On Ethnic Relations and Integration: Vietnamese Perspectives on the Ethnic Chinese in Colonial Sài Gòn (1900–1940)

Abstract

Historians studying Vietnamese intellectual and political history have evaluated the negative perspectives that the Vietnamese educated class expressed in political journalism, especially newspapers, as an expression of nationalism and anti-foreign sentiments. This hostile attitude from the Vietnamese community was correlated with the fact that the Chinese during this time were relatively segregated from the larger community with their own social and political system of governance. However, a deeper study of Vietnamese newspapers would show how their narratives were ambivalently mixed among antagonism, admiration, and even sympathy. Other literary sources such as popular literature also presented more moderate voices that took into consideration the contributions of the ethnic Chinese as a long-established immigrant-settler community in the southern region. This plurality of perspectives, as represented in Vietnamese newspapers and popular literature published in the first four decades of the twentieth centuries, demonstrated how the relationship between the two ethnic groups were influenced not just by colonial policy and ethnic nationalism but also individual economic or political motives. This paper examines the portrayals of ethnic Chinese people in selected sources of Vietnamese newspapers and popular literature written in the colonial period. Most of the publications were written in the new romanized Vietnamese script (chữ Quốc ngữ) and were published from the 1900s to 1940s. First, I will explain the historical background of Chinese migration and settlement in southern Vietnam and the context of Vietnamese intellectual and political history in the early twentieth century. Second, I examine the ambivalent anti-Chinese stance demonstrated in certain early twentieth century newspapers, including Quốc dân diễn đàn, Lục tỉnh tân văn, Đông Pháp thờibáo, and Thần chung. I will focus on how the political goals and affiliations of these newspapers impacted their views toward the Chinese and prove that they did not necessarily reflect hostile relations between the two communities.