World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [17]
21
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.
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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 1 percent of Vietnam’s population, the Chinese controlled an estimated 90 percent of non-European private capital in the mid-1950s 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.”
During the Vietnam War (which the Vietnamese call the American War), the wealth of the Chinese in South Vietnam, particularly Saigon, intensified. Vietnamese Chinese pounced on the lucrative business opportunities that came with the arrival of American troops, who needed a trade and services network. At the same time the South Vietnamese government deregulated the economy, adopting relatively liberal market practices. Local Chinese businessmen aggressively seized these opportunities as well, extending their dominance to include light industry.
Following the country’s reunification in 1976, the revolutionary Vietnamese government singled out the entrepreneurial Chinese of the south as “bourgeois” and perpetrators of “world capitalism,” arresting and brutalizing thousands and confiscating their property along with that of their Vietnamese counterparts. “Employing the techniques Hitler used to inflame hatred against the Jews,” reported U.S. News & World Report’s Ray Wallace in 1979, “Hanoi is blaming day-to-day problems in Vietnam on resented Chinese control of commerce and the Mekong Delta.”
23 As Vietnam was transformed into a socialist economy, thousands of Chinese either died laboring in Vietnam’s “new economic zones” or fled the country.
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