Chinese-led independent "Vietnamese" dynasties The following Vietnamese dynasties have historically personally claimed to be of Chinese origin: •
Au Lac - Founder/King
An Dương Vương - Origins in
Shu •
Nanyue/
Trieu Dynasty - Founder/King
Triệu Đà/Zhao Guo - Origins in
Qin •
Dai Viet/
Ly dynasty - Founder/King
Lý Thái Tổ -
Min Chinese •
Dai Viet/
Tran dynasty - Founder/King
Trần Thái Tông -
Min Chinese •
Dai Viet/
Ho dynasty - Founder/King
Hồ Quý Ly - Orgins in modern day ZheJiang
Early history Vietnam was governed by the early Chinese leniently and indirectly with no immediate change in indigenous policies. Chinese presence was first felt in modern day Vietnam in 179 BC, when Âu Lạc was conquered by
Nanyue. However, this was minimal due to Nanyue leaving indigenous chiefs mostly in control of the population. In 111 BC, Han
conquered Nanyue and continued the Nanyue policy of relinquishing control to indigenous chiefs for the next several hundred years. "Recognition" was often bestowed upon the local leaders as a symbol of legitimacy of rule and in return they paid tribute as a form of "tax". The first form of "Chinese Vietnamese" were newly settled Han Chinese officials. In fact, indigenous ways of life and ruling class did not experience major Sinitic impact, into the first century CE. While enough immigrants existed to form a coherent Han-Viet ruling class, not enough existed to administratively or culturally dominate the indigenous society. Furthermore, throughout Han rule, Han imperial officials typically adopted local customs and intermarried in efforts to maintain the peace and stability. Due to this,
sinicization did not happen. A noteworthy Chinese Vietnamese of this time was one of the Giao Chỉ prefects,
Shi Xie, who was a sixth generation Chinese Vietnamese (fully Han Chinese descent) and ruled Vietnam as an autonomous warlord for forty years. He was posthumously deified by later Vietnamese monarchs. In the words of Stephen O'Harrow, Shi Xie was essentially "the first Vietnamese." His rule gave "formal legitimacy" to those identifying with interests of the local society than with Chinese hegemony. And while the Chinese saw Shi Xie as "frontier guardian", the Vietnamese considered him the head of regional ruling-class society. According to Taylor (1983): Another noteworthy Chinese Vietnamese was
Ly Bon who led a rebellion against the Liang, frustrated with the corruption in the government and hostility toward the local population. Ly Bon's ancestors were among the Chinese who fled south to escape the disorders of Wang Mang's usurpation, in the fifth century. The Chinese of Vietnamese ancestry became assimilated, while still maintaining their Chinese identity, and were absorbed into the "social, economic and political environment" in Northern Vietnam. The insight, skills, customs, and ideas brought in by the Chinese rule and limited migration allowed the native to develop a sense of independence and identity. The strength of localization in ancient Vietnam has thus been widely noted. The
first truly Vietnamese Ngô dynasty deported some 87,000 Chinese, with a minority applying for permanent residency in Vietnam. The Chinese Vietnamese who remain in Vietnam ended up fully assimilated. Those of mixed heritage, from previous Han-Vietnamese intermarriages, later became gentry and ruling class of Vietnam. This generation of "Chinese Vietnamese" has long been assimilated into the modern day Vietnamese identity or vise-versa. It is important to note that Vietnamese identity was heavily inspired by the Chinese customs and technology at this time.
After independence , a
Hakka and
Teochew shared Community hall in
Chợ Lớn, Ho Chi Minh City. Sporadic Chinese migration into Vietnam continued between the 9th and 15th centuries AD. The Vietnamese court during the Lý dynasty and the Trần dynasty welcomed ethnic Chinese scholars and officials to fill into its administrative and bureaucratic ranks. These ranged from Chinese refugees, consisting of civilian and military officials with their family members, seeking asylum from turmoil or opportunities. They were required to adopt and adhere to the customs of the administration.
