IN A restaurant in Qiaogang, a town in the southern province of Guangxi, a large poster of Mao Zedong—entitled “Red Sun”—hangs below one of a Vietnamese island where Wu Guangsui, the restaurant’s owner, was born. He fled to China by boat with his family in 1978 when relations between the once-friendly neighbours soured—resulting, the following year, in a brief but bloody war. Mr Wu (pictured), like some 300,000 other Vietnamese who sought refuge in China at the time, feared persecution in his home country for being a member of China’s ethnic majority.
These refugees are among the very few outsiders who have legally settled in China. Then impoverished, China is now the world’s second-largest economy and aspires to be a global power. Its working-age population is shrinking, yet it remains stubbornly reluctant to accept new entrants; thousands fleeing persecution or conflict in North Korea or Myanmar in recent years have faced deportation by the Chinese authorities. Those sent back to North Korea have often been imprisoned and sometimes executed on their return.
It was different with the Vietnamese. At the...Continue reading
Source: China http://ift.tt/1L8Op6U
EmoticonEmoticon