(Im)mobility of the "Vietnamese Boat People" and the "Chinese White Dolphin" in the Greater Bay Area Borderscape

This presentation parallels the different (im)mobility experiences of the “Vietnamese boat people” and the “Chinese white dolphin” in the Greater Bay Area’s complex borderscape, examining how the political ecology of the border space constructs “racialized” bodies and mobility injustice in a world of non-dualist framework.

About 200,000 Vietnamese refugees fleeing war, poverty, and political repression sought asylum in Hong Kong between 1976 and 1997. They came to Hong Kong’s waters in waves across the South China Sea by barely seaworthy vessels. Thousands more died trying to complete the perilous journey. They saw the then British-ruled Hong Kong as a sanctuary, but most of them ended up in closed camps that were heavily guarded to stem the further influx of illegal migrants. They were named “boat people” in Hong Kong to describe how they arrived by sea. A stigmatized label was imputed onto them as aggressive, criminous, deviant, sinister, less-than-human creatures, even though Hong Kong residents rarely have any personal interaction with the Vietnamese refugees. However, the confinement of and hostility toward the refugees should be grasped in the intersection of the Cold War and the post-Cold War context of the Sino-British negotiations over the city’s future, against which local Hong Kong residents feel politically powerless.

The Greater Bay Area, aka the Pearl River Delta, has been a political borderscape crisscrossed by the continental power center (Guangdong or China interior) and the two colonial island enclaves (British-Hong Kong and Portuguese-Macau). In the face of China’s rise, the two socio-political and economic colonies from the space of islands were reunified with the mainland continent at the end of the twentieth century. The central government attempts to convert the Greater Bay Area into a major economic driving force for China’s further development. However, the political ecology of the cross-border space continues to set the region apart. Approaching Hong Kong’s handover to China in the 1990s, the Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin has been chosen to symbolize the integrating force to tie the disparate island geographies across distinct political boundaries. The Chinese name these humpback dolphins living in the estuary waters south of the Yangtze River “Chinese white dolphin” (Zhonghua bai haitun). Literally as “sea pig” in the Chinese language, the marine mammal has been designated as a “giant panda of the sea” that symbolized and served as a mascot of Hong Kong’s reunification with China in 1997 and later for the integration of the Pearl River Delta cross-border region as a whole, because dolphins have been romanticized as loving, loyal animals that cherish family bonds.

However, the economic integration that brings the Pearl River Delta’s islands and the mainland together as the Greater Bay Area via frequent sea traffic and mega-infrastructure projects, such as the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge, threatens the dolphins’ survival. Similar to the Vietnamese refugees’ closed camps that deter mobility, the compensatory marine parks set up to provide dolphins with safe havens have become obsolete because of the further disturbance of infrastructure constructions like the Hong Kong Airport’s third runway, rendering it impossible for the dolphins to enter the area.

I study how the Eurocentric or Sinocentric modernity of dualism contains the mobility of those categorized as less-than-human or more-than-human and de-mobilizes the production of other possible worlds.