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Inside of Dinh Minh Huong Gia Thanh (明鄉嘉盛會館/Ming Dynasty Assembly Hall), a temple which was established in 1789 by groups of Chinese residents.
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| Total population | ||||||||
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| 862,371 in Vietnam (1999)[1] | ||||||||
| Regions with significant populations | ||||||||
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Predominantly Mahayana Buddhism, Taoism with Confucianism (Ancestor Worship). Small numbers of Catholics and Protestants. |
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| Hoa | |||||||||||||||||||
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| Chinese name | |||||||||||||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 越南華僑 | ||||||||||||||||||
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| Vietnamese name | |||||||||||||||||||
| Vietnamese | người Minh Hương người Hoa người Huê kiều người Khách người Hán, người Tàu (might be offensive)[2] |
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Hoa people (Chinese: 華人; pinyin: Huárén; Cantonese Yale: Wa Yan; Hán Nôm: 𠊛華; quốc ngữ: Người Hoa) refers to a minority in Vietnam consisting of persons considered to be ethnic Chinese. They are often referred to as either Chinese Vietnamese,[3] Vietnamese Chinese,[4] 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 ('mountain Chinese') and the Ngai.
According to the 1999 Vietnamese census, with 862,371 people (1.1% of the population), the Hoa are the 6th largest ethnic group in Vietnam.[1]
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The intermarriage between the Hoa men and the majority Kinh women ethnic groups is the highest compared to other minorities in Vietnam.[5] But the Hoa were more likely to intermarry within their own ethnicity, since they "frowned upon inter-marriage with the local Vietnamese".[6]
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.
This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the Library of Congress Country Studies.
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.[7] Subsequently, they became dominant in commerce and manufacturing.
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 Hội 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 imposing 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.
Today, there are many Hoa communities in Australia, Oceania, 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.[47] 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.[48] 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.[49]
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.
This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the Library of Congress Country Studies.
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