Hoa people
�人 or ��
NgÆ°á»?i Hoa

Inside of Dinh Minh Huong Gia Thanh (�鄉嘉盛會館/Ming Dynasty Assembly Hall), a temple which was established in 1789 by groups of Chinese residents.
Total population
855,000 0.95% of the Vietnamese population (2011)[1]
Regions with significant populations
Quang Ninhʉۢ Saigonʉۢ Tien Giangʉۢ Bien Hoa
Languages
Vietnameseʉۢ Mandarin Chineseʉۢ Cantonese Teochewʉۢ Hakka
Religion
Mahayana Buddhismʉۢ Taoismʉۢ Confucianism Catholicismʉۢ Protestantism
Related ethnic groups
San Diu â€¢ Ngái Gin â€¢ Southern Chinese Overseas Chinese

Hoa people (Chinese: �人; pinyin: Huárén; Cantonese Yale: Wa Yan; Hán Nôm: ��; quốc ngữ: ngư�i Hoa) refers to a minority living in Vietnam consisting of persons considered to be ethnic Chinese. They are often referred to as either Chinese Vietnamese, Vietnamese Chinese,^[2] Sino-Vietnamese, or ethnic Chinese in/from Vietnam by the Vietnamese populace, Overseas Vietnamese, and other ethnic Chinese. The Vietnamese government's classification of the Hoa excludes two other groups of Chinese-speaking peoples, the San Diu and the Ngai. The Hoa constitute one group of Overseas Chinese and contain one of the largest Overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. As of 2011, the Sino-Vietnamese community numbered approximately 855,000 people corresponding to 0.95% of the Vietnamese population.^[1]

The Hoa were highly overrepresented in Vietnam's business and commerce sector before the Fall of Saigon in 1975. Today they are a well-established middle class ethnic group and make up a high percentage of Vietnam's educated and upper class.^[3][4] Like much of Southeast Asia, Sino Vietnamese are dominant in both the Vietnamese commerce and business sections. They are estimated to control 70 to 80 percent of the Southern Vietnamese economy before the Fall of Saigon in 1975.^[5][6] However now, the Chinese Vietnamese only comprise a small percentage in the modern Vietnamese economy, now mostly Vietnamese-run, as many Hoa had their businesses and property confiscated by the Communists after 1975, and many fled the country as Boat People due to persecution by the new Communist government. The Hoa were persecuted, and some were even forcibly "kicked out" of the country, at a time when Vietnam had serious tensions with China in the late 1970s, and the government feared of the Hoa collaborating with the Chinese communist government as a result of the Sino-Vietnamese War though the remaining Chinese still cornered an estimated 66% of the fledgling private economy, mainly concentrated in Saigon.^[7]

History[link]

Population[link]

The Daoyi Zhilue documents Chinese merchants who went to Cham ports in Champa, married Cham women, to whom they regularly returned to after trading voyages.^[8] A Chinese merchant from Quanzhou, Wang Yuanmao, traded extensively with Champa, and married a Cham princess.^[9] The Chinese living in the Mekong Delta area settled there before any Vietnamese settled in the region.^[10] When the Ming dynasty in China fell, several thousand Chinese refugees fled south and extensively settled on Cham lands and in Cambodia.^[11] Most of these Chinese were young males, and they took Cham women as wives. Their children identified more with Chinese culture. This migration occurred in the 17th and 18th centuries.^[12] 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 Há»™i An.^[13]

In mid-1975, when North and South Vietnam were unified, the combined Hoa communities of the North and South numbered approximately 1.3 million, and all but 200,000 resided in the South, most of them in the Saigon metropolitan area, especially in the Cholon district (Chinatown). Beginning in 1975, the Hoa bore the brunt of socialist transformation in the South. An announcement on March 24 outlawed all wholesale trade and large business activities, which forced around 30,000 businesses to close down overnight,^[14][15] followed up by another that banned all private trade.^[16][17] Further government policies forced former owners to become farmers in the countryside 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.^{[17][18][19][20][21][22]} While such measures were targeted at all bourgeois elements, such measures hurt ethnic Hoa the hardest and resulted in the takeover of Hoa properties in and around major cities.^[23][24] Hoa communities offered widespread resistance and clashes left the streets of Cholon "full of corpses".^[18][25] These measures, combined with external tensions stemming from Vietnam's dispute with Cambodia and China in 1978 and 1979 caused an exodus of as 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.^[26] 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.^[27] 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.^{[28][29][30][31][32]} 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.^{[33][34][35][36][37][38]} This new influx brought the number of refugees in China to around 200,000.^[39]

