republic of China announced that they would establish diplomatic relations at the start of 1979, the letter, written on the author’s deathbed on a deserted island in the middle of the South China Sea, implied that the fate of the Republic of Vietnam would come to Taiwan if the people of Taiwan did not stand up for themselves against communist aggression.

The Nanhai Blood Letter was republished for use as a required text in elementary and middle school and circulated among government agencies. By intertwining the publication of this blood letter with that of refugee camps on Taiwan, I show how the Cold War diaspora of Indochinese refugees loomed large in the minds of ROC leaders.