Category Archives: China

by | 7 July 2024 · 8:27 am

Japan vs. Germany in the Pacific

From Geography and Japan’s Strategic Choices: From Seclusion to Internationalization, by Peter J. Woolley (Potomac Books, 2005), Kindle pp. 80-84:

The European war that began in August 1914 was more than European. Though it was the great European powers that immolated themselves in both victory and defeat, the war was fought around the globe and had immediate consequences for Asia and Japan.

The requirements of the European war were such that Britain, France, Germany, and Russia had to redeploy the troops maintaining their empires in Asia to the European theater of war. At the same time, they all wanted to defend those parts of their empires they could while depriving the enemy of his. Japan was Germany’s foe in this war and a very useful ally of Britain. The war was the final denouement of the tsarist regime in Russia and, when the Bolshevik Revolution had run its course, it would present Japan with a new, virulent, and formidable neighboring regime. Moreover, the successful Marxist revolution in Russia would embolden the nascent communist party in China just as the Bolshevik regime would aid and abet the Chinese revolutionaries who would one day make their own revolution and reshape Japan’s geopolitical reality. In the meanwhile, it was Japan that had an unprecedented opportunity to reshape the geopolitical contours of Asia.

Japan entered the war without hesitation on the side of Britain, sending an ultimatum to Germany on August 15 demanding that Germany withdraw all naval forces from Asian waters, disarm those not withdrawn, and turn over to Japan the whole of Germany’s Chinese territory. A week later, Japan blockaded the German-controlled port of Tsingtao and in early September Japan landed a force in order to assault the port from the rear. By November 7, 1914, Japan had taken the base at Tsingtao. At the same time, Japan also took over Germany’s other Pacific territories and bases, including the Marshall Islands, the Mariana Islands, Palau, and the Caroline Islands, prizes Japan kept as rewards for its participation in the war against Germany. The former German possessions gave Japan’s navy an orientation very different than it had before. Japan’s armed forces were arrayed across the Sea of Japan to China and the continent and, for the first time, had far-flung bases and possessions southward and eastward across the world’s largest ocean.

It is a common view of historians that Japan’s participation in the war was solely to further its territorial ambitions. A typical summary of the period opines that “the Japanese Empire was keen to make the most of the golden opportunity which Germany’s occupation with European events provided. . . . She proceeded to seize every Germany territory in the Pacific she could lay her hands on.” Doubtless this view comes from the Twenty-One Demands that Japan made on China—actually a series of memos that pressed the Chinese to give to Japan the same concessions they had given to Germany, plus several additional ones. The memos put Japan at odds with the United States, which was lamely arguing to restore China’s territorial integrity. In fact, the memoirs of Germany’s Kaiser, written after the war, support this view: “the rapid rise of Tsing-tao as a trading center aroused the envy of the Japanese. . . . Envy prompted England in 1914 to demand that Japan should take Tsing-tao. . . . Japan did this joyfully.”

Yet few history books note Japan’s contributions to the allied effort against Germany. All the great powers, most especially the United States, were apprehensive about Japan’s potential to become the dominant power not only in China but in the Pacific. Germany even briefly tried to pit the anxieties of the North American power against Japan in an effort to save Germany’s Pacific possessions. Britain too was ambivalent about Japan, first demanding that Japan enter the war immediately, then trying to limit the scope of Japan’s operations. But it must be said that Japan adhered to both the letter and spirit of the alliance it had made with Great Britain. In addition to joining the war immediately and taking Germany’s Asian bases, Japan served a number of other roles. First, Japan’s navy helped Britain drive German warships from the Pacific. The Japanese Imperial navy also allowed Britain, and later the United States, to minimize their forces in the Pacific, freeing those ships for duty in waters surrounding Europe. Further, Japan escorted convoys of troops and war materials from the British dominions in the Pacific to Europe—no small task in an era of mine and submarine warfare. Meanwhile, Japanese yards produced both ships of war and merchantmen for British allies. And beginning in 1917, Japan sent two flotillas of destroyers to the Mediterranean Sea to assist Britain in antisubmarine operations and escort troop transports. In the Mediterranean theater alone, the Imperial navy had thirty-two engagements with submarines and escorted a total of 788 allied ships.

One of the few who gave Japan its due was Winston Churchill, who served as Britain’s first lord of the admiralty and wrote a prodigious history of the war. To him Japan was “another island empire situated on the other side of the globe” and “a trustworthy friend.” Similarly, Lord Grey, who served as Britain’s foreign secretary, wrote that “Japan was for us for many, many years a fair, honorable, and loyal Ally.” Nonetheless, when the time came for postwar negotiations, Churchill and Grey were out of office and Britain had obligations to Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, who had all given Britain their firm support in the war.

The Australians and New Zealanders, chips off the Anglo block, were alarmed by Japan’s reach in the Pacific at the war’s end in 1918, and equally aware of Britain’s diminished naval strength. They insisted Japan give up any of the former German holdings south of the equator. Likewise, the United States apprehended Japan, its navy, and its extensive Pacific outposts as a maritime rival and a potential threat to free trade in Asia. As a result, Japan, the United States, Britain, and its oceanic dominions now found themselves in a peculiar geographical and political puzzle.

Japan was Britain’s ally, had built a formidable navy, and had acquired far-flung Pacific bases. Australia and New Zealand were dependable British dominions but strongly preferred to have their security guaranteed by the motherland rather than by Japan. The United States never had a peacetime alliance with Britain, but Britain valued U.S. friendship, and the two democratic, commercial, naval powers sat astride the Atlantic Ocean. Meanwhile, Japanese and American interests and possessions in the Pacific were not separated by any discernible boundary and the two powers viewed each other as rivals. The Americans also insisted on an “Open Door” trading policy in China but Japan clearly had gained the upper hand over the Europeans in that chaotic country.

The Americans had some reason to be concerned about Japan’s new position in the northwest Pacific. Japan had been consolidating its control in southern Manchuria and Korea, had taken over Shantung, and had won most of its twenty-one demands from China. The Open Door policy, the idea that outside powers would compete on equal terms in China and respect its sovereignty, was seriously threatened by Japan’s increasingly advantageous position. Government in China was becoming ever more fragmented and corrupt.

