The Case of the Hai Hong: "Boat People" and the Economy of Migrant Shipping

On October 24, 1978, a group of nearly 2,500 Vietnamese refugees, the majority of them ethnic Chinese, boarded the Hai Hong freighter off the coast of Vung Tau and sailed toward Malaysia. At Port Klang, the 1,500-ton freighter was prohibited from landing and turned away, where the refugees were stranded for weeks in the sweltering sun with little to no food or water. The Hai Hong incident, which transpired over a month as Malaysian government officials and Western states hotly debated the definition of a refugee versus an “illegal migrant,” demonstrated a critical turning point in the treatment of boat refugees leaving from Vietnam. These passengers became suspect for their economic capacities to purchase what one journalist called a “pay-your-way cruise to freedom.” While the Hai Hong episode illustrated the geopolitical anxieties of nation-states towards a rapidly increasing Viet refugee populace in the late 1970s, this paper argues that the incident contributed to shifting Southeast Asian and Western discourses surrounding the “boat people.” While Vietnamese refugees prior to 1978 had escaped on all manner of vessels, it was the number of passengers on the Hai Hong ship that recast the prima facie boat refugees into illegal “human cargo” to be distributed, disciplined, and managed by asylum policy. The transformation of the boat refugee into shipped human cargo unveils an insidious conflation of infrastructure and capital with the historically racialized Asian migrant.