The Chinese-Cham In 1050, the
Cham dedicated some Chinese slaves to their goddess
Lady Po Nagar at the
Po Nagar temple complex, along with Thai, Khmer and Burmese slaves. It has been speculated by Professor Kenneth Hall that these slaves were war captives taken by the Cham from the port of
Panduranga (modern day
Phan Rang) after the Cham conquest and enslavement all inhabitants, including foreigners. In modern day southern Vietnam, the
Daoyi Zhilue also mentioned Chinese merchants who frequented
Champa and started families with Cham wives. One notable example of such intermarriages was Chinese merchant from
Quanzhou, Wang Yuanmao, who in the 12th century traded extensively with Champa and married a Cham princess. Chinese prisoners were exchanged for captured districts in 1078 after China defeated Đại Việt and overran
Cao Bằng. The decendants of these intermarriages, who took on a distinct "Chinese" identity, precedes the Vietnamization of modern day southern Vietnam.
Ly Dynasty The founder of the
Lý dynasty,
Lý Thái Tổ (Lý Công Uẩn, , has been ascribed of having origins from
Fujian Province somewhere in his paternal bloodline but little is known about his maternal side except for the fact that his mother was a woman named Phạm Thị.
Lý Thái Tổ/ Lý Công Uẩn ()'s Chinese ethnicity, at least on his paternal side, has been wildly accepted by Vietnamese historians like
Trần Quốc Vượng. During the
Min-Chinese led
Lý dynasty, Vietnam had raided
Song dynasty China and forcefully conscripted the captured. We know this because the distinct Chinese last names are found in the Tran and Ly dynasty Imperial examination records. and
Trần Thừa, the latter whose son
Trần Thái Tông would later become the first emperor of the Trần dynasty. Their descendants established the
Tran dynasty, which ruled Vietnam (Dai Viet). Some of the mixed-blooded(like-wise claim) descendants and certain members of the clan could still speak Chinese, as when a Yuan dynasty envoy met with the Chinese-speaking Tran Prince
Trần Quốc Tuấn in 1282. The first of the Trần clan to live in
Đại Việt was Trần Kinh, who settled in Tức Mặc village (now
Mỹ Lộc,
Nam Định) who lived by fishing. Southern Song Chinese military officers and civilian officials left to overseas countries, went to Vietnam and intermarried with the Vietnamese ruling elite and went to Champa to serve the government there as recorded by Zheng Sixiao. Southern Song soldiers were part of the Vietnamese army prepared by emperor
Trần Thánh Tông against the second Mongol invasion.According to Vietnamese Folk-lore, Phạm Nhan (Nguyễn Bá Linh), born to a Yuan(Mongol Chinese) official/merchant and a women from
Dong Trieu, is often portrayed as a villainous character or "evil god" for supporting the Mongols against the Vietnamese/Chinese. The culture, clothing, food and language were all Chinese dominated in
Van Don, where the Tran had migrated to from Fujian. The Min Chinese language would still be spoken by the Tran in Vietnam.
Ho Dynasty China's province of
Zhejiang around the 940s was the origin of the Chinese
Hồ/Hú family from which
Hồ dynasty founder Emperor
Hồ Quý Ly came from.