The American government also had domestic pressures to deal with in regard to Asian policy. Navalists saw British power fading and Japanese power expanding. The trend seemed to be toward Japanese dominance in the Pacific. Likewise, American traders wanted the government to take a more aggressive stance that would give them some advantage—or at least, not put them at such a disadvantage in Asia in general and in China in particular. Christian missionaries were also keen to set to work on the vast populations now accessible to their gospel. But worst of all, and most outspoken, the racist Anti-Immigration League in California made barring Japanese immigrants from schools, jobs, and property the sine qua non of their agenda and, consequently, of California politics. The Californians now found allies in various anti-immigration societies in the eastern United States as well as in worker unions and even in recent European immigrants who feared the Asians would not only drive down wages but take their jobs. Thus, the nascent Japanese-American rivalry found expression even at the level of local politics.

Complicating matters further, the Western allies, including Japan, still had troops in Siberia. Their intervention there was a confused, fruitless, and embarrassing attempt to stave the Bolshevik Revolution, or rescue the Czech freedom fighters, or prop up an alternative government, or prevent the massive resources of Siberia from falling into somebody else’s hands, or something similar. Everyone, except perhaps the Japanese, was ready to leave Siberia but not so willing to leave first and allow Japan a free hand. Consequently, the peace conference at the palace Versailles was an infamous mess.

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Filed under Australia, Britain, China, Germany, Japan, migration, military, nationalism, New Zealand, Pacific, U.S., war

by | 5 July 2024 · 5:27 am

Prudence of Tokugawa Isolation

From Geography and Japan’s Strategic Choices: From Seclusion to Internationalization, by Peter J. Woolley (Potomac Books, 2005), Kindle pp. 43-46:

Events outside Japan in the seventeenth century emphasized the prudence of the Tokugawa seclusion. This was the Age of Expansion—and not just for Europeans. In China, the Ming Dynasty was coming to an end at the hands of the Manchus, people the Ming once ruled. The Manchus gained control of Inner Mongolia before moving south and taking Manchuria and then Korea in 1637. They took the capital, Beijing, in 1644, prompting the Ming emperor to commit suicide. They spent the rest of the century subduing the remainder of China, defeating the last resistance in Taiwan in 1683. They would later add to their empire Outer Mongolia (1697) and Tibet (1720) to make the largest Chinese empire in history.

India had expanded to, then fallen victim to the expansion of others. The Mogul emperors had consolidated the vast subcontinent under their rule, adding the last big piece, Afghanistan, in 1581. By the end of the next century, however, the government had fallen into decline. Its infighting and inefficiency would eventually weaken and divide India to the point where the British could become the real rulers.

In Russia, Ivan the Terrible was creating an empire at the same time as Japan had been fighting its civil wars. Russians crossed the Ural Mountains into Asia and by 1584 had defeated the Tatars. They went on to colonize Siberia over the next several decades, reaching the Pacific Ocean by 1639, thereby becoming neighbors of Japan.

The Europeans continued to explore, conquer, and settle. In contrast to Tokugawa’s stable Japan, a chaotic Thirty Years’ War began in 1618 between Catholics and Protestants, which slowly engulfed the European continent. By its end, Germany was in ruins and hundreds of thousands were dead from disease, famine, and massacre. The Tokugawa strategy of seclusion then seemed like the wise choice. The only question was how long it could last.

The 250 years between the founding of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1603 and the first American attempt to force Japan to abandon its seclusion in 1853 were not years of stagnation in or outside Japan. In Japan there was political stability but also long-term trends toward urbanization and bureaucratization. A middle class of merchants emerged: people who accumulated wealth but did not necessarily control land. Nor did they have the same obligations and restrictions as the government and ruling class.

To be sure, there was more change taking place outside Japan than there was within. Much of this change would impinge sooner or later on Japan’s foreign policy as well as its domestic harmony. While most writers focus on the technological changes of the era, social, political, and intellectual changes were just as important. If Europe’s seventeenth century was the Age of Expansion, its eighteenth century was the Age of Enlightenment, which laid the foundations not only of modern science but of democratic conceptions of government as well. Notions such as the divine right of kings, raison d’état, and the innate superiority of a ruling class were on their way out. While Japan remained secluded in the fifth reign of its Tokugawa Shogunate, the English philosopher John Locke was publishing his Second Treatise on Civil Government, emphasizing the triune values of individual liberty, the sanctity of property, and equality under the law. Montesquieu’s treatise advocating a separation of government’s basic functions into separate institutions, De L’Esprit des lois, followed in 1748. Jean Jacques Rousseau’s appeal to the “general will” of the people in Le Contrat Social followed in 1762. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations argued the advantages of free trade in 1776. And James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay produced The Federalist Papers in 1787 and 1788. These works presaged an Age of Revolution. But in Japan none of this would be discussed: the most influential philosophers were Kamo no Mabuchi, Motoori Norinaga, and Hirata Atsutane.

A small school of Japanese writers began both to lead a return to ancient Japanese literature and to critique Chinese influences on Japan—influences they deemed to be impure blots and accretions on Japanese culture. Thus, one curious effect of Japan’s self-imposed seclusion was that the Chinese became the foreigners. The philosophers advocated the revival of Shinto, an indigenous animistic religion in which many things, living and inanimate, had kami, or spirits. Hundreds of native folk tales were attached to Shintoism, many supporting the notion that Japan was the center of creation and the emperor was divinely appointed.

Shinto had been gradually eclipsed by Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, each of which made its way to Japan through Chinese and Korean missionaries as early as the sixth century. Kamo no Mabuchi (1697–1769) was, not coincidentally, the son of a Shinto priest and was most influential in attracting attention to and reverence for classic Japanese literature—literature that included Shinto mythology. Mabuchi was succeeded in his endeavor by a disciple, Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801). Motoori’s quest was to discover the true Japanese culture, now overlaid with so many foreign influences. He saw in Japan’s distant past an ideal society ruled by the descendents of Shinto deities— the emperors. His works and speeches became very popular. But his writing had more than nostalgic undertones. Demanding new reverence for the emperor was a subtle criticism of the Shogunate that ruled in the emperor’s name. And criticizing Confucianism was tantamount to criticizing the political leadership which not only had been schooled in Confucian thought but was— Motoori implied—subservient to China. And though the Shogun gave Motoori official honors, it was Motoori’s own disciple, Hirata, who drew the ultimate conclusion: that all gods were born in Japan and none outside, thus Japan and the Japanese were a category of creation all by themselves, one that was perfect and pure—when free from the corrupting influences of outsiders.

