MIGRATIONS

Migration of people from various regions now known as China to the Red River Delta began in the pre-historical period. It is widely speculated that the ancient Lac Viet tribes settled in southern China before moving to the Red River Delta. The legendary King An Duong, who ended the dynasty of the Hung Kings, is believed to have come from southwestern China. The conquest of the Red River Delta by the Qin Empire and the Nanyue (Nam Viet) Kingdom brought more people from the north to the land that later became known as northern Vietnam.Footnote ¹⁰

During the long period of Chinese colonial rule (111 BC to 939 AD) there was a continuous flow of people from the north to the Red River Delta. These people can be divided into several categories, the first of which comprised civil officials, generals, soldiers and their families. Some members of this category stayed in Vietnam permanently, became mixed with the local people, and, after the Han dynasty general Ma Yuan (Ma Vien) brutally crushed the Trung Sisters rebellion in 42 AD, emerged as the powerful Han-Viet families.Footnote ¹¹ Some assert that a number of Ma Yuan's soldiers settled in northern Vietnam and their descendants are still identifiable today.Footnote ¹² After the collapse of the Han, many influential Chinese moved to the Red River Delta in order to avoid the chaos in China proper.Footnote ¹³ Chinese officials continued to arrive during the subsequent Sui and Tang dynasties. The second category consisted of merchants, artisans and other common people who moved to Vietnam on their own terms in order to seek opportunities. They included refugees who fled China to avoid political, social and economic disasters. The last category was criminals who were sent to frontier regions to serve their sentences.Footnote ¹⁴ It is estimated that the total population of northern Vietnam in the third and fourth centuries AD was about 500,000, and among them were 10,000 to 100,000 Chinese.Footnote ¹⁵ These early immigrants eventually assimilated; some of their descendants, it is argued, were active participants in the anti-Chinese independence movements of the sixth and tenth centuries.Footnote ¹⁶

After Vietnam gained independence in the tenth century AD, China no longer sent officials, generals, soldiers and criminals to Vietnam, but political and economic immigrants and refugees continued to arrive. Generally speaking, Vietnamese rulers encouraged the Chinese to assimilate by offering equal or even favorable treatment to permanent residents, and by keeping a close eye on temporary visitors.Footnote ¹⁷ As Châu Hải points out, large-scale Chinese migrations into Vietnam often took place during periods of political change in China.Footnote ¹⁸ For instance, the Mongol invasion of China caused some Chinese to flee to northern Vietnam.Footnote ¹⁹ Due to the similarities of political and cultural milieux, Chinese immigrants were able to win bureaucratic positions in Vietnam rather easily. The lists of degree holders who passed the Vietnamese civil service examinations during the Ly and Tran dynasties reveal a large percentage of Chinese surnames.Footnote ²⁰ Chinese officials and soldiers again went to Vietnam during the brief period of Ming occupation (1407–1427). After Vietnam regained independence, those Chinese who had remained in Vietnam were permitted to stay.Footnote ²¹ The Manchu conquest of China in the seventeenth century gave birth to a new wave of Chinese immigration, and these new immigrants became miners, merchants and farmers, as well as officials and soldiers in Vietnam.Footnote ²² In northern Vietnam, Chinese residents dominated the pottery-making and mining business.Footnote ²³ They were also very active in Pho Hien, a thriving trading center in Hung Yen. It is estimated that there were about 56,000 Chinese living in Tonkin in the eighteenth century.Footnote ²⁴ The large number of these new immigrants made it possible for some of them to form their own communities, one of which became known as the Minh Huong.Footnote ²⁵ As a result of Vietnam's conquest of Champa and the Mekong River Delta, more and more Chinese immigrants began to move to central and southern Vietnam. In fact, Vietnamese rulers used the Chinese who fled to Vietnam after the Manchu conquest as vanguards in the southward expansion.Footnote ²⁶ Châu Hải argues that before the seventeenth century, Chinese immigrants in Vietnam were easily assimilated into the local society. After that, there were Chinese men and women in numbers sufficient to constitute their own communities. These social formations ultimately became an obstacle to assimilation.Footnote ²⁷

In the early nineteenth century, the Nguyen dynasty recognized a system in which the Chinese in Vietnam were divided into several congregations based on dialect. Each group had a leader whose duty it was to pass down official edicts, collect taxes, and mediate disputes.Footnote ²⁸ Cai Tinglan, a Chinese scholar-official brought by a storm to Vietnam in 1835, reported that he met Chinese in all the places he visited in central and northern Vietnam. Most of those he met were from Guangdong, Fujian and Guangxi. Though they chiefly were businessmen, also among them were officials and fishermen. He confirmed that Chinese residents had their own organizations, settlements and leaders. Cai discovered that the government offered tax reduction and trading privileges to the Chinese, that intermarriage between Chinese men and Vietnamese women was frequent, and that in general the Chinese were wealthier than ordinary Vietnamese.Footnote ²⁹

During the period of the French colonial rule, Chinese continued to move to Vietnam, and the Chinese community in southern Vietnam grew much faster than that in the north. In northern Vietnam, Chinese rebels, bandits and troops were very active from the 1860s to the 1880s.Footnote ³⁰ The well-known Liu Yongfu and his Black Flags vexed the French, killing such famous French colonialists as Francis Garnier and Henri Riviere.Footnote ³¹ Some of these rebels were members of non-Han groups from Guangxi. There are claims in Vietnam today that certain Tay are descendants of the Black Flags.Footnote ³² Some Chinese were involved even in kidnapping Vietnamese women and children and selling them in China.Footnote ³³ The most important business for the Chinese in northern Vietnam seemed to be mining.Footnote ³⁴ It is estimated that Chinese operated most of the 124 mines in northern Vietnam in the late nineteenth century.Footnote ³⁵ In the early twentieth century, some Chinese in Vietnam participated in Sun Yat-sen's revolution against the Qing dynasty, and after the collapse of the Qing, the Nationalist government tried to offer protection to the Chinese in Vietnam.Footnote ³⁶ The Nationalist government also set up two consulates in northern Vietnam. Chiang Kai-shek's government concluded two agreements with France in the 1930s that conferred upon the Chinese the status of “privileged aliens.” In theory, they were treated like French and enjoyed more privileges than the Vietnamese themselves.Footnote ³⁷ The attitude of the French toward the Chinese was ambivalent,Footnote ³⁸ but as Alain Marsot persuasively argues, overall French colonialism was conducive to Chinese immigration because it provided security, commercial opportunities, and a demand for labor.Footnote ³⁹

After the Second World War, the Chinese Nationalist Army briefly occupied northern Vietnam. This period helped strengthen the relationship between China and Chinese residents and enhance the position of the Chinese residents in northern Vietnam. Through a Sino-French agreement reached in 1948, the Chinese consuls were granted the right to veto candidates for positions of leadership in local Chinese organizations. The agreement also stated that Chinese residents of Vietnam had the right to free movement and trade and to maintain their family and personal status according to Chinese custom.Footnote ⁴⁰

FEATURES OF THE CHINESE COMMUNITY IN NORTHERN VIETNAM

The Chinese community that existed in northern Vietnam between 1954 and 1978 can be distinguished from the Chinese community in southern Vietnam in several respects. First, because Chinese have been present in northern Vietnam since ancient times, one can say that communities of Chinese residents in the northern areas have a much longer history than those of the south. Although after several generations Chinese immigrants normally assimilated, a continuous influx of new immigrants practically guaranteed a kind of distinctly Chinese presence from 111 BC.

