In search of the history of the Chinese in South Vietnam, 1945-75

Year 2008 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the peak of ‘Boat People’ exodus, a movement started at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. This war resulted in some three million people leaving their homes in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. While much attention has been given to the boat people over the last three decades, little has been done on the society they left behind. Even less has been done on the overseas Chinese, who, as a group were made scapegoats for Hanoi’s inability to achieve socialism in the south, and who formed a large part of the boat people in the late 1970s.