Vietnamese boat people () were refugees who fled Vietnam by sea following the 1975 fall of Saigon, which marked the end of the Vietnam War. This migration and humanitarian crisis peaked in the late 1970s and early 1980s before continuing into the 1990s. Between 1975 and 1995, almost 800,000 boat people arrived safely in other countries, while many others died at sea due to piracy, overcrowding, and storms. Political repression, re-education camps and the expropriation of Hoa properties by the Vietnamese government, economic hardship, and conflicts such as the Third Indochina War, contributed to the wider Indochina refugee crisis.
Tensions between Vietnam and China in 1978 and 1979 contributed to the departure of large numbers of ethnic Hoa people from Vietnam, many of whom fled by boat.Straits Times, 10 July 1989. Anti-Chinese sentiment and regional conflict further accelerated this exodus. The number of people who died is hard to establish because of the lack of reliable data and the political instrumentalization of the topic. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that between 200,000 and 250,000 boat people died at sea. In 1981, Australian journalist Barry Wain put forward a figure of 30,000 people dead at sea.
The boat people's first destinations were Hong Kong and the Southeast Asian locations of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. Southeast Asian countries grew increasingly unwilling to accept additional arrivals. Following negotiations and an international conference in 1979, Vietnam agreed to limit departures. Southeast Asian countries agreed to grant temporary asylum, while more developed countries assumed most resettlement responsibilities and costs. Consequently, from refugee camps in Southeast Asia, the great majority of boat people were resettled in the United States, Canada, Italy, Australia, France, West Germany, and the United Kingdom. Several tens of thousands were repatriated to Vietnam. The UNHCR coordinated initiatives such as the Orderly Departure Program, the Philippine Refugee Processing Center, and the Comprehensive Plan of Action to facilitate resettlement.
Background
The Vietnam War ended on 30 April 1975, with the fall of Saigon to the People's Army of Vietnam and the subsequent evacuation of more than 130,000 Vietnamese closely associated with the United States or the former government of South Vietnam. Most of the evacuees were resettled in the United States in Operation New Life and Operation New Arrivals. The U.S. government transported refugees from Vietnam via aircraft and ships to temporarily settle down in Guam before moving them to designated homes in the contiguous United States. Within the same year, communist forces gained control of Cambodia and Laos, thus engendering a steady flow of refugees fleeing all three countries.State of the World's Refugees, 2000 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, pp. 81-84, 87, 92, 97; accessed 8 January 2014 In 1975, President Gerald Ford signed the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act, budgeting roughly 455 million dollars in the effort to provide transportation, healthcare, and accommodations to the 130,000 Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Lao refugees.
After the Saigon evacuation, the number of Vietnamese leaving their country remained relatively small until mid-1978. A number of factors contributed to the refugee crisis, including economic hardship and wars in Vietnam, China, and Cambodia. In addition, up to 300,000 people, especially those associated with the former government and military of South Vietnam, were sent to re-education camps, where many endured torture, starvation, and disease while being forced to perform hard labor. In addition, 1 million people, mostly city dwellers, "volunteered" to live in "New Economic Zones" where they were to survive by reclaiming land and clearing jungle to grow crops.Desbarats, J. "Population Redistribution in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam" Population and Development Review, Vol 13, No 1, 1987, pp. 43-76.
Repression was especially severe on the Hoa people, the ethnic Chinese population in Vietnam.Butterfield, Fox, "Hanoi Regime Reported Resolved to Oust Nearly All Ethnic Chinese," The New York Times, 12 July 1979.Kamm, Henry, "Vietnam Goes on Trial in Geneva Over its Refugees," The New York Times, 22 July 1979. Due to increasing tensions between Vietnam and China, which ultimately resulted in China's 1979 invasion of Vietnam, the Hoa were seen by the Vietnamese government as a security threat."Special Study on Indochina Refugee Situation -- July 1979", Douglas Pike Collection, The Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University, http://www.virtual.vietnam.ttu.edu/cgi-bin/starfetch.exe?c3WGk7fZGwC.5GSATuRwDvOhJJrHoi37YUc3lHzCxC5@[email protected]@dsxmaCfsxVMY/2123309004.pdf , accessed 8 January 2014; Far Eastern Economic Review 22 December 1978, p. 1 Hoa people also controlled much of the retail trade in South Vietnam, and the communist government increasingly levied them with taxes, placed restrictions on trade, and confiscated businesses. In May 1978, the Hoa began to leave Vietnam in large numbers for China, initially by land. By the end of 1979, resulting from the Sino-Vietnamese War, 250,000 Hoa had sought refuge in China and many tens of thousands more were among the Vietnamese boat people scattered all over Southeast Asia and in Hong Kong.Thompson, Larry Clinton Refugee Workers in the Indochina Exodus Jefferson, North Carolina: MacFarland Publishing Company, 2010, pp. 142-143
The Vietnamese government and its officials profited from the outflow of refugees, especially the often well-to-do Hoa. The price for obtaining exit permits, documentation, and a boat or ship, often derelict, to leave Vietnam was reported to be the equivalent of $3,000 for adults and half that for children. These payments were often made in the form of gold bars. Many poorer Vietnamese left their country secretly without documentation and in flimsy boats, and these were the most vulnerable to pirates and storms while at sea.
