How minor immigrants became the dominants: the case of the Kinh people migrating to the Central Highlands, Vietnam in the twentieth century

ABSTRACT

By century XX, the Central Highlands was being the traditional residence of indigenous ethnic minorities. In 1858, the French colonialists established plantations of industrial crops all over the area, which ended up forming the first wave of the Kinh people's migration to the Central Highlands. In 1957, the Republic of Vietnam government created the second wave of Kinh emigration to the Central Highlands through the Land Development Program. In the period 1965–1975, the violent escalation of the Vietnam War prompted the 3rd wave of war refugees migrating to the Central Highlands. The 4th wave (1976–1989) was the result of the efforts of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to redistribute human resources throughout the country, in which a large part of the population from the plains was moved to the Central Highlands to build new economic zones. By early 1990s, with the worldwide ‘coffee boom’ and the legal recognition of private economic sector, the wave of free migration to the Central Highlands to plant coffee trees exploded - this was the 5th wave. The continuum of the above five waves of migration has completely changed the population and land ownership structure of the Central Highlands as well as brought great alterations to the socio-economic life of this region. While investigating such changes, our article seeks to provides a comprehensive explanation on the process in which the Kinh gained their dominance on the Central Highlands over the five waves of their migration to the plateau.

KEYWORDS:

• Vietnam
• central highlands
• ethnic minorities
• migration;the twentieth century
• the Kinh people

Acknowledgements

This research has been done under the research project QG.21.36 ‘Migration and its impact on ethnic, religious relations in the Central Highlands under the First Republic of Vietnam (1955-1963)’ of Vietnam National University, Hanoi.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the CHCI-Mellon Foundation & the International Center for Cultural Studies, the Higher Education Sprout Project of the National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University and Ministry of Education (MOE), Taiwan.