Peking, Hanoi, and the Ethnic Chinese of Vietnam

One of the greatest human tragedies the world has witnessed since the Nazi persecution of the Jews during the 1930s and 1940s has been the massive exodus of ethnic Chinese from Vietnam, which began in 1977 and peaked in 1978. By the end of 1980, at least half a million Chinese refugees had made their way to neighboring countries and probably as many perished in their journey into the unknown. For three years, the issue of the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam was the subject of a heated and drawn-out dispute between Peking and Hanoi, and greatly contributed to the deterioration of relations between the two countries. Although the entire Chinese community in Vietnam has now been all but completely wiped out, the aftereffects of the mass exodus are still being felt and its political implications gauged throughout Southeast Asia, a region with the largest concentration of ethnic Chinese in the world outside of mainland China itself. Although not to be separated from the broader geopolitical conflict between Peking and Hanoi, the Sino-Vietnamese controversy over the ethnic Chinese had distinct origins and its own momentum. It reflected the complex and lasting nature of an old problem, and in terms of consequences also pointed to a remarkable continuity between the two eras separated by 1975.1 By and large, the conflict was rooted in the fact that the South Vietnamese government never had a real opportunity to absorb the Chinese in Vietnam due to the pro

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