15th–18th centuries Lê dynasty Temple of the Hoa community of
Sa Đéc After the
Fourth Chinese domination of Vietnam it was recorded that the union of Vietnamese women and Chinese (Ngô) men produced offspring which were left behind in Vietnam and the Chams, Cẩu Hiểm, Laotians, and Vietnamese natives who collaborated with the Ming were enslaved by Le government in the
Complete Annals of Đại Việt. The return of the Ming Chinese to China was commanded by the Ming and not
Lê Lợi. The Trai made up the supporters of Le Loi in
his campaign. He lived among the Trai at the border regions as their leader and seized the Ming-ruled lowland Kinh areas after originally forming his base in the southern highland regions. The southern dwelling Trai and Red River dwelling Vietnamese were in effect locked in a "civil war" during the anti-Ming rebellion by Le Loi.in 1499, an entry in the
Ming Shilu mentioned thirteen Chinese men from
Wenchang, including a young man named Wu Rui, were captured by the Vietnamese after their ship was blown off course while traveling from
Hainan to
Qinzhou, in the 1460s, during the reign of
Chenghua Emperor. Twelve of them were enslaved to work as agricultural laborers, whilst the youngest Chinese man,
Wu Rui was selected by the Vietnamese court for castration. Since he was the only young man in among the thirteen, he was made a eunuch of the
Vietnamese imperial palace, Thang Long for almost one fourth of a century. After years of servitude, in 1497 to a military position of importance , after the death of a ruler, in Northern Vietnam as military superintendent as recognition for his service and expertise by the Vietnamese. He was informed by a
Lạng Sơn guard soldier, called Dương Tam Tri (), of an escape route back to China and Wu Rui attempted an escaped to
Longzhou after 9 days of traversing mountains. Unfortunately, his escape attempt via Lạng Sơn eventually led to his capture by the Wei family (Tusi) in Guangxi, who initially detained him rather than returning him to the Ming court or back to Vietnam. Vietnam offered to buy Wu Rui back from Wei Chen for 100 Jin, afraid that Wu Rui would reveal Vietnamese state secrets to China. Wei Chen demanded more. However, before they could agree on a price, Wu was rescued by the
Pingxiang magistrate Li Guangning and was sent to
Beijing to work as a eunuch in the Ming palace at the Directorate of Ceremonial (). The
Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư records that in 1467 in An Bang province of Dai Viet (now
Quảng Ninh Province) a Chinese ship blew off course onto the shore. The Chinese were detained and not allowed to return to China as ordered by Lê Thánh Tông. This incident may be the same one where Wu Rui was captured. A 1472 entry in the
Ming Shilu reported that some Chinese from
Nanhai escaped back to China after their ship had been blown off course into Vietnam, where they had been forced to serve as soldiers in Vietnam's military. The escapees also reported that they found out that more than 100 Chinese men remained as captives in Vietnam after they were caught and castrated by the Vietnamese after their ships were blown off course into Vietnam in other incidents. The Chinese Ministry of Revenue responded by ordering Chinese civilians and soldiers to stop going abroad to foreign countries. These 100 men were taken prisoner around the same time as Wu Rui. Historian Leo K. Shin believes all of them may have been involved in illegal trade instead of being blown off course by wind. Both the incidents of the young Chinese man Wu Rui and the 100+ Chinese men ,castrated and turned into eunuchs, point to possible involvement in trade according to historians John K. Whitmore and Tana Li which was then suppressed by the Vietnamese government instead of them really being blown off course by the wind. China's relations with Vietnam during this period were marked by the punishment of prisoners by castration.
Northern and Southern dynasties (1533–1597) The Chinese living in the Mekong Delta area settled there before any Vietnamese settled in the region. When the
Ming dynasty fell, several thousand Chinese refugees fled south and extensively settled on
Cham lands and in Cambodia. Most of these Chinese were young males and they took
Cham women as wives. Their children started to identify more with Chinese culture. This migration occurred in the 17th and 18th centuries. In the 17th century many Chinese men from southeastern Chinese provinces like
Fujian continued to move to southeast Asia, including Vietnam, many of the Chinese married native women after settling down in places like
Hội An. In the 16th century, Lê Anh Tông of the
Lê dynasty encouraged traders to visit Vietnam by opening up Thăng Long (
Hanoi),
Huế and
Hội An. Chinese presence in the Huế/Hội An area dated back as early as 1444, when a monk from Fujian built the Buddhist temple, Chua Chuc Thanh. Hội An quickly developed into a trading port from the 16th century onwards, when Chinese and Japanese traders began to arrive in the city in greater numbers. When an Italian Jesuit priest, Father Christofo Borri, visited the city in 1618, he aptly described the city as: "The city of Faifo is so vast that one would think it is two juxtaposed cities; a Chinese city and a Japanese city." The Japanese traders quickly disappeared by the first half of the 17th century as
Tokugawa shogunate imposed a policy of
self-isolation and when Dutch traders such as Francisco Groemon visited Hội An in 1642, the Japanese population was no more than 50 people, while the Chinese numbered some 5,000 individuals.
