Southeast Asia Studies Seminar Series: Reconstructing Taiwan’s Role in the IndoChinese Refugee Crisis

This paper reconstructs Taiwan’s role in the IndoChinese refugee crisis. As a non-UN member state by the peak of the crisis in the late 1970s, Taiwan’s contributions to the IndoChinese refugee crisis are not recorded in UNHCR statistics, which detail the global nature of resettlement (across the “Global North”). By using Taiwanese and U.S. archival documents and reports from the then Free China Relief Association, I reconstruct statistics and stories behind the over 15,000 IndoChinese asylum seekers repatriated, integrated or resettled to third countries by the Republic of China/Taiwan. I use “IndoChinese” with a capital C to highlight the significant number of ethnic Chinese among those departing. I then juxtapose this archival investigation with an analysis of the 2023 Taiwanese public television documentary A Camp Unknown (彼岸他方). My analysis of texts and interviews in Vietnamese, Chinese and English focuses on the asylum seekers’ race/ethnicity, time (year) of departure, and terminology to transpacificize Critical Refugee, South/East Asian, Asian American/diasporic, and Cold War studies.

About the Speaker:
Alvin Khiêm Bùi is Research Fellow at the University of Oregon’s Global Studies Institute’s US-Vietnam Research Center. He will join Brooklyn College, City University of New York as Assistant Professor of History of Asian Peoples in Diaspora in Spring 2025. He received his PhD in History from the University of Washington, Seattle, and has published in Asiascape: Digital Asia on Saigonese motorbike YouTubers and their diasporic Vietnamese audiences.