Hirata, born the same year that the Americans produced their Declaration of Independence, became the leader of a full-blown Shinto revivalist movement. That movement was subtly critical of the government, for which Hirata spent the last two years of his life under house arrest. Though he died before the opening of Japan, his disciples were later appointed to important posts in the government, bringing with them their ideas of Japanese cultural purity to the strategic conversation.

Perhaps fundamentalist ideas such as Shinto revivalism were also the result of the strange political climate in Japan. While politically stable and peaceful, social volatility threatened. Peace and stability had brought overpopulation and a recurring threat of famine, since trade was so severely restricted. This allowed merchant and artisan guilds, or kumi to monopolize a particular distribution, trade, or manufacture. The leaders of the kumi were rich and getting richer, and this naturally caused resentment in both the aristocratic class and the underclass. Women were feeling the brunt of a more and more regulated society under an increasingly fearful, conservative government: their dress, civic participation, businesses, and even leisure arts were more and more carefully proscribed. Meanwhile, the police were easily corrupted and the highest officials were profligate in their spending and increasingly arbitrary in their enforcement of laws. All of these consequences and benefits of seclusion would be starkly outlined when Japan was confronted by the need to reevaluate its strategy of seclusion.

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Filed under Britain, China, economics, education, Japan, migration, military, nationalism, religion, Russia, South Asia, war

by | 4 July 2024 · 12:24 pm

Pinpointing the SARS Outbreak, 2003

From Seeing: A Memoir of Truth and Courage from China’s Most Influential Television Journalist by Chai Jing, trans. by Yan Yan, Jack Hargreaves (Astra House, 2023), Kindle pp. 45-48, 50-51:

I wanted to go back to People’s Hospital [in Beijing], because I couldn’t stop thinking about the “courtyard problem.” By then, it’d become the site of one of the biggest and most difficult battles against SARS. Starting on April 5, about 222 people had been infected at the hospital, including ninety-three hospital staff across nearly half the departments. The emergency ward north of the outpatient wing was the most severely affected; that was where the courtyard was. On April 22, I had seen patients covered in white cloth being rolled out of there. Two days later, when our van passed by once more, the eighty-five-year-old hospital had just announced a full quarantine. Beyond the yellow quarantine tape, three nurses sat on the empty steps, holding their blue nurse’s caps. Their long wet hair was drying in the sun. As they sat in silence, one would occasionally comb her fingers through the hair hanging in front of her chest. Our van parked in front of the hospital for over ten minutes. Xiao Peng pointed his camcorder at them from a distance.

I felt that there must be a correlation between the twenty-nine patients I’d witnessed being transferred without proper protection and the high rate of infection now sweeping the hospital. I wanted to know more about what had happened. No one asked me to work on the story. I wasn’t even sure if I could make it at all, let alone get it on the air, but my team was willing to work with me….

I ended up getting an interview with Zhu Jihong, the director of the emergency ward. He confessed to me that, at the time of transfer, the twenty-nine patients I’d counted were all in fact infected with SARS. In fact, the emergency ward had already been battling known cases since April 5. But rather than report the cases, the real numbers were hidden from the World Health Organization when they came to inspect the hospital. The patients had been transferred to ambulances that drove around Beijing in circles until the inspectors left.

I’d spent a long time convincing Zhu Jihong to accept the interview. I said, “You don’t need to make any judgments or draw any conclusions, just describe what you saw, heard, and felt, that’s all.”

After a long pause on the phone, he said, “The memory is too painful.”

“Of course,” I said, “but pain can be cathartic, consolation for one’s sacrifices.”

Zhu Jihong led me through the emergency ward corridor. He leaned over, undid the heavy chain lock, and pushed the door open. He reached for the wall with his left hand and after some flickering the lights turned on. In the ashen light, the classroom-sized space was filled with blue IV chairs tagged with white labels that read: April 17, Thursday; April 17, Thursday …

The beds were littered with rumpled blankets, some of which had fallen to the ground. Chairs were upturned, four feet in the air, left there by people fleeing for their lives.

This was the courtyard I had been hearing so much about. It was a space wedged between four buildings. With the addition of a roof, it had become an indoor space, sealed off from traffic in the rest of the hospital. They’d used it as the IV room, where all the patients with fevers came to receive their drips. Twenty-seven beds sat shoulder to shoulder with only the space of a fist between them. Every day, almost sixty people had sat tightly together on the beds and among a few chairs. Even during the daytime, the room completely depended on artificial lighting. There was no airflow, no windows, only a ventilation panel connected to the central air conditioning system, which spread the germs across the whole hospital.

The patient files that piled up in a mound on a desk were yellowing with age. I hesitated for a second. Zhu Xuhong said with a dismal smile, “Allow me.” He opened the files, which said pneumonia. He pointed toward a blackboard. Next to the twenty-two names written in white chalk, nineteen read: pneumonia, pneumonia, pneumonia …

“In fact, it was SARS,” he said.

Even the patients had not known. It was like a taboo. No one in the hospital had even called SARS by its name. They’d called it “that thing.” The first patient had come in on April 5. The doctors suspected she was a SARS patient after seeing her chest radiograph. But the government announced that all cases were from outside Beijing. All public hospitals are managed by the government. And according to the standards for diagnosis and treatment in Beijing, the doctors could only diagnose someone who had a history of direct contact with a confirmed infected person.

…

On April 22, Zeng Guang, the chief scientist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention examined this hospital. He said, “When buildings are about to collapse, escaping is the only choice.” Two days later, People’s Hospital quarantined. Zhang Wenkang, the minister of health, was fired, and within one week, the army built the biggest field medical hospital in Beijing. There were 686 SARS cases there, almost one-tenth of all global cases.

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Filed under China, disease, education, publishing

by | 3 July 2024 · 5:12 am

Journalism: Telling Whose Story?

From Seeing: A Memoir of Truth and Courage from China’s Most Influential Television Journalist by Chai Jing, trans. by Yan Yan, Jack Hargreaves (Astra House, 2023), Kindle pp. 4-5:

I never wanted to be a news reporter. Journalism remained a monopoly when I began building my career. For a long time all Chinese people watched the same program, Joint News, on CCTV, which contained countless political meetings and aired every night at seven P.M. For me, all it meant was the start of dinnertime. The only CCTV program I watched was Oriental Horizon. What impressed me was the candid state of people’s lives on screen, full of struggles in a rapidly changing society, conflicting desires that led to inevitable consequences. I watched it as a work of art, not just as news. The slogan of these stories was “Telling the ordinary people’s own story.” After being ignored for a long time, ordinary people in a fast-rising society became protagonists on a national television station.

