The Invisible Refugees

Peking tries to resettle its exiles from Viet Nam

While world attention has been riveted on the tragic exodus of 500,000 Vietnamese boat people who have escaped by sea to Southeast Asia, another virtually invisible stream of 251,000 refugees has made its way overland into the People's Republic of China. Ethnic Chinese, they have been driven out of Viet Nam in the past 18 months when they became the target of anti-Chinese prejudice -- exacerbated by heightened hostility between Hanoi and Peking. Little was known of their fate until last week when Peking, hoping for aid from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, allowed a group of U.S. journalists to visit the refugee resettlement areas in southern China. Among the first Americans to be granted entry was TIME Correspondent Richard Bernstein. His report:

Hoang Quoc Bao, 28, was the leader of an 82-mm mortar squad in the North Vietnamese army that marched with Hanoi's victorious troops from Kontum all the way to Saigon. Last year Vietnamese security police burst into his home in the middle of the night, seized him and his two brothers and beat them, warning that they had to leave Viet Nam or be killed. Now he is a refugee, working sugar-cane fields in China and owning nothing but the clothes he wears.

Hoang Thanh Thu, 41, once served as a technician in Hanoi's central railroad administration. Last week he sat in a dark makeshift hut of bamboo and straw matting and stated the obvious: "Life is hard. We all want to go some place else," he complained. "We all came to China hoping that this would be a route to another country."

These two angry men are among the 221,000 refugees from Viet Nam who have been resettled on state farms; 78,000 in Guangxi province, 27,000 in Yunnan and others scattered in Guangdong and Fujian provinces. Thirty thousand more are in refugee camps near the Viet Nam border waiting for places in permanent settlement areas.

China has not found it easy to absorb the refugees. Said a resettlement aide in Yunnan: "Grain, meat and edible oils -- these are already rationed in our country -- so you can imagine the burden on the farms imposed by this huge influx of new people." The Chinese claim that finding a home for each refugee costs $1,200, a figure that covers the purchase of transportation, agricultural tools, housing and food. As a result, Peking has taken the unprecedented step of asking the U.N. for financial help in resettling the refugees who are still in the camps and those who are expected to arrive in the future. The Chinese also want the U.N. to process the applications of those who may qualify for emigration to other countries.

Refugees from Vietnamese cities like Hanoi and Haiphong find life on state farms distinctly unpleasant. "Some of them stay at home rather than go into the fields," said Yao Bosheng, an official of Yunnan province's refugee settlement office. On the Hung Ho state farm in the lush Red River valley, 523 refugees, out of a total population of 2,000, are work ing the sugarcane, rice, banana and pineapple fields. Though some refugees have been housed in brick barracks, with one family to each large room, many others live in temporary, ramshackle shelters made of bamboo and straw mats. Like the other workers, the newcomers are paid standard wages of $17 a month, plus rations of rice, meat and oil. The refugees have strained the resources of the farm, said Farm Director Yin Dayong. "Before, the farm provided 390,000 lbs. of grain to the state. This year it incurred a loss of $87,000."

More of an asset are 11,000 ethnic Chinese who made their way from Vietnamese fishing villages and islands to the Chinese coast in their own fishing boats. In Beihai, on the Tonkin Gulf, 7,000 refugees are fishing in the boats that brought them, selling part of their catch to the government. Three thousand others are living in a makeshift camp comprising huts furnished with wooden slat beds, mosquito netting, a small table and, sometimes, a kerosene lamp. Conditions are crowded, but no more so than in the refugee camps of Thailand, Malaysia and Hong Kong. "The people here know only fishing," observed Hoang Quoi Hung, 47, a former seafood-industry official from Haiphong. "They think that any place they can fish is all right."

Nearly all the refugees come from North Viet Nam. Most seem content, but a minority see China as a way station on a voyage to the land of the once hated enemy -- the U.S. Others yearn to go to Canada, France or Australia. Said a North Vietnamese artist who has been resettled on a Chinese state farm: "I hear that life is not so difficult in America as it is in this place. Here, if you have something to wear you have nothing to eat or the other way around."

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