Seminar Series: Abstract

“State within a state”? In search of Chinese histories in South Vietnam, 1945-1975
Li Tana - PAH

Although there are hundreds of books on the Vietnam War, it is hard to find even one article that deals with the issue of the Chinese in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War period. The literatures on the boat people and on the Sino-Viet conflict of 1979 touch briefly on the issues of ethnic Chinese, but even then, only in the context of Sino-Vietnamese relations and entirely within the framework of the 1970s and 1980s' international politics rather than considering the issue of economic nationalism. This approach has been misleading, since it continues to view Chinese capital as foreign, ignoring the fact that the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam had been Vietnamese citizens since the late 1950s, and that their capital and enterprises were domestically Vietnamese, and did not belong to China

This paper looks into the intellectual climate in the 1980s and the 1990s and aims to fill a gap in knowledge and understanding of modern Vietnam and its southern society. It will focus on the crucial transitional period of the ethnic Chinese, particularly on the elites and the major business groups in post-colonial South Vietnam between 1945 and 1975