The Sojourners: Returned Overseas Chinese in the People's Republic of China

IT is impossible to say just how many ethnic migrated to mainland China during the first four decades of the People's Republic. Excluding recent refugees from Vietnam, the total may still come close to a half million.' Once held to be sojourners (huaqiao) when they lived abroad-mostly in Southeast Asia-yet distrusted in the PRC because of their previous connections, the Overseas Chinese (guiguo huaqiao) faced further hostility and abuse after moving to what they believed was their homeland. They were brutalized during the Cultural Revolution, imprisoned as spies or counterrevolutionaries and attacked as capitalists, imperialists, worshippers of things and, in the most hurtful way, foreign devils. Discrimination became so widespread that when word went out to those who were unhappy that they were free to leave, a number of the small elite who had been accepted into the Communist Party joined several hundred thousand others in a mass exodus to Hong Kong and Macau. Most are extremely bitter. The fifty thousand or so who originally returned to China for further education in the 1950s, and managed to obtain fairly important positions in medicine, education and technology after graduation, seem most hurt by the turn of events. Certainly they are the most outspoken. They feel not only unfairly rejected but that they