Nguyễn Lords (1533–1789) Han Chinese Ming dynasty refugees numbering 3,000 came to Vietnam at the end of the Ming dynasty. They opposed the Qing dynasty and were fiercely loyal to the Ming dynasty. Vietnamese women married these Han Chinese refugees since most of them were soldiers and single men. Their descendants became known as
Minh Hương and they strongly identified as Chinese despite influence from Vietnamese mothers. They did not wear Manchu hairstyle unlike later Chinese migrants to Vietnam during the Qing dynasty. Hội An was also the first city to take on refugees from the
Ming dynasty following the
Manchu conquest. An association for these refugees, commonly referred to as "Ming-Huong-Xa" () first appeared between 1645 and 1653. Around this time, Hội An and Vietnamese territories further south were under the control of the
Nguyễn lords and the Nguyễn rulers allowed Vietnamese refugees to freely settle in disputed frontier lands with remnants of the Champa kingdom and the Khmer empire. According to the Dai Nam Chronicle, a Chinese general from
Guangxi,
Yang Yandi (Dương Ngạn Địch) led a band of 3,000 Ming loyalists to Huế to seek asylum. The Ming loyalist Chinese pirate Yang Yandi and his fleet sailed to Vietnam to leave the Qing dynasty in March 1682, first appearing off the coast of
Tonkin in
North Vietnam. According to the Vietnamese account, Vũ Duy Chí (), a minister of the Vietnamese
Lê dynasty came up with a plan to defeat the Chinese pirates by sending more than 300 Vietnamese girls who were beautiful singing girls and prostitutes with red handkerchiefs to go to the Chinese pirate junks on small boats. The Chinese pirates and Northern Vietnamese girls had sex but the Vietnamese women then wet the gun barrels of the Chinese pirates ships with their handkerchiefs which they got wet. They then left in the same boats. The Vietnamese navy then attacked the Chinese pirate fleet which was unable to fire back with their wet guns. The Chinese pirate fleet, originally 206 junks, was reduced to 50-80 junks by the time it reached
south Vietnam's
Quảng Nam and the
Mekong delta. The Chinese pirates having sex with North Vietnamese women may also have transmitted a deadly epidemic from China to the Vietnamese which ravaged the Tonkin regime of North Vietnam. French and Chinese sources say a typhoon contributed to the loss of ships along with the disease. The Nguyễn court allowed Duong and his surviving followers to resettle in
Đồng Nai, which had been newly acquired from the Khmers. Duong's followers named their settlement as "Minh Huong", to recall their allegiance to the Ming dynasty. More Chinese refugees followed suit to settle in Hội An and the frontier territory in
Cochinchina such as
Mạc Cửu, who had earlier settled in the
Kampot–
Hà Tiên area in the 1680s under the patronage of the Cambodian king, Chey Chettha IV. However, Cambodia fell into Thai rule under
Taksin and, in 1708, Mạc Cửu switched his alliance to the Nguyễn lords, paying tribute to Huế. Mạc Cửu was given autonomy to rule Ha Tien in return for his tribute and throughout the 18th century, his descendants implemented their own administrative policies, independent of Huế and Cambodia. The presence of these semi-autonomous fiefdoms run by Chinese refugees encouraged more Chinese to settle in the South. In contrast, very few Chinese refugees chose to settle in territories controlled by the
Trịnh lords, who still mandated Chinese refugees to strictly follow Vietnamese customs and refrain from contacts with the local Vietnamese populace in the cities. Vietnamese women were wedded as wives of the Han Chinese Minh Hương () who moved to Vietnam during the Ming dynasty's fall. They formed a new group of people in Vietnamese society and worked for the Nguyễn government. Chinese citizens in Vietnam were grouped as Huaqiao by the French while the Minh Huong were permanent residents of Vietnam who were ethnic Chinese. To make commerce easier, Vietnamese female merchants wedded Chinese male merchants wedded in Hoi An.