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 Vietnam-occupied Kampuchea, leading to over 43,000 refugees of mostly Hoa descent fleeing overland to Thailand^[40] 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.^[41] 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.^[42] By 1980, the refugee population in China reached 260,000,^[43] and the number of surviving boat people refugees in Southeast Asia reached 400,000.^[44] (An estimated 50%^[45][46] to 70%^[41] of Vietnamese and Chinese boat people perished at sea.) By the end of 1980, the majority of the Hoa had fled from Vietnam. In addition to ethnic Hoa, an estimated 30,000 ethnic Vietnamese refugees fled to China.^{[citation needed]}

Languages[link]

The intermarriage between the Hoa men and the majority Kinh women ethnic groups is the highest compared to other minorities in Vietnam.^[47] But the Hoa were more likely to intermarry within their own ethnicity, since they "frowned upon inter-marriage with the local Vietnamese".^[48] They are predominantly urban dwellers. A few Hoa live in small settlements in the northern highlands near the Chinese frontier, where they are also known as ngai. In 1955, North Vietnam and China agreed that the Hoa should be integrated gradually into Vietnamese society and should have Vietnamese citizenship conferred on them.

Socioeconomics[link]

Employment[link]

Before 1975 the northern Hoa were mainly rice farmers, fishermen, and coal miners, except for those residing in cities and provincial towns. In the South, the French colonizers had allowed the Cholon Hoa to be the trading middleman.^[49] Subsequently, they became dominant in commerce and manufacturing as well as taking control four-fifths of the rice trade, wholesale and retail trade, banking, and manufacturing.^[50][51][52]

Economics[link]

Before 1975 the northern Hoa were mainly rice farmers, fishermen, and coal miners, except for those residing in cities and provincial towns. In the South they were dominant in commerce and manufacturing. According to an official source, at the end of 1974 the Hoa controlled more than 80 percent of the food, textile, chemical, metallurgy, engineering, and electrical industries, 100 percent of wholesale trade, more than 50 percent of retail trade, and 90 percent of export-import trade. Dominance over the economy enabled the Hoa to "manipulate prices" of rice and other scarce goods.^[53] This particular source further observed that the Hoa community constituted "a state within a state," inasmuch as they had built "a closed world based on blood relations, strict internal discipline, and a network of sects, each with its own chief, to avoid the indigenous administration's direct interference." It was noted by Hanoi in 1983 that as many as 60 percent of "the former bourgeoisie" of the south were of Chinese origin. Small numbers of Hoa have been involved in agriculture. Hoa are more socioeconomically prosperous than the population average, with only 8 percent of the Hoa living in poverty versus 36 percent of the country overall. They also produce a per capita expenditure rate of 5.1 million Viet Dong versus the average rate of 2.7 million nationally. They also tend to have larger households of 5.18 versus the average of 4.71.^[3][4] Hoa per capita income is 233% above the national average where the Chinese monthly per capita income is 1000 Viet dong compared with the national average of 300 Viet Dong.^[54]

Trade and industry[link]

History[link]

Chinese economic dominance in Vietnam dates back even further. Vietnam's recorded history begins in 208 B.C., when a renegade Chinese general conquered Au Lac, a domain in the northern mountains of Vietnam populated by the Viet people, and declared himself emperor of Nam Viet. A century later the powerful Han dynasty incorporated Nam Viet into the Chinese empire, and for the next thousand years Vietnam was ruled as a province of China. During this period of Chinese colonization, and for many centuries afterward, waves of Chinese immigrants- bureaucrats, scholars, and merchants as well as soldiers, fugitives, and prisoners of war-settled in Vietnam. By the end of the seventeenth century a distinct Chinese community, known in Vietnam as the Hoa, had formed within Vietnamese society." The Chinese in Vietnam were notoriously enterprising. Unlike the British, Dutch, and Japanese, the Chinese were not only traders but also manufacturers, of everything from black incense to fine silk. They acted as middlemen between the Europeans and the local Vietnamese. In Hoi An, Vietnam's busiest trading port from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Chinese merchants monopolized Vietnam's gold export business and dominated the local trade in paper, tea, pepper, silver bars, arms, sulphur, lead, and lead oxide. Resentment against Chinese success coupled with repeated attempts by China to conquer Vietnam sparked recurrent anti-Hoa reprisals, including the 1782 massacre of Chinese in Cholon, Saigon's Chinatown. Nevertheless, by the time the French arrived in the mid-eighteenth century, Vietnam's tiny Chinese minority dominated the indigenous Vietnamese majority in virtually every urban market sector as well as in trade and mining."^[55]

