Surveying Hong Kong in the 1950s: Western humanitarians and the ‘problem’ of Chinese refugees
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract At the end of the Second World War, there were over a million displaced persons and refugees in Europe alone. Hundreds of thousands of people were uprooted with the expansion of the Japanese empire across the Pacific Theater, and many others were similarly displaced when Japan was defeated. Others later fled civil conflicts, in South Asia, for instance, and in China, where thousands left the mainland during the final days of the Chinese Civil War. Among this massive displacement in Asia, unlike in Europe, only a few groups were identified as refugees. One such group consisted of the migrants in Hong Kong who, after 1949, were understood to be refugees fleeing communist oppression in the People's Republic of China. This article examines the critical role that surveys (population studies designed to account for, and define, refugee groups) played in shaping particular, Westernized Cold War understandings of the refugee experience in Hong Kong. These surveys were organized by non-state interests and undertaken with financial support from major American philanthropies. In examining the objectives and methodologies of the refugee surveys conducted in Hong Kong in the early 1950s, in contrast with studies undertaken contemporaneously in Europe, this article observes that, although at the time the flaws in the surveys were recognized and regularly disregarded in the pursuit of broad political objectives, scholars have failed to adequately recognize the subjective nature of the surveys' supposedly empirical evidence. As a result, the dominant European-based narrative about modern refugees has obfuscated the distinctive aspects of the refugee experience in Hong Kong.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".