| This paper examines how French colonial bureaucratic practices and ethnography marginalized the Chinese within Vietnamese society. What it meant to be Chinese was proportional to French ideology regarding race, and modeled after administrative practices of colonial rule. Bureaucratic practices that sought to identify, legislate, and recruit colonial subjects determined what it meant to be Chinese in Vietnam within various stages of colonial rule. It is a socio-cultural history of the Chinese that focus on the construction of ideas and concepts centered around the discourse on becoming Chinese as rendered through colonial bureaucratic practices pertaining to legal categorization and identification, expulsions, and labor recruitment. This discourse served as a forum upon which ideas and conceptions of characteristics and differences were debated and made real, and demonstrates the development of not only what it meant to be Chinese, but also why and how such a question emerged and influenced socioeconomic and political policies that affected assimilation and socio-cultural relations. Chinese identity is examined not through economic or political methodologies, but rather through alternative modes of articulation---through ethnographic inquiry, legal debate surrounding expulsion, taxation, labor recruitment, identification, etc.---to assess the historical socio-cultural development of how the Chinese in Vietnam came to become Chinese. |
