‘Undesirable Element’: The Repatriation of Chinese Sailors and Break Up of Mixed Families in the 1940s

Abstract

The consequences of the war were also felt by the Chinese seamen in Liverpool, many of whom (including some who had partners and children in the city) were repatriated to East Asia when the Pacific war with Japan was concluded. This expedient act of government stereotyped the Chinese in Liverpool, a group that had been characterised as a model community in the 1930s, as ‘undesirable aliens’ and, like the ‘brown babies’ of the Second World War, created a generation of children who have been searching for their fathers and mothers into the twenty-first century.