As throughout Southeast Asia, the Chinese prospered under colonial laissez-faire policies. Indeed, favorable economic conditions brought a rapid influx of Chinese immigrants, which continued until the middle of the twentieth century. Almost all of these Chinese settled in South Vietnam. By the 1930s the gaps between the large-scale manufacturing, commercial, and financial enterprises of the French were filled by the smaller businesses of the Chinese. The magnitude of the Chinese minority's economic power was astounding. Constituting just one percent of Vietnam's population, the Chinese controlled an estimated 90 percent of non-European private capital in the mid-1950's and dominated Vietnam's retail trade, its financial, manufacturing, and transportation sectors, and all aspects of the country's rice economy. Although there were also numerous wealthy Vietnamese in the commercial class, Chinese economic dominance produced a bitter outcry against "the Chinese stranglehold on Indochina," "the Chinese cyst," and "the Chinese excrescence.^[56][55]

The control and regulation of markets was one of the most sensitive and persistent problems faced by the government following the beginning of North-South integration in 1975. The government, in its doctrinaire efforts to communize the commercial, market-oriented Southern economy, faced several paradoxes. The first was the need both to cultivate and to control commercial activity by ethnic Chinese in the South, especially in Ho Chi Minh City. Chinese businesses controlled much of the commerce in Ho Chi Minh City and the South generally. Following the break with China in 1978, some Vietnamese leaders evidently feared the potential for espionage activities within the Chinese commercial community. On the one hand, Chinese-owned concerns controlled trade in a number of commodities and services, such as pharmaceuticals, fertilizer distribution, grain milling, and foreign-currency exchange, that were supposed to be state monopolies. On the other hand, Chinese merchants 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.^[57]

Predominance[link]

Skyline of Ho Chi Minh City with Bitexco Financial Tower

As they are inclined to be entrepreneurs, Chinese Vietnamese have dominated several types of businesses such as selling rice, crewed junk, rice transportation, and ship building during their early arrival to Vietnam. Through enterprise, organization, and cooperation many Chinese became part of a prosperous, urban middle class that controlled retail trade. Chinese shops filled every town in sea route rice selling and transportation remained one of the most profitable businesses in the nation. In addition, the Hoa became actively involved in commerce, particularly in the area of Saigon, where Chinese worked as vendors and sold an array of products as an industrious enterprising ethnic group. Many would then work as butchers and tailors, and then venture into confectionery. Many Chinese also worked as money lenders, bankers, and money changers. Products such as tea, porcelain, drugs and medicine, and cabinet-work were shipped to Vietnam from China.^[58] Government officials said the ethnic Chinese in Cholon were active in municipal interests and the Vietnamese Communist Party. But their main interest was enterprise. The Chinese feel secure in business as well as their social and cultural life. About 20 percent of 6,000 private companies and 150,000 small individual businesses in the city were run by Chinese. The Chinese accounted for more than 30 percent of the Ho Chi Minh city's business output due to better equipment used by the businesses.^[54]