Yet the Chinese community in northern Vietnam was much smaller than that in the south, the south being the destination chosen by most Chinese who relocated to Vietnam during the French colonial period. Later social and political changes also contributed to size fluctuations between the two communities. When the First Indochina War erupted in 1946, some Chinese left northern Vietnam for the south,Footnote ⁴¹ and others for China.Footnote ⁴² When Vietnam was divided in 1954, nearly 60,000 Chinese moved from the north to the south.Footnote ⁴³ During that time there also were Chinese Communists who moved from the south to the north,Footnote ⁴⁴ but their number likely was small.

Different estimates exist about the number of Chinese in northern Vietnam. French colonial officials estimated that in 1886 there were 7,467 foreign Asians in Tonkin; Alain Marsot believes that they were all Chinese. In 1906 and 1907, there were about 30,000 Chinese in Tonkin. The number of Chinese in Tonkin increased to 32,000 in 1911; 41,800 in 1913; 46,000 in 1926; and 52,000 in 1931.Footnote ⁴⁵ The North Vietnamese government reported that there were 1.5 million Chinese in Vietnam in 1951, including 1.4 million in southern Vietnam, 53,000 in central Vietnam and 90,000 in northern Vietnam.Footnote ⁴⁶ Another estimate concluded that there were 170,000 Chinese in North Vietnam in 1955,Footnote ⁴⁷ but Alain Marsot argues that there were only 50,000 Chinese in North Vietnam around 1957, constituting 0.4% of the local population. This percentage was much lower than that for Southeast Asia as a whole, which was about 5%. In fact, among all the regions and countries in Southeast Asia, North Vietnam had the lowest percentage of Chinese in its population.Footnote ⁴⁸ According to Victor Purcell, the total population of the Chinese in North Vietnam was about 55,000 in 1960, but a Vietnamese official census conducted in the same year reported 174,644 Chinese there, a number comprising 1.1% of the total population.Footnote ⁴⁹ Two other scholars reported 190,000 Chinese in North Vietnam in 1965.Footnote ⁵⁰ The post-unification Vietnamese government put the number of Chinese in North Vietnam before their flight in the late 1970s at over 200,000,Footnote ⁵¹ and another scholar reported that in 1978 there were 300,000 Chinese in North Vietnam.Footnote ⁵²

The different estimates derive partially from scholarly disagreement about how to define Chineseness. Some of the estimates obviously did not include all the rural Chinese, whereas others included not only all rural Chinese, but also some non-Han Chinese groups. For example, according to one study, during the period between 1946 and 1954 Chinese made up 78% of Hai Ninh's population, because in this study Hai Ninh's 100,000 Nung people are counted as Chinese. The argument is that the Nung were originally Han Chinese farmers, but came to be called Nung after 1885 mainly because the French, for political reasons, did not want to recognize them as Chinese.Footnote ⁵³ A similar problem arises with the identity of the Minh Huong. The Nguyen dynasty classified them as a separate group but granted them almost all the rights enjoyed by Vietnamese citizens. During the colonial period, they were sometimes treated as Vietnamese, sometimes as Chinese. Complicating things further, even at the same historical juncture some of them were treated as Vietnamese, whereas others were considered Chinese.Footnote ⁵⁴

There also was a difference between the two communities in geographic distribution. Most Chinese in South Vietnam lived in urban areas, and Saigon had one of the largest concentrations of Chinese immigrants in Southeast Asia.Footnote ⁵⁵ In the north, the number of Chinese living in large cities was rather small. There was no large urban concentration of Chinese. It is estimated that the number of Chinese living in Hanoi was 2,000 in 1913;Footnote ⁵⁶ 4,200 in 1920;Footnote ⁵⁷ 5,000 in 1931; 15,000 in 1948;Footnote ⁵⁸ 10,000 in 1968;Footnote ⁵⁹ and 13,000 in 1978.Footnote ⁶⁰ Haiphong had 8,500 Chinese in 1913;Footnote ⁶¹ 10,250 in 1920;Footnote ⁶² 19,000 in 1931Footnote ⁶³ and more than 30,000 in the 1970s.Footnote ⁶⁴ Most Chinese lived in rural areas of the provinces adjacent to China, especially in the province of Quang Ninh.Footnote ⁶⁵

There are further differences between the two groups. Physically, the Chinese community in North Vietnam was much closer to China than that in South Vietnam, with many Chinese living along the Sino-Vietnamese border. Also, the economic power of the Chinese in northern Vietnam was rather insignificant compared to that of the Chinese community in the south. And, while businesspeople formed a disproportionate percentage of the Chinese population in the south, occupations held by the Chinese in North Vietnam were more diverse. Last, the Chinese residents of North Vietnam also had more varied origins. Most Chinese in the south came from Guangdong and Fujian. In North Vietnam, there were sizable groups from Guangxi and Yunnan in addition to those from Guangdong and Fujian.Footnote ⁶⁶

It should be noted that Han Chinese was not the only group of people that had migrated from China to Vietnam. Among the fifty-four officially identified ethnic groups of Vietnam, more than twenty are comprised of immigrants from China of recent centuries. Only two of these groups, Hoa and Ngai, fall into the category of Han Chinese according to the official Chinese identification system. This article treats only the Hoa and Ngai, and does not cover the non-Han groups.Footnote ⁶⁷ Nor do I touch on the Chinese military and political personnel who were present in Vietnam from 1954 to 1978.

CITIZENSHIP IN NORTH VIETNAM

The Vietnamese Communist Party began to pay attention to the Chinese in Vietnam immediately after its founding in 1930. The party's first political program argued that Chinese laborers were allies of the Vietnamese revolutionaries.Footnote ⁶⁸ The party later explained that this alliance stemmed from the fact that the Chinese residents of Indochina belonged to a semi-colonial nation. They did not enjoy the privileges of Westerners, and in many aspects were exploited by the latter.Footnote ⁶⁹ When the First Indochina War broke out in 1946, Ho Chi Minh promised that after the Communists defeated the French, the Vietnamese and Chinese would share happiness in Vietnam.Footnote ⁷⁰ In 1951, the North Vietnamese government declared that the Chinese enjoyed the same rights as Vietnamese citizens.Footnote ⁷¹ When most other newly independent Southeast Asian countries decided to apply a policy of forced assimilation to the Chinese communities and cut off the connections between their Chinese communities and China, the North Vietnamese government chose to adopt the policy of equality and leniency toward Chinese residents, and to strengthen the ties between China and their domestic population of Chinese. In fact, in the late 1940s and 1950s, the Vietnamese Communists largely handed over the organizational responsibility for the Chinese community to the Chinese Communist Party because they believed that “the CCP could organize the Chinese more effectively.” The local branch of the Chinese Communist Party in southern Guangdong sent both political and military cadres to North Vietnam in order to help create party branches and military units among the Chinese.Footnote ⁷²

The partition and independence of Vietnam in 1954 made it imperative for the two Vietnams to solve the problem of the citizenship of the Chinese living in the two countries, an issue, again, that existed in almost all the other newly independent nations of Southeast Asia. The problem was exacerbated by the various nationality laws adopted by the Manchu and Republican governments of China, which recognized dual citizenship and citizenship by bloodline.Footnote ⁷³ The People's Republic of China followed the same policy when it took power in 1949. In 1952, the Chinese Communist Party passed a directive in which all overseas Chinese were classified as “Chinese sojourners.”Footnote ⁷⁴ However, in an effort to win the trust of Southeast Asian countries, in 1955 China's Premier Zhou Enlai announced at the Bandung conference that China had changed its policy and would no longer support dual citizenship. This change meant that overseas Chinese who had adopted local citizenship ceased to be Chinese citizens. Those who did not adopt local citizenship were still considered Chinese nationals, but they were urged to respect the customs and abide by the laws of their countries of residence.