Chen Meng, a man who had never been trained by any official news school, created a slogan in 1993 to express the goal of China’s journalism reform at the time: “Turning propaganda into communication.” In the beginning, CCTV asked the program to “serve people” by teaching them how to cook. But when Chen Meng became a producer, he said, “If we serve people, we serve their spiritual life.” He put life in a shell. Chen Meng invited me to join CCTV in 2000. Since I was a young girl who hadn’t studied any news textbooks, he asked me to learn the principles of journalism from life: from the pain, joy, struggle, and bloody lessons of people in general and myself in particular.

Fourteen years later, I quit my job, went back to freelancing. I used what I had learned, and used some royalties from the book I’d published (which you’re now holding in your hands) to make a nonprofit documentary about air pollution in China. On February 28, 2015, I put it online. It got over three hundred million views before being removed seven days later. I left China then, and have been living in Europe ever since.

For those fourteen years, working at CCTV gave me the opportunity to travel to different places over a hundred and fifty days a year, to see my country, which was changing dramatically, and understand the trajectory of that change. What I saw showed me that China’s development depends on its ability to free people’s creativity from unnecessary shackles. It can explain the country’s stagnation, and it can also explain the country’s success; it can explain the past, and it will explain the future.

Chen Meng never told me why he chose me until he became seriously ill. The last time we talked in the hospital, he told me that eight years prior he had seen a young girl talking on TV. He didn’t remember what she had said and didn’t check her background, but he thought, “This girl has many flaws, but there is one thing about her I value—she doesn’t follow blindly.”

That was when he called me.

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Filed under China, democracy, economics, nationalism, philosophy, publishing

by | 2 July 2024 · 11:37 am

Journalism in China & Taiwan, 1990s

From Seeing: A Memoir of Truth and Courage from China’s Most Influential Television Journalist by Chai Jing, trans. by Yan Yan, Jack Hargreaves (Astra House, 2023), Kindle pp. 1-4:

My mom bought a radio for me when I was sixteen. I found out I could hear broadcasts from Taiwan. Listening to “enemy radio” had been illegal for a long time. One of my father’s colleagues had been tortured as a spy in the 1960s, when there was hostility between Taiwan and mainland China, for breaking this law. He ended up cutting his own throat with a razor.

The way the hosts spoke surprised me. They didn’t read from a script or talk like official spokespeople. They shared literature, music, plays, and jokes. One time one of them even went out to her balcony and described how beautiful the sunset was. I’d never experienced such a thing in any media before. I learned to make my own tape, telling stories to myself, in my lonely girlhood.

In 1994, while studying at a railway college in Hunan Province, I took one of those tapes to Hunan People’s Broadcasting Station to look for a summer job. I was too naïve to know that there was no possibility for a student like me to work at a state-controlled media network. The state allocated jobs to everyone. My role was decided already, as an accountant working at the 17th Railway Bureau. The head of the station told me to leave. However, after listening to my tape, the radio host Shang Neng offered me a half hour in his program. He was famous enough to be able to fight against his boss’s disapproval. All state-controlled stations needed money to survive after the 1992 economic reforms—when China set the goal of establishing a socialist market system, opening the gate to the outside world—and Shang Neng attracted a lot of commercials for them.

One year later, in 1995, I signed a contract with the radio station by winning an open competition. It was the first time the station had selected staff through an open market and fair competition. Thinking that a contract meant a job that was only temporary, my mother wrote a harsh letter to warn me of what I might lose if I gave up my state-allocated railway job: my house, hukou, social benefits, safety. In short, all she had had to struggle for her entire life. I didn’t write back to her. Living in a society with a long history of collectivism, we rarely talk about our personal feelings at home, and this was especially true after a period of excessive politicization where the idea of individual humanity was seen as “spiritual pollution.” It was hard to tell my mom that, for me, a job was a spiritual human bond. People wrote to me and I read their letters on the radio; it was a human bond. There were long-suppressed voices that wanted to be heard, and I was there. I did nothing but listen, yet the hole in my life was filled by strangers. More than making a living, I was alive.

In 1999, in order to survive, all the stations—radio and television alike—had to produce programs that spoke to people’s needs. New Youth, a program on Hunan TV, invited me to be their host, and my job was to interview young people who brought sharp ideas to different fields. This was during China’s explosive economic growth, and I realized these people had one thing in common: instead of destroying the old, they built the new where creativity was most unfettered. Life itself has to grow, and where there is a gap, there is a way out. I ended up writing their story as well, including the parts that the station cut, to provide a fuller picture for the magazines. The media market was expanding quickly and competitively around 2000, so it had been to my advantage to work freely, and not sign a contract with the TV station. As one of the first generation media freelancers, I got a taste of what it was like to be independent. Like the rock-and-roll star Cui Jian sang, “As long as I have a pen, no one can stop me.”

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Filed under China, economics, education, nationalism, philosophy, publishing, Taiwan

by | 10 June 2024 · 6:10 am

Cambodia, April 1975

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 11-12:

Cambodia is a small Southeast Asian kingdom, bordered by Vietnam on the east, Thailand on the west and north, and Laos to the north. Its primary religion is Theravada Buddhism. Its main ethnic majority are referred to as Khmers, and the national language is Khmer. The capital city, sitting at the confluence of the Mekong and Sap rivers, is called Phnom Penh.

The kingdom was colonized by France for nearly a century, from 1863 until 1953 when it secured full independence from France under the leadership of King Norodom Sihanouk. Sihanouk abdicated the throne a year later to take a leading role in Cambodian electoral politics, which he dominated for the next fifteen years as a popular and powerful head of state.

On 18 March 1970, Sihanouk was deposed in a parliamentary coup by his prime minister, General Lon Nol. This seminal event broke Sihanouk’s long and carefully maintained neutrality that had kept Cambodia out of the Vietnam War raging next door, as Lon Nol immediately aligned with the United States against the communists, causing the conflict to spill over into Cambodia.