During the period of French colonial rule, French regulations discouraged Vietnamese but encouraged Chinese participation in commerce, and in 1970 it was estimated that while Chinese Vietnamese made up 5.3 percent of the total population, but controlled 70 to 80 percent of the commerce sector of Vietnam.^[5][59] Chinese businesses controlled much of the commerce in Saigon in South Vietnam. Before the Fall of Saigon, ethnic Chinese controlled 40.9% of the small scale enterprises, 100% of the wholesale trade in South Vietnam, transitioning from smaller-scale retail firms to larger wholesale enterprises.^[60][61] In the South, they controlled more than 90 percent of the non-European capital, 80 percent of the food, textile, chemical, metallurgy, engineering, and electrical industries, 100 percent of the wholesale trade, more than 50% of the retail trade, and 90 percent of the import-export trade. Economic dominance presided accusations from the Vietnamese that the Hoa manipulated prices of rice and other scarce commodities. It was also noted by 1983, more than 60% of Southern Vietnam's bourgeoisie were of Chinese extraction.^[62] They also controlled the entire rice paddy market and obtained up to 80 percent of the bank loans in the south. Hoa also owned 42 of the 60 corporations having a large annual turnover of more than 1 million dong and investments accounted for two-thirds of the total investment in South Vietnam.^[63][61] In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and new economic zones established by the ethnic Vietnamese, the Hoa people became a political target from the rising Communists, and later led to the Sino-Vietnamese War and many fled or were driven out of Vietnam.^[5][64]

At the end of the Vietnam War, ethnic Chinese controlled about 75% of the economic activity in South Vietnam, 100% of the domestic wholesale trade, 80% of the industry, 70% of the foreign trade and presided over half the retail trade.^[65] At the same time 117 of the 670 leading business families were considered ethnic Chinese bourgeois.^[65] Utilizing the Confucian paradigm of personal networks, Hoa have dominated several types of businesses such as finance, food, information technology, chemicals, electronic and electrical equipment, machinery, fabricated metals, wholesale trade, transportation equipment, and services. 100 percent of the domestic foreign trade, 80 percent of the industry, 70 percent of foreign trade, and 50 percent of retail trade was controlled by the Chinese minority after Communist devastation.^[66] Constituting just 1 percent of Vietnam's population, the Chinese controlled an estimated 90 percent of non-European private capital in the mid-1960s and dominated Vietnam's retail trade, its financial, manufacturing, and transportation sectors, and all aspects of the country's rice economy. Although there were also numerous wealthy Vietnamese in the commercial class, Chinese economic dominance produced a bitter outcry against "the Chinese stranglehold on Indochina," "the Chinese cyst," and "the Chinese excrescence."Today in Vietnam, both markets and the Chinese are back. The government's post- 1988 shift to market liberalization, or doi moi ("renovation"), has led to an astounding resurgence of Chinese commercial dominance in the country's urban areas. Vietnam's 3 percent Chinese minority cluster in Ho Chi Minh City (still Saigon to most Vietnamese), where they control roughly 50 percent of that city's market activity and overwhelmingly dominate the light industry, import and export trading, shopping malls, and private banking where once again, resentment among the indigenous Vietnamese is acculumating.^[55]

Immigration[link]

Today, there are many Hoa communities in Australia, Canada, France and the United States, where they have been instrumental in breathing new life into old existing Chinatowns. For example, the established Chinatowns of Los Angeles, Houston, Toronto, Honolulu, and Paris have a Vietnamese atmosphere due to the large presence of Hoa people. Some of these communities also have associations for transplanted Hoa refugees such as the Association des Résidents en France d'origine indochinoise in Paris.

The Chinese Vietnamese population in China now number up to 300,000, and live mostly in 194 refugee settlements mostly in the provinces of Guangdong, Yunnan, Fujian, Hainan, Jiangxi, and Guangxi. Most (85%+) have achieved economic independence, but the remainder still live below the poverty line in rural areas.^[67] While they have most of the same rights as Chinese nationals, including employment, education, housing, property ownership, pensions, and health care, they had not been granted citizenship and continued to be regarded by the government as refugees. Their refugee status allowed them to receive UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) assistance and aid until the early 21st century.^[68] In 2007, the Chinese government began drafting legislation to grant full Chinese citizenship to Indochinese refugees, including the ethnic Hoa which make up the majority, living within its borders.^[69]

There is also a sizable Hoa refugee population – many of whom speak Cantonese – in Hong Kong, but they have experienced discrimination in housing and employment. In the United States, the Hoa have also started businesses in prominent Vietnamese communities called Little Saigon near Los Angeles and San Jose, including those in the states of California, Texas, and Washington. They own a large share of businesses especially catering to the local Vietnamese population and to other Hoas.

See also[link]

	Vietnam portal
	China portal

• China–Vietnam relations

References[link]

External links[link]

• Chinese Affairs Department of Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnamese) (Chinese) (English)