Quảng Nam Province was the site where fourth rank Chinese Brigade Vice-Commander (Dushu) Liu Sifu was shipwrecked after being blown by the wind and he was taken back to Guangzhou, China by a Vietnamese Nguyễn ship in 1669. The Vietnamese sent the Chinese Zhao Wenbin to led the diplomatic delegation on the ship and requested establishment of commercial links but the request was rejected despite Qing Chinese officials thanking the Nguyễn for repatriating the shipwrecked military officer. On Champa's coastal waters in a place called Linlangqian by the Chinese a ship ran aground after departing on 25 Jun 1682 from Cambodia carrying Chinese captain Chang Xiaoguan with a Chinese crew. Their cargo was left in the waters Chen Xiaoguan went to Thailand (Siam). This was recorded in the log of a Chinese trading junk going to Nagasaki on 25 June 1683. A shipwrecked Chinese blown to Vietnam by the wind, Pan Dinggui in his book "Annan ji you" said that the Trinh restored the Le dynasty to power after Vietnam was struck by disease, thunder and winds when the Le was dethroned when they initially could not find Le and Tran dynasty royals to restore to the throne when he was in Vietnam in 1688. Pan also said that only the Le king was met by official diplomats from the Qing, not the Trinh lord.
19th–20th centuries (1885, photography by
Charles-Édouard Hocquard) The Thanh Nhan Chinese made their living by exporting rice to other Southeast Asian countries, and their participation increased greatly in the years during the early 18th century after the Tây Sơn rebellion. Under local laws, rice exports to other countries were tightly regulated, but the Chinese largely ignored this rule and exported rice en masse. The prices of rice witnessed an increase of 50–100% in the 1820s as a result of these exports, which irked the Nguyễn court under Emperor
Minh Mạng. Minh Mạng's mandarin,
Lê Văn Duyệt noticed that the Chinese had a great autonomy over trade affairs in Gia Dinh, which was partly attributed to the patronage of Trinh Hoai Duc who was serving as the governor of the province. Minh Mạng introduced a new series of measures to curb Chinese trade from 1831 onwards, and started by introducing new restrictions to which residents are banned from overseas travel, which culminated in a brief revolt among Gia Dinh's residents in 1833. The Nguyễn court also experimented with measures to assimilate the Chinese immigrants; in 1839 an edict was issued to abolish the Chinese clan associations in Vietnamese-ruled Cambodia, which proved to be ineffective.
Minh Mạng's son,
Thiệu Trị, introduced a new law to allow only Chinese-born immigrants to register with the Chinese clan associations, whereas their local-born male descendants are allowed to register with the Minh-Huong-xa and adorn the Vietnamese costume. The Nguyễn court also showed signs of subtle discrimination against people of Chinese origin; only one Minh Huong Chinese was promoted to a Mandarin. This sharply contrasted with the high representation of people of Chinese descent who were able to serve the Nguyễn court under Gia Long's reign. Chinese immigration into Vietnam visibly increased following the French
colonization of Vietnam from 1860 onwards following the signing of the
Convention of Peking whereby the rights of Chinese to seek employment overseas were officially recognized by the Chinese, British and French authorities. Unlike their Vietnamese predecessors, the French were very receptive of these Chinese immigrants as it provided an opportunity to stimulate trade and industry, and they generally found employment as laborers or middlemen. The French established a special Immigration Bureau in 1874 requiring Chinese immigrants to register with the Chinese clan and dialect group associations and eased trade restrictions that were previously in place. Historians such as Khanh Tran viewed this as a divide-and-conquer policy, and its implementation intended to minimize the chances of any Vietnamese revolt against the French authorities. The Chinese population witnessed an exponential increase in the late 19th century and more so in the 20th century; between the 1870s and 1890s, some 20,000 Chinese settled in Cochinchina. Another 600,000 arrived in the 1920s and 1930s, and peaks in the migration patterns were especially pronounced during the 1920s and late 1940s when the effects of fighting and economic instability arising from the
Chinese Civil War became pronounced. The inter-ethnic marriage between Chinese and Vietnamese brought Chinese customs into Vietnam society. For example,
crocodiles were eaten by Vietnamese while they were taboo and off-limits for Chinese. Vietnamese women who married Chinese men adopted the Chinese taboo.