Thus began a bloody civil war, as Lon Nol founded the Khmer Republic, notoriously corrupt and heavily funded by United States military aid; and the embittered Sihanouk, with Chinese support, publicly allied himself with the Cambodian faction of communists, dubbed (by him) the “Khmer Rouge,” in an armed resistance against the new government. Hoping for a return to power, Sihanouk allowed himself to be made the nominal figurehead of this armed resistance, and because he was highly revered by many Cambodians, especially in the countryside, this decision lent tremendous influence and strength to the Khmer Rouge in recruiting large-scale support from the Cambodian populace.

Five years of violent conflict and devastating national division led, ultimately, to an imminent Khmer Rouge victory in mid-April 1975. As Khmer Rouge forces surrounded Phnom Penh for the final battle against disintegrating government forces and prepared to capture the city, the city’s population eagerly awaited the end of the war and the return of peace.

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Filed under Cambodia, China, France, military, religion, U.S., Vietnam, war

by | 13 May 2024 · 5:38 am

Chinese in Colonial Vietnam

From The Ethnic Chinese and Economic Development in Vietnam, by Tran Khanh (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 1993), pp. 21-25:

Two major factors converged to cause an upsurge in Chinese migration to Vietnam in the second half of the nineteenth century. A push factor was the political upheavals in China, which led to its people seeking better conditions overseas. A pull factor was French colonization and the policy of the colonial government to recruit Chinese labour for Vietnam.

After the Treaty of Nanking in AD 1842 forced the Manchu court in Beijing to cede Hong Kong to the British and open five treaty ports to Western powers, it was no longer possible for the Chinese authority to control the movement of their nationals in and out of the country. At that time, the Chinese Government had officially banned travelling beyond the shores of China. Thus China became an increasingly stable source of manpower for labour-hungry Western colonies in Southeast Asia and Latin America. By AD 1860, articles within the Treaty of Peking signed between China and both Britain and France literally compelled the Manchu authorities to recognize the right of Chinese workers to seek a livelihood abroad under contracts they themselves could freely enter into. Dovetailing with this relaxation of laws on emigration was the political turmoil of the times which contributed to the urge to leave. During AD 1850-61 there was a large-scale uprising in the form of the Taiping Revolution. Added to that were the intermittent wars fought with Western powers. The majority of migrants in this exodus were the usual land-deprived peasants and impoverished city dwellers. But there was also a sizeable number of small and middle-scale business­ men, intellectuals, and military personnel.

France colonized six provinces of southern Vietnam (Nam Ky), which constituted Cochinchina, in AD 1867 and established protectorates in cen­tral and northern Vietnam by AD 1884. The two protectorates were named Annam and Tonkin, respectively. From the start, the French colonial admin­istration took measures to regulate Chinese immigration with a mixture of control and encouragement. In AD 1874 a special Immigration Bureau was established in Saigon which allowed Chinese immigrants into the country but only if they belonged to dialect groups already existing in the country and if the groups would provide sponsorship for their own kind.  The Bureau was very active, and as early as AD 1897 it had a department that could arbitrarily decide on the suitability of a Chinese immigrant for work; this aroused such an angry protest from the Chinese community that the administration was forced to close it down. After this, streams of Chinese immigrants could cross freely into Vietnam, and they congregated mainly in big cities.

The French colonial administration allowed the Chinese to deal freely in rice, opium, and alcohol. Other legal rights included the right to own land, to travel without restriction within the Indochinese Federation, to establish commercial organizations, to return to China for a visit, and to transfer their wealth out of the country. Such favourable conditions continued to attract Chinese migrants as in the days of the Nguyen dynasty. Within a ten-year span, the number of Chinese in Cochinchina shot up from 44,000 in 1873 to 56,000 in 1889, concentrating mainly in big cities. Cholon in the year 1889 had a population of nearly 16,000 Chinese; Saigon, over 7,000; and Gia Dinh, nearly 3,000. In Tonkin and Annam, the Chinese migrants also gathered in Haiphong, Hanoi, Danang, and the Quang Ninh province, which bordered China. The Chines here were involved mostly in commerce and service.

Chinese immigrants during the period of late nineteenth and early twen­tieth centuries also consisted of labourers contracted by the French to work in Vietnam. They were sent to excavate mines, specifically in Quang Ninh province, to build the railway linking Vietnam to the southern provinces of China or to tap rubber in plantations. By the 1920s, Chinese workers accounted for 7 per cent of the total number of miners and 17 per cent of the total number of industrial workers in Vietnam. The influx of Chinese labourers contributed not only to the country’s manpower but also to the emergence of a working class in Vietnam.

This rapid influx of Chinese migrants continued up till the middle of the twentieth century. Data published during the period AD 1912-22 give their number as 158,000. Between 1923 and 1933, nearly 600,000 arrived from China. Another set of data estimates the number to be 1.2 million between 1923 and 1951, which was a record at any given period of time during the whole history of Chinese emigration. But the traffic was prone to ebb and flow. The figures were high in the years 1925-30, 1936-38, and 1946-48, correlating with the security situation in China. China was ex­periencing civil wars during the periods 1924-27 and 1946-49. The years 1936-38 saw the beginnings of Japanese military encroachment on China. Going by official statistics, the figure for the Chinese population in Vietnam in the years just before the French left in 1954 would range from 600,000 to 750,000. Variations of this figure for different years are shown in Table 1, estimated to be 2 per cent of Vietnam’s population.

The distribution of population also shows Chinese preference for urban centres and the southern part of the country. Before 1945, some 90 per cent of the Chinese community were residing in Cochinchina, where they made up 7 per cent of the population. The proportions of Chinese in Tonkin and Annam were minimal, 0.5 per cent and 0.2 per cent, respectively. Table 2 illustrates the urban characteristic of the Chinese population in Vietnam.

In 1952 the Chinese population in Saigon-Cholon constituted about 34 per cent of the total population of the city. Their proportions in Hanoi and Haiphong were 4 per cent and 15 per cent, respectively. Besides these three big cities, the Chinese were also found in sizeable numbers in other cities of the South. As mentioned earlier, the border province of Quang Ning in the North also had concentrations of Chinese, as in Cam Pha, Ti  Yen, Quang Ha, and Mong Cai. With towns where large numbers of Chinese reside, they would also gather in particular quarters or streets. For example, in Sai­gon, they are to be found in districts 5, 6, 10, and 11. District 5 is Cholon, where before 1975, 80 per cent of the residents were Chinese. In Hanoi, they were gathered at the Hang Buom and Ma May quarters.