There were many methods employed by Vietnamese citizens to leave the country. Most were secret and done at night; some involved the bribing of top government officials. Some people bought places in large boats that hold up to several hundred passengers. Others boarded fishing boats (fishing being a common occupation in Vietnam) and left that way. One method used involved middle-class refugees from Saigon, armed with forged identity documents, traveling approximately to Da Nang by road. On arrival, they would take refuge for up to two days in safe houses while waiting for fishing junks and trawlers to take small groups into international waters. Planning for such a trip took many months and even years. Although these attempts often caused a depletion of resources, people often had false starts before they managed to escape.
Exodus in 1978–1979
Although a few thousand people had fled Vietnam by boat between 1975 and mid-1978, the exodus of the boat people began in September 1978. The vessel Southern Cross unloaded 1,200 Vietnamese on an uninhabited island belonging to Indonesia. The government of Indonesia was furious at the people being dumped on its shores, but was pacified by the assurances of Western countries that they would resettle the refugees. In October 1978, another ship, the Hai Hong, attempted to land 2,500 refugees in Malaysia. The Malaysians declined to allow them to enter their territory and the ship sat offshore until the refugees were processed for resettlement in third countries. More large ships carrying thousands of refugees began to arrive in Hong Kong territorial waters: the Huey Fong in December 1978 (3,318 refugees), the Skyluck, disguised as the Kylu, in February 1979 (2,651 refugees), and the Seng Cheong, disguised as the Sen On, in May (1,433 refugees).Bird, Les. Along the Southern Boundary: A Marine Police Officer's Frontline Account of the Vietnamese Boatpeople and their Arrival in Hong Kong. Blacksmith Books, 2021Jones, Gary Skyluck, the Ship That Smuggled 2,600 Boatpeople to Hong Kong – and Freedom, 2019. South China Morning Post; accessed 21 December 2023 Their passengers were both ethnic Vietnamese and Hoa who had paid substantial fares for the passage.Thompson, pp. 150–152
As these larger ships met resistance to landing their human cargo, many thousands of Vietnamese began to depart Vietnam in small boats, attempting to land surreptitiously on the shores of neighbouring countries. The people in these small boats faced enormous dangers at sea and many thousands of them did not survive the voyage. The countries of the region often "pushed back" the boats when they arrived near their coastline and boat people cast about at sea for weeks or months looking for a place where they could land. Despite the dangers and the resistance of the receiving countries, the number of boat people continued to grow, reaching a high of 54,000 arrivals in the month of June 1979, with a total of 350,000 in refugee camps in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. At this point, the countries of Southeast Asia united in declaring that they had "reached the limit of their endurance and decided that they would not accept any new arrivals".State of the World's Refugees, 2000 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, pp. 83, 84; accessed 8 January 2014
The United Nations convened an international conference in Geneva, Switzerland in July 1979, stating that "a grave crisis exists in Southeast Asia for hundreds of thousands of refugees". Illustrating the prominence of the issue, Vice President Walter Mondale headed the U.S. delegation. The results of the conference were that the Southeast Asian countries agreed to provide temporary asylum to the refugees, Vietnam agreed to promote orderly departures rather than permit boat people to depart, and the Western countries agreed to accelerate resettlement. The Orderly Departure Program enabled Vietnamese, if approved, to depart Vietnam for resettlement in another country without having to become a boat person.Kumin, Judith. "Orderly Departure from Vietnam: Cold War Anomaly or Humanitarian Innovation?" Refugee Survey Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 1 (2008), p. 104. As a result of the conference, boat people departures from Vietnam declined to a few thousand per month and resettlements increased from 9,000 per month in early 1979 to 25,000 per month, the majority of the Vietnamese going to the United States, France, Australia, and Canada. The worst of the humanitarian crisis was over, although boat people would continue to leave Vietnam for more than another decade and die at sea or be confined to lengthy stays in refugee camps.State of the World's Refugees, 2000. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. pp. 83, 84; accessed 8 January 2014; Thompson, pp. 164–165.
Pirates and other hazards Boat people had to face storms, diseases, starvation, and elude pirates. The boats were not intended for navigating open waters, and would typically head for busy international shipping lanes some to the east. Additionally, these boats were especially vulnerable due to the lack of weapons to defend themselves as it was difficult to obtain unauthorized weapons in Vietnam at the time. Before 1983 around 20% of boat people were rescued by freighters, but that percentage declined the following years. These lucky ones would reach shore 1–2 weeks after departure. The unlucky ones continued their perilous journey at sea, sometimes lasting a few months long, suffering from hunger, thirst, disease, theft and more attacks before finding safety.