Statehood under North Vietnam and South Vietnam: 1950–1975 At a party plenum in 1930, the
Indochinese Communist Party made a statement that the Chinese were to be treated on an equal footing with the Vietnamese, specifically defining them as "The workers and laborers among the Chinese nationals are allies of the Vietnamese revolution". One year after the state of
North Vietnam was established, a mutual agreement was made between the
Chinese Communist Party and
Communist Party of Vietnam to give ethnic Chinese living in North Vietnam Vietnamese citizenship. This process was mostly completed by the end of the 1950s. During the
Vietnam War, the relationships were still cordial toward the Chinese minority in North Vietnam. Although the authorities increasingly encouraged the Chinese to get citizenship and reduced Chinese to a foreign language. Along the line of gradual assimilation, the prominent Chinese politician
Zhou Enlai, during a visit to Hanoi in 1956, encouraged the Chinese to integrate into the Vietnamese society. Unlike in the South, the authorities never forced or punished the local Chinese for their culture. "The Hoa in the north had all the rights and privileges of Vietnamese citizenship and none of its disadvantages. From about 1970 the Vietnamese had been trying to get us to become citizens, but few of us regarded it to be in our best interests. We could even vote in their elections. We were regarded as Vietnamese in all respects, except that we were not subject to the military draft." Following the
Battle of the Paracel Islands (a Chinese action that Hanoi disapproved), the DRV authorities started to hinder the Hoa in visiting their relatives in the PRC. Around the same time in
South Vietnam, President
Ngô Đình Diệm issued a series of measures between 1955 and 1956 to integrate the ethnic Chinese into South Vietnamese society: • 7 December 1955: A nationality law was passed which automatically qualified Vietnamese residents of mixed Chinese and Vietnamese parentage as South Vietnamese citizens. • 21 August 1956: Decree 48 was passed which made all ethnic Chinese born in Vietnam South Vietnamese citizens, irrespective of their family wishes. First-generation immigrants who were born in China, however, were not allowed to apply for Vietnamese citizenship and had to apply for residential permits that were to be renewed periodically, on top of paying residential taxes. • 29 August 1956: Decree 52 was passed which required all Vietnamese citizens regardless of their ethnic origin to adopt a Vietnamese name within six months, failing which they had to pay a heavy fine. • 6 September 1956: Decree 53 was issued which prohibited all foreigners from engaging in eleven different trades, all of which were dominated by ethnic Chinese. The foreign shareholders were required to liquidate their business or transfer their ownership to Vietnamese citizens within 6 months to 1 year, and failure to do so would result in deportation or a fine of up to 5 million piastres. As most ethnic Chinese in Vietnam were holders of
ROC nationality in 1955, the measures greatly reduced the number of expatriate Chinese in South Vietnam. The fourth decree in particular had the effect of encouraging Chinese businessmen to transfer their assets to their local-born children. In 1955, the number of ROC nationals stood at 621,000, which was greatly reduced to 3,000 by 1958. The South Vietnamese government later relaxed its stance to foreign-born Chinese in 1963, and a new nationality law was passed to allow them the choice to retain their ROC nationality or adopt South Vietnamese citizenship. The following year, the Statistics Office created a new census category, "Nguoi Viet goc Hoa" (Vietnamese people of Chinese origin), whereby Vietnamese citizens of Chinese heritage were identified as such in all official documents. No further major measures were implemented to integrate or assimilate the Chinese after 1964. Both Taiwan and the PRC protested the policies. Some Chinese wanted to leave Vietnam, but only a few went to Taiwan because the two governments couldn’t agree on the process. The protests of the two Chinese states did not have any effect on the policies of the RVN towards its Chinese community. Instead it was the actions of the Chinese population that forced the Vietnamese authorities to back down and to change the decrees
Departure from Vietnam: 1975–1990 Following the
reunification of Vietnam, The ethnic Hoa in South Vietnam suffered most from the socialist transformation. A major challenge for the government was how to regulate and control sensitive market activity, especially in Ho Chi Minh City, where Chinese-owned businesses dominated much of the commercial economy. Following Vietnam's break with China in 1978, some Vietnamese leaders evidently feared the potential for espionage activities within the Chinese business community. On the one hand, Chinese-owned concerns controlled trade in a number of goods and services, such as pharmaceuticals, fertilizer distribution, grain milling, and foreign-currency exchange, that were supposed to be state monopolies. On the other hand, savvy Chinese entrepreneurs provided excellent access to markets for Vietnamese exports through Hong Kong and Singapore. This access became increasingly important in the 1980s as a way of circumventing the boycott on trade with Vietnam imposed by a number of Asian and Western Nations. followed up by another that banned all private trade. Further government policies forced former owners to become farmers in the
