Refugees on the Run

The film footage showed weary, bedraggled refugees, some borne on stretchers, some wrapped in bandages, some hobbling along on crutches. Many were aged, others babes in arms. With the all too familiar misery of the homeless etched on their faces, the wretched bands made their way out of Viet Nam across the Nanhsi River into China. Elsewhere along the Sino-Vietnamese border, near Tunghsing, 52 escapees were fired on by Hanoi's troops as they tried to flee across the Gulf of Tonkin in a flotilla of tiny fishing boats.

Hauntingly reminiscent of the Viet Nam War, those scenes of human agony were shown on television newscasts across China last week. The dramatic scenes reflected an extraordinary political scenario: the virtual collapse of fraternal relations between Hanoi and Peking, which Chinese propagandists had once described as being as close "as lips are to teeth." Complaining bitterly about the Vietnamese government's maltreatment of 1.2 million Chinese whose forebears settled in Viet Nam more than a century ago, the New China News Agency raged that "persecuted and ostracized" Chinese last week were fleeing for safety into the People's Republic at the rate of about 4,000 a day.

In the past two months, according to Peking, more than 102,000 refugees have streamed across the border into Yunnan province and the Kwangsi region, where emergency measures are being taken to resettle them on state farms and communes. Soon, Peking announced, it would dispatch ships to the Vietnamese coast in order to pick up its mistreated countrymen. In Hong Kong, leftist newspapers predicted that perhaps 300,000 more Chinese would emigrate from Viet Nam in the next few weeks.

In early April, after Hanoi announced that all free enterprise in the South had been abolished, the major exodus began. This belated effort to stamp out the vestiges of capitalism was a particular blow to the Chinese, who have long been among South Viet Nam's most thriving businessmen and black marketeers. In the enclave of Cholon, the Chinatown of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), Chinese merchants had succeeded in cornering the trade in black-market rice, as well as such luxury goods as American bourbon, Algerian orange juice, German cameras and Tiger Balm from Hong Kong. Ideologically outraged by this and other flagrantly capitalistic enterprises in the South, Hanoi moved to close down private shops, expropriate goods and drive both Chinese and Vietnamese merchants into the swamps, wastelands and forests of the so-called new economic zones in rural Viet Nam.

Carefully avoiding any mention of its own struggles against capitalism, Peking has complained that "many Chinese in Viet Nam had the meager fruits of decades of hard work confiscated and stolen; most Chinese living in Ho Chi Minh City had their property searched and impounded before having to flee in a pathetic state."

The vehemence of the Chinese charges has clearly disconcerted Hanoi, which can scarcely afford more trouble with Peking. Already suffering from severe economic problems, Viet Nam is embroiled in a costly war with its Peking-supported neighbor, Cambodia. Accordingly, the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry has asked Peking to negotiate "in a spirit of friendship" the problems involving the overseas Chinese. Meanwhile, Hanoi's official news agency has dismissed the Chinese atrocity stories as "sheer fabrications."

Hanoi has also twitted Peking over its concern about the Chinese in Viet Nam while it inconsistently ignores the persecution of the 500,000 ethnic Chinese in Cambodia. According to Hanoi radio, hundreds of thousands of Chinese in "Democratic Kampuchea"--the country's official name--"have been subjected to blatant repression, mass evictions and massacres." Hanoi has also strongly defended its harassment of Chinese shopkeepers on the grounds that Communism should affect everyone equally. Argued one official press release: "China is a socialist country that also underwent a difficult period, similar to what Viet Nam is now experiencing; China should not cause Viet Nam difficulties in its present work of transforming the country."

Anti-Chinese feeling in Viet Nam has roots in China's ten-century-long domination (111 B.C.-939 A.D.) of the country. Nonetheless, there is much evidence that the mass exodus was occasioned by Hanoi's communization program rather than by specifically anti-Chinese discrimination. Already deprived of their shops and goods, the Chinese in Viet Nam are understandably fearful of Hanoi's announced intention to resettle over the next 20 years in uninhabited areas 10 million people from overcrowded cities. An equally draconian resettlement program in Cambodia in 1975 coupled with political reprisals has already cost at least half a million lives. Why has Peking so far refused to accept Hanoi's offer to negotiate the fate of the Chinese in Viet Nam? Some Western observers speculate that Peking may have seized on the Chinese exodus as a pretext to put pressure on an erstwhile ally that is leaning more and more toward Moscow. Soviet technical aid and loans have reinforced the Kremlin's influence in Viet Nam. Fearful of being encircled by Soviet-dominated countries, Peking this year has dispatched high-level diplomatic missions to Burma, Nepal and North Korea in an effort to shore up good relations with border nations. The verbal fireworks that China has exploded over the refugee issue are a clear warning that Peking will respond even more menacingly to any attempt by Hanoi to overthrow the pro-Chinese regime in Cambodia or to establish Soviet naval or missile bases in Viet Nam.

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