With the division of the country into two halves in 1954, complete in­tegrated statistics were not available for the whole of Vietnam. The South became the Republic of Vietnam (ROV) while the North was the Demo­cratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and it was not till 1976 that they were united under the name of the Social Republic of Vietnam (SRV). By Tsai Maw Kuey’s data, the Chinese population in the ROV in 1968 reached 1,035,000. The French magazine Le Monde puts it at 1,200,000 in the ROV and 208,000 in the DRV in 1970. Wu Yuan-Li and Wu Chun-Hsi’s figures are 2 million for the South and 175,000 for the North at the collapse of the ROV. According to official figures for 1976, the year of reunification, the Chinese population in Vietnam was 1,236,000, which was about 2.6 per cent of the total population. Summing up these various estimates, it can be concluded that the Chinese population in Vietnam in the middle of the 1970s was around 1,500,000, of which 85 per cent lived in the South. The Chinese community made up 3 per cent of the total population of Vietnam.

The problems of estimating the Chinese population in Vietnam contin­ued after 1975 because of large-scale population movement caused by political changes. When the Saigon regime collapsed in April 1975, some 150,000 people left the country, among whom were high-ranking government and military officials of the old regime as well as Chinese businessmen. Shortly after, beginning in 1978, another exodus of Chinese residents took place, with 230,000 leaving for China and another 220,000 leaving for Southeast Asia by boat. This was the result of the socialist transformation of private capitalist industry and trade in the newly liberated South and tense relations with China. The latter arose because of differences over Cambodia, and Beijing exploited the issue of the Chinese community in Vietnam to complicate matters. From a population of 1,236,000, the ethnic Chinese population shrank to 935,000 on 1 October 1979. By the time of the cen­sus in April 1989, the Chinese population had increased to 961,702 but its proportion of the total population had dropped to 1.5 percent. The distribution of this community across Vietnam is given in Table 3. In some areas, the proportion of ethnic Chinese had dropped very significantly. For example, before 1978, ethnic Chinese residents in Quang Ninh province numbered about 160,000, or 22 per cent, of the provincial population. This was about 60-80 per cent of the total ethnic Chinese population in North Vietnam. In the 1980s, Quang Ninh’s ethnic Chinese population dropped to 5,000, or 0.6 per cent, of the provincial population.

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by | 11 May 2024 · 5:08 am

Chinese Under Vietnamese Dynasties

From The Ethnic Chinese and Economic Development in Vietnam, by Tran Khanh (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 1993), pp. 17-20:

When Vietnam became independent of its Chinese colonial masters in AD 938 and power was consolidated by the Ly dynasty (AD 1009-1225), the issue of the ethnic Chinese as a resident community of foreign nationals and how they are to be treated arose. Thus began a form of assimilation policy. During the reign of the Ly’s and the the subsequent Tran dynasty (AD 1226-1400), the us of ethnic Chinese scholars and officials in leading administra­tive position was advocated. But this applied to only those Chinese who had chosen to settle permanently in Vietnam. Those who retained their migrant status could not even travel without permission from the local authorities.

During the Later Le dynasty (AD 1428-1592) and under the rule of the Trinh lords in the north up till AD 1788, assimilation and surveillance of the Chinese community intensified. The Chinese had to abide by Vietnamese laws, conform with Vietnamese customs and traditions, even to the extent of dressing the Vietnamese way. Chinese immigrants were not free to travel within Dai Viet (Great Viet, the name of the country then), particularly in the vicinity of Thang Long, the country’s capital. The more stringent Vietnamese  attitude towards the Chinese community was because the Le’s reign came as a result of having defeated the occupied force of China’s Ming dynasty. The Chinese army had earlier entered Vietnam on the pretext of helping the then Tran emperor to quell a rebellion. They stayed on for twenty years (AD  1407-1427).

This was how assimilation gradually proceeded over the centuries. However, as mentioned above, new waves of migrants in the later part of the seventeenth century strengthened the identity of the Chinese community. It was not just a question of numbers. A new factor had also emerged to raise the socio-economic status of the Chinese. That was the growing importance of international commerce as more Western powers started to make their appearances in this part of the world in the seventeenth century. To understand the extent of Chinese participation in this important trade, let us look at some of these trading centres.

As mentioned earlier, small Chinatowns started to emerge in almost every main city and in various important economic centres in Vietnam around this time. Examples would include Pho Hien, Hoi An (then known by foreigners as Faifo), Phien Tran (today’s Gia Dinh), Tran Bien (today’s Bien Hoa), Cholon, and Ha Tien. Pho Hien, located in the centre of the Red River plain in the north, came into being in the thirteenth century. Due to the thriving business in the beginning of the seventeenth century, more Chinese, Japanese, and Europeans were attracted to this town. The Dutch East India Company sent a trade representative there in AD 1637. The English East India Company also established an office there in AD 1672. Unlike the European and the Japanese, Chinese merchants not only traded, but also par­ticipated in the production of black incense, alum sugar, sedge mat, Chinese medicinal herbs.

The old town of Hoi An, 26 km north of Danang, was reputedly the most busy trading port of Vietnam from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Its rise was mainly owing to foreign merchants, especially Chinese and Japanese, who controlled the external trade since native Vietnamese were not active in the seafaring business. European traders who called at this port in the seventeenth century related that Hoi An town had two special quarters: one Chinese and other Japanese, with each ruled by a Vietnamese governor.

According to Le Qui Don, a renowned historian of that time,  commerce and handicraft were the two main livelihoods of Hoi An’s Chinese residents. They bought brass utensils transported there by European vessels and resold them in their own quarters. The seven-month long trading season began approximately  with each new year and the natives would bring their prod­ucts here for sale, things such as raw and processed silk, various kinds of wood and spices, and rice. Vessels from China arrived loaded with porcelain, paper, tea, silver bars, arms, sulphur, saltpeter, lead, and lead oxide. According to another source of history, the amount of gold extracted in South Vietnam was mainly for export. Chinese merchants from Hoi An bought over this volume to export. Gold, which was reserved entirely for export, was monopolized by the Chinese merchants of the town. Historic documents stated that by the eighteenth century (AD 1714), Chinese merchants of Hoi An established the Sea Trading Association. This was probably the first in stance of institution-building by the Chinese migrants. There were in AD 1768 nearly 6,000 Chinese, most of whom were engaged in trading.

