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Salient. Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 42 No. 5. March 26 1979

Vietnamese Witch-Hunt

Vietnamese Witch-Hunt

The main thing which caused the turnaround in Sino-Vietnamese relations, however was the treatment of Chinese nationals by the Vietnamese. Since early 1978, the Vietnamese leadership has initiated a cruel witch-hunt against people of Chinese background resident in Vietnam.

There are roughly 1.8 million Chinese in Vietnam and they come from three main groups. The first is Chinese living near the border area. With the increasing number of Vietnamese troops in the area and the attacks made on the Chinese border, these groups have come under special provocation Seeing them as some kind of "fifth column" for China, the Vietnamese have conducted deliberate expulsions of those people.

Second are the Chinese living in North Vietnam. Of the estimated 200,000 Chinese expelled or forced to leave Vietnam, 95% have come from the North, primarily from the industrial cities of Hanoi and Haiphong. The majority of these were workers, although Chinese serving in prominent state and army post have been dismissed from their positions. A top ranking general in the Vietnamese army was treated in this way.

The prime justification of the Vietnamese for the expulsions has been that most of the Chinese occupied jobs as traders, merchants and other small capitalists. They say that in the process of "socialist transformation" such occupational groups are bound to be dislocated. If you look at the facts though, this simply does not wash. North Vietnam has already undergone its main period of socialist transformation - The socialist government took power in 1954.

Photo of people in the bush with guns

The third group of Chinese is that in South Vietnam, mainly living in Ho Chi Minh City. 90% of the total Chinese population come from the South. Hoang Tring, member of the Central Committee of the Vietnamese Communist Party let the cat out of the bag at the press conference in Japan when referring to Chinese residents in the South, he revealed that "the number of working people makes up the overwhelming majority, about 100 times that of the capitalists".