The Politics of Competition and Integration: 

   The Configuration of the Division System and the Ethnoscapes of Overseas 

   and Ethnic Chinese in Vietnam​​

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Author : Shim, Ju Hyung​​​​​​​​

Page : 513-574

Abstract   

  This article is a comparative study on the overseas Chinese and ethnic Chinese policies, which were commonly sensitive political issues to the North and South Vietnamese governments in the process of forming and maintaining the Vietnamese division system (1955-1975), since the Geneva Conference of 1954. The complexities of the Asian Cold War order were materialized in a clear form in the violent and compulsory policies of the political powers attempting ideological contentions as well as founding integrated national citizenship among the population in the process of nation-state building. In particular, Southeast Asia, where the largest overseas and ethnic Chinese population resides with a long history, has developed diverse local and transnational networks of overseas Chinese. The post-colonial situation overlapped with the order of the Cold War configured the division system in Vietnam and forcefully put such networks into the politics of competition and integration between the national and the transnational. In this article, I first reviewed the history-scape of political competition for the nation-state building between the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the Republic of Vietnam. Then, I attempted to comparatively analyze the different policies affecting the lives of overseas and ethnic Chinese under the Vietnamese "division system." In conclusion, this article argues that the politics of competition and integration on overseas and ethnic Chinese population under different ideological and living conditions imposed by North and South Vietnam, had not only gone beyond simple political competitions under the political pressure from the division system of the Cold War order but also reconfigured a structure of unstable living for the Chinese population in Vietnam as the most sensitive subject of its national history and politics.​

 <Key Words>​

Division system in Vietnam, Ethnoscapes of Overseas and Ethnic Chinese, Nation-state Building, Politics of Competition and Integration​