NEZ or join the armed forces and fight at the Vietnam-Cambodia border and confiscated all old and foreign currencies, as well as any Vietnamese currency in excess of the
US value of $250 for urban households and $150 by rural households. While such measures targeted all bourgeois elements, such measures hurt the Hoa the hardest and resulted in the expropriation of Hoa properties in and around major cities. Hoa communities offered widespread resistance and clashes left the streets of Cholon "full of corpses". These measures, combined with external tensions stemming from Vietnam's dispute with Cambodia and China in 1978 and 1979 caused an exodus of the majority of the Hoa, of whom more than 170,000 fled overland into the province of
Guangxi, China, from the North and the remainder fled by boat from the South. China received a daily influx of 4–5,000 refugees, while Southeast Asian countries saw a wave of 5,000 boat people arriving at their shores each month. China sent unarmed ships to help evacuate the refugees but encountered diplomatic problems as the Vietnamese government denied that the Hoa suffered persecution and later refused to issue exit permits after as many as 250,000 Hoa had applied for repatriation. In an attempt to stem the refugee flow, avert Vietnamese accusations that Beijing was coercing its citizens to emigrate, and encourage Vietnam to change its policies towards ethnic Hoa, China closed off its land border in 1978. This led to a jump in the number of boat people, with as many as 100,000 arriving in other countries by the end of 1978. However, the Vietnamese government by now not only encouraged the exodus but took the opportunity to profit from it by
extorting a price of five to ten
taels of gold or an equivalent of US$1,500 to $3,000 per person wishing to leave the country. The Vietnamese military also forcibly drove the thousands of border refugees across the China-Vietnam land border, causing numerous border incidents and armed clashes, while blaming these movements on China by accusing them of using saboteurs to force Vietnamese citizens into China. This new influx brought the number of refugees in China to around 200,000. One family was split. An ethnic Chinese man was deported while his ethnic Vietnamese wife and child were left behind. For those who lacked the resources to pay their way out remained to face continued discrimination and ostracism, including forced retirement, reduction of food rations and exclusion from certain fields of study, a measure considered necessary for national security.
Quảng Ninh was the worst affected province. Some 160k Hoa were forced to leave, corresponding to approximately 22 per cent of the total population. The Chinese provided much-needed manpower to the industrial and mining sectors and the economy of the province was devastated by the departure of virtually the entire Chinese community. The size of the exodus increased during and after the war. The monthly number of boat people arriving in Southeast Asia increased to 11,000 during the first quarter of 1979, 28,000 by April, and 55,000 in June, while more than 90,000 fled by boat to China. In addition, the Vietnamese military also began expelling ethnic Hoa from Vietnamese-occupied Cambodia, leading to over 43,000 refugees of mostly Hoa descent fleeing overland to Thailand. By now, Vietnam was openly confiscating the properties and extorting money from fleeing refugees. In April 1979 alone, Hoa outside of Vietnam had remitted a total of US$242 million (an amount equivalent to half the total value of Vietnam's 1978 exports) through
Hong Kong to
Ho Chi Minh City to help their friends or family pay their way out of Vietnam. By June, money from refugees had replaced the coal industry as Vietnam's largest source of foreign exchange and was expected to reach as much as 3 billion in US dollars. By 1980, the refugee population in China reached 260,000, and the number of surviving boat people refugees in Southeast Asia reached 400,000. (An estimated 50% to 70% of Vietnamese and Chinese boat people perished at sea.)
Đổi Mới (since 1986) After
Nguyễn Văn Linh initiated the
Vietnamese economic reforms in 1986, the Hoa in Vietnam has witnessed a massive commercial resurgence and despite many years of persecution began to regain much of their power in the Vietnamese economy. The open-door policy and economic reforms of Vietnam, as well as the improved economic and diplomatic relations of Vietnam with other Southeast Asian countries, has revived much of the entrepreneurial presence and economic clout of the predominantly urban Hoa minority in the roles they had played in the Vietnamese economy prior to 1975. ==Trade and industry==