Shortly after China declared its policy change, South Vietnam started to force Chinese residents to naturalize. From December 1955 to September 1956, the government promulgated four decrees stipulating that all Chinese born in Vietnam automatically became Vietnamese citizens. Children born of mixed marriages between Chinese and Vietnamese also were considered Vietnamese citizens. Non-citizens were to be excluded from eleven occupations, and were given between six and twelve months to liquidate their businesses. Once naturalized, Chinese residents would have to serve in the military and to disband their associations. The South Vietnamese government also took measures to change the Chinese school system. It required that the Vietnamese language be used in all Chinese high schools and that Vietnamese be appointed principals of Chinese schools.Footnote ⁷⁵

China severely condemned South Vietnam's policy of forced naturalization, and North Vietnam actively joined the attack. On 23 May 1957, for example, Nhan Dan published an article entitled “The Ngo Dinh Diem Clique is the Common Enemy of the Vietnamese and Chinese Residents.” The Communist-backed South Vietnam National Liberation Front repeatedly stated in its documents that “… all decrees and measures of the US-puppet regime regarding Chinese residents shall be abrogated,” and that “Chinese residents have the freedom and right to choose their nationality.”Footnote ⁷⁶ North Vietnam also mobilized Chinese residents in the north to hold rallies and meetings meant to protest Ngo Dien Diem's policies.Footnote ⁷⁷

North Vietnam's approach toward the issue of citizenship differed from that of South Vietnam in two aspects. First, North Vietnam's policy toward the citizenship issue was more lenient than that of South Vietnam's; second, North Vietnam took the issue not as a domestic one but as a matter between Vietnam and China, and, with regard to the citizenship issue, would negotiate with China rather than the Chinese community. In 1955, immediately after China changed its policy toward dual citizenship, North Vietnam initiated talks with China about the Chinese in Vietnam, and the two governments came to an oral agreement about transforming the Chinese into Vietnamese citizens. In the following year, during a visit to North Vietnam, Zhou Enlai urged Chinese residents there to treat Vietnam as their home. This was followed in 1957 by a bilateral agreement affirming that the Chinese in North Vietnam would enjoy the same rights as North Vietnamese citizens and would be encouraged to adopt North Vietnamese citizenship voluntarily after “sustained and patient persuasion and ideological education.”Footnote ⁷⁸ According to one Vietnamese source, this agreement led Luo Guibo, the Chinese ambassador to North Vietnam, to declare, “we must implement the changeover of all the Hoa into Vietnamese citizens within a period of 8 to 10 years, or a bit longer.”Footnote ⁷⁹ In order to persuade the Chinese to assimilate, the North Vietnamese government created in 1956 the Commission for Chinese Affairs (Tiểu Ban công tác người Hoa), and in 1958 the Association of Chinese in Vietnam (Tồng hội Liên hiệp Hoa kiều Việt Nam).Footnote ⁸⁰ The two governments jointly started a propaganda campaign to promote slogans such as “building Vietnam is the same as building China” and to criticize “great China” and “guest mentalities”.Footnote ⁸¹ The North Vietnamese government also initiated a literacy campaign designed to encourage Chinese residents to learn to read and write Vietnamese.Footnote ⁸²

The Chinese and North Vietnamese governments apparently agreed that they would adopt a gradual approach toward the issue of naturalization, and that within the Chinese community some subgroups would be naturalized before others. In general they desired rural Chinese to adopt Vietnamese citizenship before urban Chinese. This differentiation might have been related to the population size and geographic location of the rural Chinese. As mentioned above, the majority of Chinese in North Vietnam were living in rural areas. Moreover, they were living along the strategic Sino-Vietnamese border. One of the largest rural Chinese groups was the Ngai, which several generations before had migrated to Vietnam's Quang Ninh Province from South China. This population seemed to have included Hakka speakers and some other Chinese from Yunnan.Footnote ⁸³ Although the exact size of their population remains unclear, it is estimated that in 1978 there were 160,000 Chinese in Quang Ninh, a number that comprised 22% of the province's total population. Such numbers made the Chinese community in Quang Ninh the second largest in unified Vietnam, next only to that of Cho Lon.Footnote ⁸⁴ Within the province they congregated in four counties, where they made up between 50% and 60% of the population of each. They were involved in agriculture, fishing, mining, porcelain manufacturing, trade and services.Footnote ⁸⁵

Even as early as October 1945, the North Vietnamese government had decided that all minority peoples in Vietnam, except the urban capitalist “Chinese sojourners”, were Vietnamese citizens.Footnote ⁸⁶ However, this policy was not successfully enforced. That is why in 1956 Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai had to urge Chinese residents of Quang Ninh to take Vietnamese citizenship, an exhortation that the Chinese residents protested. A Vietnamese source reported that in 1957, the Chinese embassy in Hanoi and the North Vietnamese government agreed that from that point on the Ngai people in Quang Ninh would be considered Vietnamese citizens, while the matter of citizenship for the Chinese living in other parts of North Vietnam was to be deferred.Footnote ⁸⁷

The policy of differentiating the Ngai from the urban Chinese probably contributed to their exclusion from the Association of Chinese in Vietnam, which consisted mainly of Chinese residents in large cities like Hanoi, Haiphong, and Nam Dinh.Footnote ⁸⁸ This differentiation also led the Vietnamese government to use a separate term for the Chinese in Quang Ninh. In a 1965 article referring to the Chinese in Quang Ninh, the General Secretary of the provincial party committee of Quang Ninh used the term Hanzu (Han ethnic group) instead of Huaqiao (Overseas Chinese).Footnote ⁸⁹ An article about the Chinese farmers and fishermen on the Co To Island also calls them Hanzu rather than Huaqiao,Footnote ⁹⁰ whereas the Chinese farmers in other northern provinces continued to be called Huaqiao.Footnote ⁹¹ Overall the adoption of this differential policy did not have much immediate impact on the Ngai people and other rural Chinese – they still could cross the border easily without a passport. During the crisis in the late 1970s, Vietnam announced that the Chinese residents of northern Vietnam had become actual citizens of Vietnam voluntarily, but China argued that despite all the efforts at encouraging them to adopt Vietnamese citizenship, most had failed to do so.Footnote ⁹² In the late 1970s, many Ngai people moved to China or other countries along with other Chinese. In 1979, the Vietnamese government recognized those who stayed as a separate ethnic group independent of the Hoa.Footnote ⁹³

In 1961, North Vietnam and China reached another agreement, according to which the Chinese embassy in Hanoi would cease issuing Chinese passports to Chinese residents of Vietnam. Chinese who wished to visit China were to submit their applications to the Vietnamese government for approval. Once approved, the applications would then be presented to the Chinese embassy, which would issue the applicants tourist visas and passes. This was to be a very important step in the naturalization of Chinese residents, although Vietnam was still not authorized to issue to them regular passports. It essentially made the Chinese in North Vietnam “people without passports.”Footnote ⁹⁴

