Abstract
ABSTRACTWith the support of new sources from British and Hong Kong archives, this study casts new light on the post-war international adoptions of Chinese refugee children in the British colony of Hong Kong. It argues that while children were ‘saved’ and found families overseas, they were also used as pawns in a bigger political game. A way to delegate welfare for the Hong Kong government, a symbolic humanitarian concession vis-à-vis a strict anti-immigration policy for Britain, and an anti-communist propaganda tool for the United States, these adoptions also convey the competing power and population politics played over subject children by two multiracial empires: one in decline (the rapidly decolonising Britain), the other on the rise (the new cold war superpower).
Highlights
In October 1964, International Social Services of Hong Kong (ISS HK) sent its thousandth child for adoption overseas
Between 1958 and 1963 alone it had organised 779 placements, sending 696 children to the United States, but oddly only 56 to Britain, the Hong Kong’s metropole, with the remaining children going to other countries.[3]
Some children were refugees from China, others foundlings abandoned anonymously, whose identity could not be ascertained. They were all classified as ‘Chinese refugee children’. As such their plight resonated with world public opinion at a time when Hong Kong had to cope with about one million refugees from mainland China, and so they found loving homes abroad
Summary
Please note that the Funding section has been created by summarising information given in your acknowledgements Do not comment on correct changes Please provide missing page range for reference “Choy 2013” references list entry. You can select any text and mark it up for deletion or replacement, or insert new text as needed Please note that these will clearly be displayed in the Comments pane and secondary annotation is not needed to draw attention to your corrections. Firefox users: Firefox’s inbuilt PDF Viewer is set to the default; please see the following for instructions on how to use this and download the PDF to your hard drive: http://support.mozilla.org/ en-US/kb/view-pdf-files-firefox-without-downloading-them#w_using-a-pdf-reader-plugin. The University of Nottingham Ningbo China, Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, People’s Republic of China
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