Death Sentence on Cholon

For generations Cholon, the rich, raucous city that exists side by side with Saigon, has been a state within a state. The home of half of South Viet Nam's 1,000,000 Chinese, and long administered by five semiautonomous Chinese "communities," Cholon was both the Wall Street and the Broadway of Viet Nam. At night its jampacked streets offered visitors a heady cocktail compounded of neon lights, savory smells and cabaret music.

Last week Cholon's streets were strangely subdued. Its shops, which once stayed open till the small hours of the morning, now closed at sunset, and in the Pavilion of Jade cabaret the "little flowers" found few dancing partners among the once ebullient Chinese businessmen. Officially, Cholon (which means "big market") had even ceased to exist and was simply one more district of Saigon.

Cause of Cholon's unwonted somberness was a frontal assault by South Viet Nam's President Ngo Dinh Diem on a problem common to all Southeast Asian nations: the threat posed by unassimilated colonies of overseas Chinese. In South Viet Nam, where they make up only one-tenth of the population, Chinese control nearly two-thirds of the economy. Though many come from families that have been in the country for centuries, almost none have taken out Vietnamese citizenship.

Last summer, worried by the possibility that Viet Nam's Chinese might one day shift their loyalty from Chiang to Mao--as Cambodia's Chinese colony apparently did recently--Diem swore that "Before I die, I will Vietnamize Cholon." He issued a series of decrees declaring all Viet Nam-born Chinese to be Vietnamese citizens and prohibiting foreigners, i.e., Chinese, from engaging in eleven vital trades, from rice milling to brokerage.

Encouraged by the Nationalist Chinese legation, Viet Nam's race-proud Chinese almost to a man ignored the naturalization order and launched a campaign of economic retaliation. Rice exports, one of South Viet Nam's chief sources of foreign exchange, dwindled to nothing, and to the dismay of Viet Nam's farmers, the domestic price of rice fell to its lowest level in years. Large-scale shipments of Chinese capital to Hong Kong sent the price of gold and black-market dollars soaring in Viet Nam. But stubborn Ngo Dinh Diem had no intention of backing down.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.