During China's Cultural Revolution, which started in 1966, Chinese residents in North Vietnam caused a number of disturbances. They held demonstrations against “Soviet hegemonism” and conducted other “Pro-Maoist” rallies in Hanoi.Footnote ⁹⁵ Vietnamese leaders later charged that during the Cultural Revolution, “reactionary Chinese nationals propagated ‘Mao Zedong thought’ and ‘the Cultural Revolution’, distorted the political line of Vietnam and organized a network of intelligence.”Footnote ⁹⁶ These were not baseless accusations. During this period, Xin Yue Hua Bao, the news organ of the Association of Chinese in Vietnam, was full of reports about how the Chinese in Vietnam shouted revolutionary slogans, sang revolutionary songs, criticized revisionism, studied the works of Chairman Mao and expressed their loyalty to him.Footnote ⁹⁷ The party secretary of the Chinese primary school in Hanoi later recalled that during the Cultural Revolution, the school was in chaos because of the struggles between different political factions.Footnote ⁹⁸

If the Chinese in North Vietnam were already on their way to becoming Vietnamese citizens before the Cultural Revolution, then the Cultural Revolution caused a reversal of this trend, or at least its delay. Although China had agreed to hand over Chinese community affairs to the North Vietnamese government in 1957,Footnote ⁹⁹ a declaration of the Association of the Chinese in Vietnam issued in 1967 remarked that the Chinese in North Vietnam should be directed by the “two governments and two parties.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Officials from the Chinese embassy in Hanoi once again were involved deeply in local Chinese affairs. During a visit to several Chinese schools in Hanoi, a secretary from the Chinese embassy commented that the Chinese in North Vietnam had the right and duty to read Chinese newspapers and magazines, listen to Chinese radio programs and show the same loyalty to Chairman Mao as Chinese did in China, and that the Chinese community and the embassy of China were bound by a blood relationship.Footnote ¹⁰¹

In response to these radical actions and comments, the Vietnamese government made specific efforts to prevent the Chinese from listening to Chinese radio programs and reading Chinese newspapers and magazines. Some Chinese residents who held positions in the party, army or government were demoted. As will be discussed in the next section, the government also took measures to Vietnamize Chinese schools.Footnote ¹⁰² Furthermore, in order to integrate Chinese and Vietnamese, the government launched a Three-Share and Two-Well Campaign (to share joys and sorrows, life and death, and duties with the Vietnamese, and to work and fight well).Footnote ¹⁰³ Finally, North Vietnam began once again encouraging the Chinese to take Vietnamese citizenship, but Chinese residents again showed their reluctance.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ It is reported that after March 1967, the local government in Lao Cay started to persecute the Chinese and force them to take Vietnamese citizenship. In protest, ten Chinese students from Lao Cay crossed the border during night and entered China. By December 1967, about 1,000 Chinese had moved to China. The Chinese government persuaded most of them to return to Vietnam, but 101 people were allowed to remain in China. Nearly 400 Chinese relocated to China from Vietnam in 1968 for similar reasons, and most of them were permitted to stay.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Many Chinese obviously ignored this new call to naturalization because in 1976, the Association of Chinese in Vietnam once again had to urge urban Chinese to adopt Vietnamese citizenship voluntarily.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Compared with other Southeast Asian countries, up until the end of the 1970s North Vietnam was very unsuccessful in altering the national identity of its Chinese residents, a failure particularly acute given the small size of the Chinese community there. One of the most important reasons for this failure was the moderate nature of North Vietnam's policy toward the Chinese. In countries like Malaysia, South Vietnam, and Indonesia, the governments could coerce the Chinese into changing their nationality, but in North Vietnam, as agreed upon by the North Vietnamese and Chinese governments, the only methods available were persuasion and education, which, ultimately, were not very effective.

North Vietnam's policy toward the Chinese was not only moderate, but also self-contradictory. On one hand, the North Vietnamese government was eager to persuade the Chinese to become Vietnamese citizens; on the other, it not only granted the Chinese all the rights that Vietnamese citizens enjoyed before they adopted Vietnamese citizenship, but also offered the Chinese privileges if they chose to maintain their Chinese citizenship. Like Vietnamese citizens, the Chinese were permitted to participate in elections, to join the Workers' Party, and to serve as officials.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The most important privilege granted to the Chinese was draft exemption: during the long war with the United States and South Vietnam, the Chinese in North Vietnam were not obligated to join the army.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ A Chinese refugee from Vietnam remarked in 1978 that many Chinese did not want to take Vietnamese citizenship because with that status would come obligations of military and other services. Some refugees admitted that one of the reasons for their flight to China in the late 1970s was that they did not want to be sent to fight the Cambodians.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Chinese residents also enjoyed more trade freedom than Vietnamese citizens. The socialization of the Chinese in North Vietnam started in the late 1950s and it consisted of two policies: one was to encourage Chinese traders and artisans to organize themselves into cooperatives, and the other was to persuade some Chinese traders to become, in the rhetoric of communism, producers, i.e. factory workers or farmers.Footnote ¹¹⁰ That transformation was not completed until mid-1974.Footnote ¹¹¹ To many Vietnamese, the fact that the Chinese could make trips to China was another special privilege, for the reason that these visits gave Chinese residents opportunities to smuggle in from China goods such as perfume, powder, liquor, and herbs. It was believed that the Chinese controlled a network of black market goods.Footnote ¹¹² In 1974 and 1975, the Association of Chinese in Vietnam reported that there were too many Chinese retailers and that some of them were involved in illegal trade.Footnote ¹¹³ About Chinese residents, a Vietnamese refugee from North Vietnam recalled that:

A Chinese refugee from North Vietnam agreed: “We had the best of both worlds. The Hoa in the north had all the rights and privileges of Vietnamese citizenship and none of its disadvantages.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ A Vietnamese Chinese doctor confirmed that Chinese patients were treated better than Vietnamese patients in the hospitals of North Vietnam.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Even in 1978, when China and Vietnam had started a bitter verbal war over the Chinese in Vietnam, the Chinese government still conceded that before 1975 Chinese residents of North Vietnam were treated well.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The Vietnamese government argued in 1978 that the Chinese were treated well because they were seen as Vietnamese citizens rather than foreigners, and that the Vietnamese government granted more rights to the Chinese in Vietnam than did China to the Vietnamese living in China.Footnote ¹¹⁸ But in offering various privileges to the Chinese, the Vietnamese government had preserved a tradition started by the Chinese colonial government and maintained by some Vietnamese dynasties as well as the French colonial government, in contradiction to its proclaimed intention of treating the Chinese as Vietnamese citizens.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The preferential treatment may very well have had the effect of reinforcing the perceived differences between the Vietnamese and Chinese, strengthening the sense of superiority of the Chinese and an imagined connection with China, all of which made them more reluctant to assimilate.

