Vietnam's Ethnic Chinese and the Sino-Vietnamese conflict

Abstract

The massive exodus of ethnic Chinese from Vietnam to China in 1978 and to Southeast Asia by boat in 1979 seemed to the outside world explainable only in terms of racist policies toward an ethnic minority paralleling the Nazi policy toward the Jews. But Vietnamese policy toward the ethnic Chinese them-selves can be understood only in the context of the development of the Sino-Vietnamese conflict. While racism toward the Hoa in the form of resentment toward an unassimilated and privileged minority had long existed among ethnic Vietnamese, there had also been a long-established Communist Party policy of discouraging Vietnamese from anti-Chinese sentiments or actions, in contrast with non-Communist Vietnamese governments in the past. Communist Vietnam had always portrayed the Hoa as active participants in the anti-imperialist struggle, linking friendly relations between Hoa and Vietnamese with close cooperation between China and Vietnam.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gareth Porter

This is a revised version of a paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Washington D.C., March 21–23, 1980.