BACKGROUND
Between 1975 and February 1986 a total of 110,500 refugees from Vietnam arrived in Hong Kong. The influx peaked in 1979, when 68,748 refugees arrived. Nobody was refused permission to land.
The refugees were initially housed in open camps. They were allowed to travel freely throughout Hong Kong and to obtain open employment. Oxfam was one of many agencies to provide services to the refugees, providing grants of £ 37,000 (approx. $400,000) to help with health, family planning and social programmes (see Appendix B).
International attention was focused on the problem, and in 1979 sixty-five countries attended a United Nations conference in Geneva to discuss ways of tackling the continuing exodus from Vietnam.
The main results of the conference were that the Vietnamese government agreed to control the exodus of people and other countries agreed to offer more places of resettlement. The number of places was increased from 125,000 to 260,000, but it was not decided from which countries the refugees would be taken.
From 1979 to 1981, largely as a result of the conference, a total of 79,663 refugees from Hong Kong were accepted for resettlement overseas. But then the resettlement rate dropped dramatically Kong.
in 1982 only 9,247 refugees left Hong
At the same time, the relationship between the refugees and the Hong Kong community was becoming strained. Violent riots among the refugees had drawn much adverse comment, and there was popular resentment at the fact that refugees from Vietnam were being cared for in open camps while illegal immigrants from China were repatriated.
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