It should be noted that although many Chinese residents gladly accepted the privileges offered by the government, there also were many who voluntarily gave up their special rights and acted as dedicated citizens of Vietnam. For example, it is reported that from 1964 to 1975, about 1,800 Chinese from Quang Ninh joined the army each year. During the Vietnam War, in total 22,000 Chinese from that province joined the army.Footnote ¹²⁰ Many Chinese from other provinces and large cities such as Hanoi and Haiphong also volunteered to join the army.Footnote ¹²¹ Between 1969 and 1974 the North Vietnamese government recognized twenty-seven Chinese residents of Haiphong as martyrs who sacrificed their lives for “the Vietnamese revolution in protection of the heroic city of Haiphong.” From 1969 to 1972, over 100 Chinese residents of Haiphong were granted the title of “Model Worker” and over 1,000 were given the title of “Advanced Worker.” During the same period, individual Chinese residents of Haiphong received 24 Ho Chi Minh Medals, 11 Worker's Medals, 5 Meritorious Military Service Medals, 2 Resistance War Medals from the government and 10 Certificates of Merit directly from the Office of the Prime Minister.Footnote ¹²² Various North Vietnamese leaders from Ho Chi Minh to Le Duan had repeatedly praised the Chinese residents for their contributions to the Vietnamese revolution before 1978Footnote ¹²³ and the Vietnamese government continued to acknowledge such contributions thereafter.

The moderate and self-contradictory nature of North Vietnam's policy toward the Chinese can only be explained by North Vietnamese leaders' strong desire to maintain close relations with China, which they deemed conducive to their efforts of reunifying and reconstructing Vietnam. They treated the Chinese in North Vietnam as representatives of China, believing that granting them special rights would help galvanize the friendship and alliance between China and Vietnam.

CHINESE SCHOOLS

Another key issue in the triangular relationship among the North Vietnamese government, the Chinese community and China was the Chinese school system. Unlike some other Southeast Asian governments, which chose to close down or put restrictions on Chinese schools or at least withdraw government support, the government of North Vietnam not only permitted Chinese schools to operate, but also offered them generous support and freedom. Furthermore, during much of the period, the North Vietnamese government allowed China to exert complete control over these schools.

Chinese schools appeared in North Vietnam in the early twentieth century, initially only at the elementary level. Some taught Confucian classics, whereas others adopted a modern curriculum. In 1935, two middle schools were founded in Hanoi and Haiphong, and in 1938 a third middle school was established in Nghe An. At the time these middle schools were probably illegal, because the French did not grant the Chinese the right to set up secondary schools until 1946.Footnote ¹²⁴ It is estimated that in the early 1950s there were nearly fifty Chinese schools in northern Vietnam with a total of about 5,000 students. By 1960, the number of Chinese schools in North Vietnam had risen to over 100.

China's control over the Chinese schools in North Vietnam started during the first Indochina War, when the North Vietnamese government decided to hand over Chinese community affairs to the Chinese Communist Party. In 1954, the Chinese embassy in Hanoi helped re-establish Chinese schools in North Vietnam, whose administration was entrusted to China's Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission. China provided the funds, directors, and all textbooks and teaching materials. A teacher-training program was established in Hanoi to train Chinese teachers from North Vietnam, and the directors of the program were from China.Footnote ¹²⁵ Students who scored the highest in middle schools were sent to China for further study upon graduation, and after finishing their studies there most of them returned to Vietnam.Footnote ¹²⁶

In those Southeast Asian countries that adopted toward the Chinese a policy of forced assimilation, changes in citizenship usually were accompanied by various measures aimed at changing the cultural identity of the Chinese. These were deemed necessary because the leaders of these countries were aware that a change in citizenship did not mean much unless it also entailed a change in the factors that helped keep the Chinese loyal to China. Such measures usually included prohibiting the Chinese from visiting China, forcing the Chinese to give up Chinese names, and restricting Chinese newspapers and schools, etc. In some countries, such policies achieved a certain degree of success in changing the political loyalty and cultural identity of the Chinese over the course of two or three decades. As Wang Gungwu explained in 1985:

According to the Sino-Vietnamese agreement reached in 1955, the Chinese in Vietnam would be encouraged to adopt Vietnamese citizenship through “education and persuasion”. But how was the Vietnamese government to educate the Chinese if it did not even have control over Chinese schools? It was inevitable that in North Vietnam, each effort of the government designed to instigate a change in the citizenship of Chinese residents was accompanied by attempts to establish control over the Chinese schools and to enact measures of educational reform. For example, in 1957, two years after China changed its policy toward dual citizenship, the North Vietnamese and Chinese governments concluded an agreement specifying that “all the work regulating the Hoa people from now on, including the problems of mass organizations, newspapers, schools, hospitals, and all other relief associations for unemployment and social welfare, will be done by the Vietnamese side.”Footnote ¹²⁸ The transfer started in 1958Footnote ¹²⁹ and was completed in 1962,Footnote ¹³⁰ and marked the beginning of a process of Vietnamization in the Chinese community, especially in the Chinese schools. Starting around 1960, the Chinese schools began to offer Vietnamese language classes and the textbooks were revised to include more materials about Vietnam.Footnote ¹³¹ At the same time, the number of Chinese language courses was reduced, imbalances in the student population of the Chinese schools were redressed, administrators and teachers from China gradually were withdrawn, and students from the Chinese schools ceased to go to China for further study.Footnote ¹³²

In 1970, in response to the radical actions of some Chinese residents, North Vietnam once again asked Chinese residents to take Vietnamese citizenship. A new wave of Vietnamization began, again focused on the Chinese schools.Footnote ¹³³ The government's plan for new educational reform was proposed in early 1969 and implemented in the 1970–1971 academic year. Many changes ensued. In political education, the new plan emphasized the teaching of the policies of the Vietnamese government and party rather than those of China's, with the purpose of familiarizing students with “our motherland, our army, and our nation” and strengthening their allegiance toward Vietnam. Such indoctrination permeated the entire curriculum, especially such subjects as literature, history, and politics. It was reported that in the beginning, some Chinese teachers felt very uncomfortable when reading “our rich and beautiful motherland Vietnam,” but later managed to get rid of their “guest mentality”. Language courses also were reformed. Chinese language textbooks were rewritten for all grades to include more information about Vietnamese literature and history, and to eliminate any elements that might strengthen the Chinese identity, which the North Vietnamese government now termed “reactionary idealistic nationalism.” Vietnamese language courses were strengthened in order to enable students to participate more fully in Vietnamese society after graduation. All subjects except Chinese language were to be taught in Vietnamese. Previously, many Chinese students could not read Vietnamese and many of them could not continue their studies in Vietnamese universities even if they were able to gain admission (they were allowed to take the college entrance exam in Chinese). In order to conform to the Vietnamese school system, the duration of study in Chinese primary schools was reduced from six years to five years and finally to four years. The new plan also allocated more time to technical education.

