Former refugees stay in Guangxi
ONLY a few ethnic-Chinese Vietnamese who fled to Guangxi province in the 1970s have chosen to return to Vietnam despite normalisation of relations between the two communist neighbours.
According to figures provided by the Guangxi Government, more than 200,000 ethnic-Chinese Vietnamese fled to China in the wake of the outbreak of Sino-Vietnamese hostilities in 1978.
About 103,500 of the refugees were resettled on 44 farms and in 19 factories and two fishing teams in Guangxi.
Although Vietnam has followed in China's footsteps and launched economic reforms in recent years, officials said living standards were so low that former refugees were unwilling to go back.
The number of ethnic Chinese Vietnamese who left Guangxi for Vietnam has amounted to no more than 100 since the normalisation of relations last year.
It is believed some of them breached China's one child family-planning policy, and others committed various offences.
Officials noted that since the refugees were ethnic Chinese, they did not experience the discrimination that might have been encountered by other refugees.
They said that following more than a decade of reform in China, the overseas Chinese were taking the opportunity to reap the fruit of economic development and some were even doing better than native residents in terms of living standards.
In the Guangxi state-owned Wuming Overseas Chinese Farm in Nanning, residents are capitalising on their overseas links to develop the local economy.
Since its establishment in 1962, the farm has received a total of 12,000 returned overseas Chinese from nine countries, including Indonesia, Burma, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. Among them, 3,000 were from Vietnam.
''Our strategy is to make use of our overseas linkage as a bridge to reach out to other parts of world. We have plenty of people who are proficient in various Southeast Asian languages,'' an administrator said.
In 1990, the farm, the largest of its kind in China, gained approval from the Guangxi Autonomous Region Government to set up an overseas Chinese investment zone.
At present, it has 26 state-owned enterprises and 11 joint-venture enterprises. Investment from Hongkong totals 70 million yuan (HK$94.22 million). A trade delegation will be in Hongkong later this month to attract foreign investment.
The farm is now planning to absorb 100 million yuan to build a holiday resort.
It is starting to discuss the feasibility of doing business with Vietnam, but nothing concrete has been achieved so far.
It is understood that ethnic Chinese Vietnamese have continued to come to the farm even after the normalisation of relations between the countries.
Officials said they could do nothing more than try to persuade them to go back.
