11 AUG 2026 (TUE) 14:35 - 15:05

Infrastructures of Care: Vietnamese Refugees and the Making of Humanitarian Hong Kong

Miss SHI Zhaohe     

( Supervisor: Prof Wesley Attwell )

Abstract:

This dissertation rethinks Hong Kong’s late twentieth-century history by tracing the entangled infrastructures of humanitarian care, gendered labor, and biopolitical governance that emerged in response to the arrival of over 200,000 Vietnamese refugees between 1975 and the 1990s. Moving beyond familiar framings of Hong Kong as an exceptional Chinese metropolis or a neutral hub of mobility, I map how the city’s camps operated as logistical nodes within broader regional and imperial circuits of migration, regulation, and aid. Through a contrapuntal reading of archival documents, government and NGO reports, oral histories, and media, I show that camps were not simply spaces of crisis or charity but laboratories of exclusion, management, and everyday negotiation. Focusing especially on the informal infrastructures sustained by women as caregivers, laborers, organizers, and at times sex workers, I argue that gendered labor was both the object of regulation and the condition of possibility for community survival inside the camps. Through cases of medical screening, family planning, and collective survival tactics, the dissertation reveals how colonial authorities, international agencies, and local organizations wielded technologies of care to classify, discipline, and sometimes provide protection, while refugee women persistently reworked the boundaries of agency, risk, and solidarity. By situating the micro-politics of camp life within shifting geographies of Cold War migration, urban development, and postcolonial labor, I show how the management of refugee bodies and relationships transformed not only the lives of displaced Vietnamese but also the infrastructures and social imaginaries of Hong Kong itself. In recovering these often-overlooked histories, the dissertation offers new insight into how humanitarian infrastructures and gendered migration have shaped, and continue to haunt, the boundaries of belonging, care, and citizenship in contemporary Asian cities.