The reform not only caused changes in the curriculum, but also called for reorganizing the schools and classes, with the purpose of eliminating the “walls” between Chinese and Vietnamese schools and bringing Chinese and Vietnamese students together. Chinese schools began to accept Vietnamese students, and Vietnamese schools also started to admit Chinese students. For example, in the 1973–1974 academic year, two Vietnamese primary schools in Haiphong began to enroll Chinese students. In the 1971–1972 academic year, 30% of the students in the Tuan Jie (Solidarity) Chinese Middle School in Haiphong were Vietnamese, a percentage that was increased to 50% the following year. In Hanoi, the Zhonghua Chinese Middle School was renamed Pham Hong Thai Level Three Middle School and in 1973 started to admit Vietnamese students. By 1976, only one of every six students in that school was Chinese. Chinese and Vietnamese students studied in the same school, but in segregated classes. Chinese students took one more subject than Vietnamese students, namely Chinese language and literature. It was reported that the mixture not only increased communications among Chinese and Vietnamese teachers and students, but also enhanced contacts and friendships among Chinese and Vietnamese parents.Footnote ¹³⁴

The North Vietnamese government argued that the legal basis for the educational reform was provided in a 1958 agreement between the Chinese and North Vietnamese governments, which stated that the education of the Chinese should be an integral part of the Vietnamese national education system; specifically, “Chinese schools should follow Vietnamese policies and use Vietnamese textbooks, so that students can continue their studies in more advanced Vietnamese schools or undertake various occupations after graduation.”Footnote ¹³⁵ The agreement had not been fulfilled earlier because some Chinese residents were against it.Footnote ¹³⁶ The North Vietnamese leaders believed that the educational reform was also politically correct. They repeatedly cited Lenin's criticism of separate schools as justification,Footnote ¹³⁷ and they obviously saw the measure as an important step toward the assimilation of Chinese residents. As Wang Gungwu has pointed out, in almost all the new nations of Southeast Asia, education was widely used as a means of creating and molding citizens, although with regard to Chinese communities the results were different in different countries depending on the size of its population, the attitude of the local government toward Chinese residents, and various religious and racial factors.Footnote ¹³⁸ The North Vietnamese government clearly stated that the aim of the educational reform was to break down the barriers between the Chinese community and Vietnamese society and to make young Chinese residents good citizens, good revolutionaries, good fighters, and good cadres of Vietnam.Footnote ¹³⁹

The North Vietnamese government believed that citizenship education was important not only for young Chinese students, but also for Chinese adults. Whereas the reform of the Chinese school system would ensure that Chinese students receive proper citizenship education at school, the government relied on mass education to bring the political messages to adult Chinese. In addition to the “Three-Share and Two-Well Campaign” launched in the late 1960s, the government also stressed the close connections between Chinese and Vietnamese cultures. Those who emphasized differences between the two cultures were criticized.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ In the early 1970s, there also was a subtle change in the vocabularies used in Xin Yue Hua Bao (the New Vietnamese Chinese News), the official news organ of the Association of Chinese in Vietnam. China was no longer referred to as “the great socialist motherland,” or “the great motherland,” but simply “China,” or “the People's Republic of China.” Vietnam now became the “motherland.” The term “Hua Qiao”, which literally means the Chinese sojourners, was first replaced by Hua Ren, meaning ethnic Chinese, around 1973, and finally by Hua Zu, or Chinese nationality, in 1976. The term “Zhong Yue” (Sino-Vietnamese) was replaced by “Yue-Zhong” (Vietnamese-Chinese). In previous years, if the paper mentioned Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh at the same time, it always put Mao first; now the order was reversed.

CHINA's POSITION IN THE TRIANGLE

Ever complicating the relationship between the Chinese community and the North Vietnamese state was the presence of China. Other Southeast Asian governments could more or less ignore China when dealing with the Chinese communities within their boundaries. They could create and enforce their policies toward the Chinese communities without having to consult with China. North Vietnam was not afforded that luxury. Mainly because of its geographical and political proximity to China, North Vietnam saw China as a strong ally whose support was essential for the survival and growth of the North Vietnamese state. Since the Chinese in North Vietnam were seen, in a sense, as delegates of China, the North Vietnamese leaders believed that it was important that they dealt with the Chinese community in a way that would contribute to the Sino-Vietnamese friendship and alliance. As such, in North Vietnam the relations between the state and the Chinese community were taken to be a subordinate component of Sino-Vietnamese bilateral relations.

Like the leaders of other Southeast Asian nations, North Vietnamese leaders were interested in transforming Chinese residents from the status of foreign sojourners to Vietnamese citizens. However, their concerns about Sino-Vietnamese relations limited the methods they could adopt to foster such a transition. The policy of forced assimilation, which had been adopted in several Southeast Asian states, was not acceptable to China and therefore would not work in North Vietnam. As mentioned earlier, after consulting with China the North Vietnamese government decided to encourage the Chinese to naturalize by means of education and persuasion. These measures were not very successful, partly because of a fundamental contradiction in the official policy toward the Chinese – although the North Vietnamese government wanted Chinese residents to become Vietnamese citizens, it offered them special treatment if they chose to maintain their Chinese citizenship. This contradiction existed mainly because the leaders of North Vietnam believed that at that point in time it was more important to maintain and solidify the Sino-Vietnamese alliance than to transform the Chinese community. Because of the special care with which the North Vietnamese government conducted its relationship with China, Chinese residents of North Vietnam received the best official treatment among the Chinese in Southeast Asia. Consequently, their assimilation was delayed.

The North Vietnamese government made several important policy changes between the late 1940s and the late 1970s, with the purpose of gradually decreasing China's control over the Chinese in Vietnam, increasing Vietnamese control over the Chinese communities, and expediting a change of their sense of national identity. In the late 1940s, the Vietnamese Communists allowed the Chinese Communists to establish complete control over the Chinese community in North Vietnam.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Starting in the mid-1950s, the North Vietnamese government began to assume control over the Chinese community and initiate policies that would encourage the Chinese to assimilate, but China still maintained a great deal of influence. For example, the official Association of Chinese in Vietnam was under the control of the Chinese embassy in Hanoi. Its news organ, Xin Yue Hua Bao, was started in 1955 and was edited by people China appointed.Footnote ¹⁴² In the late 1960s and early 1970s, in response to the disturbances caused by China's Cultural Revolution, North Vietnam tried to accelerate the assimilation process by renewing the call to take Vietnamese citizenship and by drastically reforming the Chinese schools. Despite all the changes, mainly because of the China factor, the North Vietnamese government never adopted the policy of forced assimilation before the reunification of Vietnam in 1975.

Radical changes did not come about until 1976, following reunification, when the government of the newly proclaimed Socialist Republic of Vietnam issued another call for the Chinese to naturalize. This time the call was accompanied not by the usual means of education and persuasion but by much tougher measures. Those who refused to adopt Vietnamese citizenship would be denied food rations, rights to fishing, and government jobs.Footnote ¹⁴³ In the final analysis, North Vietnam's policy toward the Chinese community was not fundamentally different from that adopted by other Southeast Asian governments. The only difference is that for political reasons North Vietnam had to wait till the late 1970s to start a process that had begun in the 1950s and 1960s in other Southeast Asian countries.

There were many factors behind the radical policy change begun in 1976. The reunification of Vietnam in 1975 greatly reduced China's importance to Vietnam; China's Cultural Revolution and the rapprochement between China and the United States had damaged the bilateral relations; the death of Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong ended the close bond that existed between the first generation revolutionary leaders. Also, by refusing to provide substantial aid to Vietnam Mao's successors contributed little to improving the bilateral relations; Vietnamese leaders moved to support the Soviet Union in the Sino-Soviet dispute;Footnote ¹⁴⁴ and in the Vietnamese-Cambodian conflict Chinese leaders sided with the Khmer Rouge. Finally, the reunification of Vietnam meant that Vietnamese leaders now had to deal with a much larger and much more powerful Chinese community, which made it all the more urgent to assimilate its members.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The North Vietnamese government had promised in the 1950s that after reunification the Chinese residents of southern Vietnam would be granted the freedom to choose their citizenship, but in the late 1970s the Vietnamese leaders seemed no longer interested in keeping this promise. In early 1976, the Vietnamese government confirmed that the great majority of the Chinese in southern Vietnam had already become Vietnamese citizens.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ China reacted by insisting that the Chinese in the south be granted the freedom to choose their citizenship and by issuing Chinese passports to several thousand Chinese in northern Vietnam.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

Reunified Vietnam's new policy of forced assimilation was adopted at a moment when its relations with China were rapidly deteriorating. The animosity between the two countries made Vietnamese leaders suspicious of Chinese residents in Vietnam as a whole. They worried about what position Chinese residents would take in the Sino-Vietnamese dispute. Such concerns may have prompted Vietnam to seek a quick and tough solution to the Chinese problem.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The Chinese government viewed the policy change as an unreasonable act against a former benefactor. China reacted by accusing Vietnam of persecuting Chinese residents, and by portraying China as their protector. In despair, many Chinese naturally identified with China and went to China for help.