Chinese-dominated trading centres have their ups and downs, a result of political changes within Vietnam and the Chinese community’s relationship with the ruling powers of the time. This relationship and the status of the community was sometimes a function of state-to-state relations between China and Vietnam. Cholon, which is today still famous as a hub of Chi­nese economic activities, was one such example. It began as a small settlement of villages 5 km. from Saigon, born of the Tay Son rebellion, which began in the early 1760s and ended with its leaders taking over the whole country in AD 1788. In order to escape the ravages of the Tay Son uprising, in AD 1778 a group of Chinese moved from their settlement in Tran Bien (today’s Bien Hoa), northeast of Saigon, to a place that came to be known as Cholon (today’s districts 5 and 6 of Ho Chi Minh City), southwest of Saigon. This land was given to them by Le Van Duyet, the lord of that area and who was opposed to the Tay Son rebels. In AD 1792, during the reign of Tay Son, there was a massacre of the Chinese in Cholon.

There were explanations to account for the Tay Son period, both dur­ing their uprising and when they were in power, this being a difficult time for the ethnic Chinese. The latter were on the wrong side since they were generally supportive of the Nguyen lords, the corrupt ruling order which the Tay Son leaders were seeking to overthrow. The Nguyen lords, and the imperial court at Hue that they controlled, had allowed Chinese migrants into the country and to prosper in their business. This effete regime was also heavily steeped in Confucianism and patterned on the Chinese imperial court, influences which the Tay Son leaders sought to remove. Furthermore, the Tay Son rebellion took its roots from widespread peasant discontent and the Chinese, a distinctive urban elite, were therefore a natural target. Finally, the Nguyen lords called on the assistance of the Qing emperor in China to help fight the rebels, and in AD  1788 an army from China invaded. It was defeated, however, but it must have added to anti-Chinese feelings within the Tay Son movement.

In AD 1802 the Tay Son dynasty was toppled by Nguyen Anh, one of the last Nguyen lords. Nguyen Anh then established the Nguyen dynasty, declared himself Emperor Gia Long, and reverted to a Confucian orthodoxy patterned after the Qing court in China. Chinese business activities flourished under the Nguyens. By the time the French acquired South Vietnam as a colony of Cochinchina in AD 1867, Cholon had 500 tiled houses, two man-made canals, and five bridges under construction, including one of iron. The quay along the Arroyo Chinois was covered with warehouses and shipyards. In the centre of the town was placed a fountain of Chinese design, and the streets were lit by lamps using coconut oil.

The Nguyen rulers used Chinese merchants in the collection of taxes, encouraged them to set up shipyards to build boats and ships, allowed them to buy houses, acquire land, and foorm their own social and economic organizations. Historical records show that in some economic sectors, the Chinese were even more favored than the Vietnamese. They could, for example, build ships of any capacity while the Vietnamese were allowed to build only small ships. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Nguyen court exempted new Chinese immigrants from all taxes in the first three years after their arrival. Such preferential treatment for the Chinese community helped them to expand their economic power. It also encouraged further immigration by the Chinese.

What was the motivation of the Nguyen court for encouraging the Chinese? First, the increasing wealth of the Chinese community served the interest of Vietnam’s ruling class. Officials got financial spinoffs from Chi­nese businesses. The Chinese also brought useful handicraft skills. There were also common strategic interests at that time as Asian countries were starting to experience the encroachment of Western imperial powers. For Vietnam, a bigger and stronger China next door may be useful to fend off Western powers.

Besides commerce, the Chinese in Vietnam were also actively involved in investment and mining. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Chinese operated 124 mines in the North on lease. They recruited their own miners, mostly new arrivals from China. Materials extracted from these mines, such as iron and coal, were generally for export with a small propor­tion reserved as tax payment to the Vietnamese authorities. Despite measures by local authorities to restrict Chinese miners, their numbers rose to 700-800 at times. It was a general tendency then for successful Chinese mine formen to return to China or revert to trading after having reaped huge profits from mining. Even though Chinese mining entrepreneurs paid taxes to the royal court and also reinvested part of their earnings, the overall participation of the Chinese in mining represented a loss rather than a gain of capital for Vietnam. Chinese leasing of mines was subsequently prohibited by law when the French colonized the country.

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by | 9 May 2024 · 6:02 am

Early Chinese Emigration to Vietnam

From The Ethnic Chinese and Economic Development in Vietnam, by Tran Khanh (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 1993), pp. 14-16:

Chinese contacts with the Indochina peninsula began in 1110 BC during the sixth year of the reign of King Cheng, the second ruler of the Zhou dynasty. During the third century BC the first emperor of the Qin dynasty (221-225 BC), Shih Huang Ti conquered the area that is North Vietnam today. Thus began the long period of Chinese colonization and it also resulted in the first massive migration of Chinese into Vietnam. In 214 BC nearly half a million Chinese troops and fugitives were resettled in the north­ern part of Vietnam.

After the crushing of the Vietnamese uprising by the two Trung sisters (popularly referred to in Vietnam as Hai Ba Trung), the Western Han dynasty (140-87 BC), which ruled China at that time sent peasants and soldiers to resettle on land further to the south, where the Chinese prefecture of Giao Chi, Cuu Chan, and Nhat Nam were located. Among these mi­grants were Chinese scholars and government officials.

Throughout the period of Chinese colonization, which spanned ten centuries, Vietnam was to become one of the big receiving countries of Chinese migrants. Historical documents stated that Vietnam, after having regained independence from China in the tenth century AD, returned 87,000 Chinese nationals to China. A large number of other Chinese requested permanent resettlement in Vietnam and were granted permission to do so by the Vietnamese state. A large proportion of this group were registered into the Vietnamese head-tax book and were treated as Vietnamese.

From the tenth century on, when successive wars of aggression were waged against Vietnam by the Song (tenth and eleventh centuries), the Yuan (thirteenth century), the Ming (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), and the Qing (eighteenth century), new waves of Chinese immigration took place. In AD 1279, for example, when the Song dynasty was about to be toppled by the Mongols of the Yuan dynasty, many civilian and military officials of the Chinese court fled to Vietnam with their families, relatives, and dependents. The Vietnamese Tran dynasty (AD 1226-1400) allowed them to settle permanently in Vietnam.

Then there was the Ming occupation (AD 1407-1427) and in the war of liberation against the Chinese court, large numbers of Chinese soldiers were captured and they chose to remain in Vietnam. They were placed under strict supervision, however, and were not allowed to change residence within Vietnamese territory. From that time on, the Dai Viet government (Great Vietnam, then the name of Vietnam) started to enforce an assimilation policy which went as far as making the Chinese adopt the Vietnamese way of dressing.

