Overseas Chinese in the People's Republic of China by Peterson Glen

Author:Peterson, Glen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Capitalists: leading the good life

Not all of those who migrated to China in the 1950s were destitute and penniless refugees. A small but conspicuous number came with considerable personal wealth. They included pro-Beijing capitalists and businessmen fleeing the anti-Chinese economic policies adopted by countries like Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, as well as elderly emigrants who had decided they wanted to live out the final years of their lives in the land of their birth or ancestry.54 It appears that many of those in the latter category were emigrants who had spent much or all of their working lives in North America, often toiling at menial jobs, and who saw an opportunity to retire comfortably in China and enjoy a degree of social status and respect that had been impossible overseas in countries like the US and Canada, where Chinese lived under conditions of legislated racism. Such persons were not ‘capitalists’ by any objective standard. But they possessed a level of personal wealth and a superior living standard that set them well apart not only from other Guiqiao but from most ordinary Chinese as well; which led easily to accusations of ‘capitalism’ and a ‘bourgeois mentality’. Zhao Huaxie (赵华协), for instance, had gone to the US in 1931 at the age of 17 to work as a tailor and remained there for more than two decades until he and his wife decided to return to China in 1954. Although Zhao and his wife had only limited economic means by North American standards, they were able to use their life’s savings to live a comfortable and relatively privileged life in China.55 Whatever their backgrounds and circumstances, the experiences of this group of Guiqiao were far different from those of the much larger group of refugees and students who came to China in the 1950s. In fact, socialist China went to considerable lengths to encourage the ‘return’ of such migrants in the 1950s by offering them a level of material comfort and a privileged lifestyle that was well beyond the reach of most other Guiqiao, not to mention ordinary citizens.

If refugees were quarantined in state farms located in remote border regions far from the centres of economic and political power, wealthy Guiqiao were sequestered in luxurious gated communities located in the suburbs of Guangzhou and in cities and towns throughout Guangdong and Fujian. The centrepiece of the PRC’s effort to indulge the needs and desires of upperclass Guiqiao involved the construction of special residential enclaves known as Overseas Chinese New Villages (Huaqiao Xincun 华侨新村). A kind of 1950s socialist version of the contemporary gated retirement community, with the same claim to exclusive living, Overseas Chinese New Villages were built for the exclusive residential use of Guiqiao and Qiaojuan. The idea for such a ‘village’ appears to have been conceived in 1954 as local authorities in Guangdong searched for ways to make up for the property losses suffered by many Overseas Chinese during land reform and to prevent such losses from happening again.

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