In northern Vietnam, the exodus of the Chinese began when Vietnam started to clear its border areas in early 1977. As discussed before, although the two governments viewed Chinese residents in the border areas as Vietnamese citizens, these people still maintained close relations with China. Thus the Vietnamese government felt that it had good reasons to suspect their loyalty. The Chinese and other minority groups living in the border areas were forced either to migrate to China or to move to the new economic zones.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ It was reported that in some regions the government spared very few Chinese, not even a Vietnam War hero.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ The Chinese preferred going back to China over moving to the new economic zones. This reaction simply confirmed the suspicions of the Vietnamese government about their loyalty. The Vietnamese government then declared, “if anyone wants to return to China, he need only to make an open request.”Footnote ¹⁵¹

To provide legal justification for the new policy toward the Chinese, Prime Minister Pham Van Dong signed a fifteen-article ordinance in April 1977 specifying how foreign residents or non-naturalized Chinese should be treated in Vietnam. The ordinance stipulated that the Vietnamese government had the right to decide where the foreign residents should reside and to approve their movement. In addition to making it compulsory for foreign residents to register periodically with the government, the ordinance made it illegal for foreign residents to own real estate and to engage in fishing, forestry, radio repair, driving, and printing. Finally the ordinance denied foreign residents the right to elect and to be elected.Footnote ¹⁵² It is obvious that the ordinance was made not only to deprive the Chinese of the special privileges they had enjoyed thus far, but also to impose new restrictions. Chinese residents were presented with three options: adopt Vietnamese citizenship and avoid the restrictions; maintain their Chinese citizenship and live with the restrictions; or move to China and escape the restrictions.

During the crisis, there were rumors among the Chinese in northern Vietnam that there would be a war between China and Vietnam, and that, unless they returned to China immediately, the Chinese in Vietnam would be punished by Chinese troops as traitors. There also was talk that China was calling the overseas Chinese back to help with the modernization program, and that the Chinese who returned from Vietnam could obtain good jobs in China.Footnote ¹⁵³ Some Chinese residents were told, harrowingly, that if they chose to stay in Vietnam, they surely would be killed by one of four armies: the Vietnamese, the Soviet, the Cambodian, or the Chinese.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The source of the rumors is unknown. The Vietnamese government accused the Chinese embassy in Hanoi and some “bad elements” among the Chinese residents of spreading the rumors with the intention of causing trouble for Vietnam.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ China countered by saying that it was the Vietnamese government that spread the rumors in order to get rid of the Chinese. There is no evidence to prove either accusation. China may have wanted to cause trouble for Vietnam; it is also true that China had adopted a new policy toward the overseas Chinese with the aim of attracting their skills and investment, but there were also reasons for China not to take the refugees from Vietnam. Many refugees were people who possessed neither capital nor technical skills, and the memory of the difficulties caused by the Chinese refugees from Indonesia and Malaysia in the previous decades was still fresh in mind. China's decision to close the Sino-Vietnamese border to stop the flow of refugees indicates that the Chinese leaders saw the refugees more as a burden than a potential asset.

The Vietnamese government did have a strong interest in seeing Chinese residents leave the sensitive border area, but at the same time it probably did not want to lose the skilled workers and technicians, who played an important role in the economy.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The mixed feelings of the Vietnamese government are indicated in its ambivalent policies toward Chinese residents. On one hand, the Vietnamese government provided boats and vehicles to transport the Chinese to the border area.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ In some cases it forced the Chinese to go to China. On the other hand, it also took measures to stop the exodus. Some Chinese refugees who were later interviewed recalled that Vietnamese authorities had tried to persuade them not to leave Vietnam.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ A French reporter testified that after the departure of 5,000 Chinese from the Haiphong and Hon Gay area, the government set up restrictions on the movement of the Chinese because “they are considered people with good skills.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ This concern was confirmed by a Japanese reporter, and also by the Vietnamese government.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ It is estimated that before 1977 the Chinese made up between 15% and 17% of the miners in Vietnam, many of them highly skilled. Most workers in the porcelain and pottery factories in Quang Ninh and the fishermen on the islands of Cat Ba, Co To, and Bach Long Vi were Chinese residents. In their respective fields, their production made up 50% of the national total.Footnote ¹⁶¹

Certain Chinese residents were the likely perpetuators of various rumors. In the late 1970s, there existed a radical group among the Chinese in northern Vietnam opposed to the Vietnamese government's policy of assimilation. The significance of this group is indicated by criticisms it received from the North Vietnamese government-controlled Association of Chinese in Vietnam.Footnote ¹⁶² Members may have included those who had been persecuted for actively participating in the Cultural Revolution. If we speculate about their sentiment, we might argue that as long as China continued to have a good relationship with Vietnam, these people would have no opportunity to express their resentment about the mandate to assimilate. But when relations between China and Vietnam began to get prickly, their chance had come. The Vietnamese government once asserted that the exodus of Chinese residents of Vietnam to China had been started “by certain Chinese residents, who are spreading rumors in an attempt to stir up discord between Vietnam and China.”Footnote ¹⁶³ Another motivation for certain Chinese residents to spread rumors was profit, i.e. Chinese residents who could make money by organizing the flight of the Chinese from Vietnam.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Yet another possibility is that the rumors were created and perpetuated simply out of fear and worry, rather than any nefarious intentions. The rumors reflected the self-assessment of members of the Chinese community, and the awkward and dangerous position as pawns between two powerful governments.

No matter who spread the rumors, the fact that so many Chinese residents believed them clearly indicated that China remained in their hearts and minds, and that many considered relocating to China the better option than moving elsewhere in Vietnam. To the Vietnamese leaders, such a sentiment revealed that Chinese residents failed the test of loyalty. The two governments agreed in the mid-1950s that they would prefer Chinese residents to take the path of natural assimilation, but ultimately they were not given enough time to travel that path. For many Chinese residents of northern Vietnam, it would take a painful journey to China to find out how Chinese – or Vietnamese – they actually were.

