500,000 Uncles

Like every other chief of state in Southeast Asia. South Viet Nam's President Ngo Dinh Diem was disturbed by the disproportionate economic influence wielded by his country's closely knit 1,000,000 "overseas Chinese."* In South Viet Nam 75% of the country's rice and corn trade is Chinese-controlled, and Chinese entrepreneurs dominate much of the nation's export-import trade, banking and shopkeeping. President Diem felt that Chinese who lived and worked in South Viet Nam should become Vietnamese citizens. The Chinese, respectable, law-abiding, but ever prideful of their heritage, disagreed.

Eight months ago Diem issued executive decrees disbarring Chinese and other foreigners from eleven lines of business, proclaimed 500,000 Viet Nam-born Chinese males (known as "uncles") forthwith Vietnamized, and commanded them to take new names. South Viet Nam's Chinese, one of Southeast Asia's most outspokenly anti-Communist communities, reacted promptly. Some Chinese businessmen simply took in a Vietnamese partner as a cover, stayed right on in business. But many others, partly from pride, partly because they thought Diem was bluffing, decided to hold out.

Diem was not bluffing. He turned over the job of Vietnamizing the Chinese to steely Vice President Nguyen Ngoc Tho. To both Diem and the Vice President the problem was simple and urgent. "There is no time for diplomacy or protocol.'' said one high official last week. "We are in a great hurry. The President himself demanded that the Chinese be Vietnamized 'before I die.' "

In Saigon last week, protesting what they called inadequate support from Nationalist China, several hundred unhappy Chinese rioted, wrecked the Chinese legation, screamed denunciations at Chinese Minister Yuen Tse-kien. In Formosa's capital of Taipeh, Nationalist Foreign Minister George Yeh worried whether the Vietnamese demonstration was only the beginning: "We Chinese are being looked on as the Jews of Asia."

Vice President Nguyen Ngoc Tho insisted: "This is an internal affair." Saigon's lively, neon-lighted Chinese city of Cholon was plunged into deep gloom. Grocers closed their doors, sat in front of their shops reading newspapers. Depressed by the slump in business, the queen of Cholon's call girls took an overdose of sleeping pills as the shortest route to the shades of her ancestors, was escorted to her grave in a red teak coffin by a weeping procession of old customers.

The scuffling by resentful overseas Chinese was the first outbreak of violence in Saigon in months, and it was no real threat to the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. Less than three years ago the august Times of London, among other respectable voices, was proclaiming that "Diem has failed as Prime Minister." (The U.S. State Department was resolutely backing him.) Since then, Diem has reorganized his army, defeated and routed the French-supplied guerrilla sects that waged open war on his government and seen a freely elected National Assembly installed in Saigon. Diem's success has also attracted such neutralist-minded Asian leaders as Burma's U Nu. This week Diem will arrive in Washington to call on President Eisenhower in his first U.S. visit since the two years (1951-53) he spent here in self-imposed exile from the French at the Maryknoll Junior Seminary in Lakewood, N.J.

*There are over 14 million "overseas Chinese" outside Red China and Formosa. They make up 75% of the population of Singapore, 99% of Hong Kong, 20% of Thailand.

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