The next influx came after the Ming dynasty in China was usurped by the Manchus, who set up the Qing dynasty in AD 1644. According to the Dai Nam Chronicle, in AD 1679, about 3,000 Chinese officers, soldiers, and their families landed at Thuan An (today’s Thua Thien province near Hue) in central Vietnam and proceeded to ask the Vietnamese court at Hue for land to farm in return for which they would pay tax. The court was recep­tive and gave them land on what is today known as Dong Nai in newly acquired territory to the south, popularly known in Vietnamese as Nam Ky or Nam Bo.

The Dong Nai plain was then called Dong Pho and historical records show that by the end of the seventeenth century, Chinese merchants and artisans had cleared land and founded villages in this area, currently the districts of Binh Thach, Phu Nhuan, and Bien Hoa on the fringe of Ho Chi Minh City. These were known as Minh Huong villages, a term referring to descendants of Ming loyalists. More Chinese migrants were attracted to these villages by the bustling atmosphere and thriving business climate. They also attracted merchants from Japan, the Arabic countries, India, and even as far as Europe.

Another influx of Chinese refugees came at the end of the seventeenth century and they settled in what was then Cambodian territory in the south­ern tip of present-day Vietnam. Most significant among them were 400 military officers and soldiers led by Mac Cuu (Mo Jiu), who was given suzerainty in AD 1708 over the territory known as Ha Tien, in return for which Mac Cuu had to pay homage to the Vietnamese court at Hue. The Nguyen lords who then controlled the southern half of the country in the name of the Le dynasty appointed Mac Cuu as Lord of Ha Tien despite protests from Cambodia. Mac Cuu’s men settled in both Vietnamese and Cambodian territory. After his death in AD 1735, his son Mac Ti Tri continued to be recognized by the Nguyen lords as Lord of Ha Tien. Mac Tien Tri opened markets as well as encouraged the development of commerce and handicraft. He also founded schools to teach the Chinese language. Ha Tien thus gradually became a commercial port and a centre for the diffusion of Chinese culture into South Vietnam in the eighteenth century.

Thus by the end of the seventeenth century, Chinese settlements con­centrated in Nam Ky (south). Prior to this, Chinese migration was a gradual process and the migrants would tend to assimilate over the years. It was only from this time that there was a critical mass of Chinese migrants which together with steady inflows from China thereafter, hastened the formation of a distinct and relatively permanent Chinese community within Vietnam­ese society. Small Chinatowns sprouted in or close to almost every big city and major trading centre. The settlement patterns of the Chinese were also becoming more complex as the increasing numbers allowed them to con­gregate according to dialect groups or kinship or even the causes which led to their leaving China. Their growing economic sophistication also meant the creation of institutions to regulate business activities and some of these were in turn meshed with traditional Chinese allegiance according to kinship or birthplace. For instance, there existed in Vietnam’s Chinese popula­tion, the bang, which are communities based on dialect groups, clans, and secret societies. There were also respective Chambers of Commerce to regulate business practices.

It would be useful to know the proportion of the Chinese community within the larger Vietnamese population during that time but unfortunately no  definitive statistics are available as no census was ever conducted before the  colonial period. Nevertheless, a number of publications estimated the Chinese population in Vietnam in the first half of the nineteenth century to be in the tens of thousands or less than 100,000. In Tonkin (the French term for the northern part of Vietnam), there was said to be about 20,000-30,000 Chinese, the majority of whom worked in the mines.

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by | 8 May 2024 · 4:50 am

Studies of Chinese in Vietnam

From The Ethnic Chinese and Economic Development in Vietnam, by Tran Khanh (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 1993), pp. 1-7.

Close to twenty years have passed since South Vietnam was liberated in 1975. The economy of a re-unified Vietnam, however, is still poverty-ridden. One of the reasons for this is the lack of effectiveness in the use of private domestic resources. particularly that of the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam. Before 1975, Chinese capital, entrepreneurship, and skilled manpower in South Vietnam played an important role in the development of domestic markets and international trade. After 1975, however, Chinese participation in the Vietnamese economy underwent a decline brought about by the socialist transformation of the South and an exodus of capital. However, the residual economic potential of the Chinese who have remained in Vietnam is still considerable.

Under doi moi, which is the programme of economic and political reforms in Vietnam, there is evidence that the Chinese are once again contributing significantly to the expansion of internal markets and capital accumulation for small-scale industrial development. Accordingly, the role which the Chinese have played in the past and are beginning to play again seems eminently worthy of study.

…

A survey of the literature on the role of the Chinese in Vietnam’ economy indicates that between 1964 and 1975, the Chinese community in South Vietnam flourished and prospered. Furthermore, during this period the Chinese community underwent important changes, both qualitatively and quantitatively: Chinese businesses, for instance, grew and became more diversified as reflected in the growth of Chinese-owned capital and in terms of the occupational structure of the community. After 1975, however, political changes in the South following the fall of Saigon resulted in a change in the fortunes of the ethnic Chinese and the part that they played in the economy of a unified Vietnam.

The situation of the Chinese in Vietnam after 1975 and the economic ups and downs which they faced have been little researched. Nevertheless, the Chinese community has undoubtedly experienced considerable changes as a result of the political and economic changes that have taken place in Vietnam since 1975. There are no readily available Vietnamese documents, reference books, and research papers in libraries or even specific research centres inside and outside the country covering this period in any great detail, although this is, to some extent, now slowly changing with new governmental policies on access to hitherto restricted official sources of information. Where information exists, the data are not always comparable in the post-1975 period, and comparisons with data from the pre-1975 period are even more problematic because of gaps in the data, different methods of data gathering, and so on. Despite such difficulties, a study of the economic position of the Chinese in Vietnam especially after 1975 is much needed, precisely because so little is known about it.

The topic is large and complex, and it would not be possible, in a single study, to deal with all aspects of the Chinese in Vietnam after 1975. Thus, the present study attempts to focus specifically on changing patterns of Chinese involvement in the economy of Vietnam as well as the impact of changes in the overall Vietnamese economy on the Chinese business system in the country. In dealing with this in the post-1975 period, it is necessary, however, to review the situation of the Chinese before 1975 so that the changes experienced by the Chinese in more recent times may be better understood.

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