VIETNAMESE POLICIES OF ASSIMILATION IN THE LARGER SOUTHEAST ASIAN CONTEXT

Chinese communities in Southeast Asia expanded greatly during the colonial period, particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Chinese in the region served as an important link in the global colonial system before the Second World War and within that system they created a relatively comfortable niche for themselves. Economically, they were an integral and productive part of the colonial system, serving as intermediaries between China and Southeast Asia and between Southeast Asians and the colonialists. Politically, they were allowed to maintain their mixed, ambiguous and divided identity and loyalty. Some saw themselves as loyal citizens of China; some had been assimilated into the indigenous societies; some chose to identify with the colonialists; some moved from one identity to another or between and among different identities. The aftermath of the Second World War marked the beginning of the end of the global colonial system and, in Southeast Asia, the rise of a new nation-state system. These developments brought about drastic economic and political changes to Chinese communities. The leaders of the newly independent nation-states in the region saw the Chinese within their borders as secondary colonialists that needed to be eliminated by either assimilation or expulsion. These new nation-states demanded absolute, unambiguous loyalty from their citizens. They were not tolerant of non-citizens or divided loyalty. Under this variant of nationalism, restricting the rights of foreigners, forcing foreigners to adopt local citizenship, denying foreigners citizenship, or even expelling them, became justifiable policies. Compared with what happened to Chinese communities in some other Southeast Asian states such as Malaysia, Indonesia, and Myanmar, where they formed powerful but “foreign” minority groups, what the post-reunification Vietnamese government did to the Chinese in the late 1970s was not terribly unusual.

In North Vietnam, this process of nation-state purification was delayed because the demise of the global colonial system there led to the rise of a new global Communist system, which emphasizes the unity of fellow socialist countries. The Vietnam War and North Vietnam's need for Chinese aid further contributed to the delay. Although the process was postponed, it could not be avoided. As a post-colonial nation-state, it was “wrong” for Vietnam to allow the existence of a large “foreign” community within its border. That is why North Vietnam and China decided in 1955 to encourage the Chinese to naturalize. However, for over two decades, Chinese residents were allowed to maintain a kind of vague or dual identity and loyalty since, in the sweet rhetoric of socialist internationalism and friendship, it was assumed that there is no real difference between loyalty to China and loyalty to Vietnam. The Chinese residents were taught that to love Vietnam is to love China, to work for Vietnam is to work for China, and to defend Vietnam is to defend China. A Chinese resident of Vietnam wrote in 1961: “The socialist revolution has made China and Vietnam complete equal and close like brothers. Living in Vietnam is just like living in China … in the minds of the Chinese compatriots, the Red River and the Cuu Long River are linked up with the Yangzi River and the Yellow River.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶ It did not become necessary for the Chinese to make a choice between Vietnam and China until the late 1970s, when the two countries suddenly became enemies. The collapse of the international Communist system prompted the Vietnamese government to complete the process of national purification.

China had gone through a similar process of national purification after 1949. Under Mao's leadership, foreign communities were expelled and foreign enterprises were nationalized. During the Cultural Revolution, many citizens with foreign connections were persecuted, and many Chinese who had returned from foreign countries were victims of discrimination. A shared view of how to deal with foreign communities in a nation-state made it easy for China and the Southeast Asian governments to reach an agreement on the issue of dual citizenship in the 1950s. China's renunciation of dual citizenship was welcomed widely by Southeast Asian governments, because divided and mixed loyalty was deemed incompatible with the newly emerged nationalistic states. China encouraged the Chinese residents of Southeast Asian countries to accept local citizenship, but at the same time asked the indigenous governments not to force the Chinese to give up their Chinese citizenship. China also pleaded with the Chinese who chose to maintain their Chinese citizenship to respect local laws and customs and stay away from politics.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ The persecution of the Chinese carried out by various governments in the region put Chinese leaders in a dilemma: while, as leaders of new China, they felt it their responsibility to protect Chinese citizens overseas, they also came to realize that what the Southeast Asian governments did to the Chinese was not very different from what the Chinese government had done to foreigners in China. If they did not believe in double standards they would have to live with these measures of assimilation and discrimination implemented by Southeast Asian countries. It is mainly because of this dilemma that during the Mao years China's reactions to the persecution of the Chinese were rather moderate gestures that entailed condemning the indigenous governments of violating bilateral agreements, taking back those Chinese who were expelled or who desired to move to China, and providing limited financial assistance. The shared belief in a “purified” nation-state rendered many harsh policies taken by Southeast Asian governments toward their Chinese communities as understandable and even acceptable.

When Ngo Dien Diem adopted the policy of forced assimilation toward the Chinese in South Vietnam in the 1950s, China condemned the policy, donated $10,000 to aid the Chinese in need and then did nothing more. China took similar measures in the 1960s in dealing with crises involving the Chinese in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Myanmar. Post-unification Vietnamese leaders had reasons to expect similar reactions from China when in the late 1970s they started forcing the Chinese to naturalize. However, this time China's reactions were much more severe. Initially China staged an intense propaganda campaign against Vietnam, and eventually the persecution of the Chinese became one of China's declared reasons for launching a brief war against Vietnam. One of the reasons for China's more explosive reactions in the late 1970s might have been the reform program just begun by Deng Xiaoping. Deng was abandoning Mao's policy of national purification and bringing China back into the global system by inviting foreigners to China. So while Vietnam was busy “purifying” its nation-state, China was bringing previously excluded elements back into the fold. It is therefore understandable that Deng Xiaoping would see Vietnam's policies toward the Chinese as reactionary and unacceptable.

There were other reasons for China's unyielding responses to Vietnam in the late 1970s. Measured by the number of refugees it engendered, the scale of the crisis was unprecedented. Chinese leaders also felt that the Vietnamese government was ungrateful for China's support during the Vietnam Wars and for the contribution of the Chinese community to the war efforts. Moreover, the crisis over the Chinese residents happened at a time when the two governments were having conflicts over other issues such as territorial disputes, China's support for Cambodia, and Vietnam's close relationship with the Soviet Union. Each of these conflicts aggravated one another. In other words, taken together the conflict between the two governments, and that between the Vietnamese state and the Chinese community, generated all the more hostility. This international factor helps explain why the Chinese government did not react as harshly to the persecution of Chinese residents carried out by the Khmer Rouge during the same period. In fact, the Chinese government did little if anything to stop the persecution of the Chinese in Cambodia, and China's official media was completely silent about the tragedy. The Vietnamese government thus made a persuasive point by accusing China of adopting double standards toward Vietnam and Cambodia.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ The Vietnamese leaders argued that the issue regarding Chinese residents could actually be easily solved between the two governments, and it accused the Chinese government of refusing to discuss the issue out of a desire to use it as a grievance in a campaign against Vietnam.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

If the Sino-Vietnam alliance had not collapsed in the late 1970s, the Vietnamese government likely would have been able to achieve its goals of socializing and naturalizing the Chinese in Vietnam with the help of the Chinese government, and without undue trouble. The breakdown of the alliance between the two governments forced the Chinese to take a loyalty test at a difficult time. In previous decades, the two governments had been trying to convince Chinese residents that to identify with Vietnam was to identify with China; suddenly, the Vietnamese government wanted Chinese residents to forget China and give their complete loyalty to Vietnam. For many Chinese, this change was too abrupt to accept. Their refusal to take Vietnamese citizenship, in turn, convinced Vietnamese leaders that the Chinese residents would rather remain privileged guests, a preference that made them unwelcome in Vietnam. In reality, however, at any given time, while there were some Chinese who chose to live like spoiled guests, there also were Chinese residents who voluntarily gave up their privileges and behaved like dedicated Vietnamese patriots. During the harsh years of the war, the ambiguous identity of Chinese residents did not prevent many of them from volunteering for the army and performing other services. They were willing to offer their service then because they believed they were fighting the common enemies of both Vietnam and China. When they were forced to choose between fighting China on behalf of Vietnam, or fighting Vietnam on behalf of China, they were baffled and reluctant, and were victimized because of their confusion.