Peasants On The Move: Rural Urban Migration In The Hanoi Region

88 Pages·1996·26.731 MB·English

by  Li Tana

Occasional Paper No. 91
Peasants on the Move
Migration
Rura~rban
in the Hanoi Region
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This is done by resident and visiting fellows of various nationalitie . To under
stand the Vietnamese perspective better. the programme invites scholars from
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Peasants on the Move
Rural-Urban Migration
in the Hanoi Region
Li Tana
INDOCHINA PROGRAMME
INSTITUTE OF SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES
Cataloguing In Publication Data
Li Tana.
Peasants on the move : rural-urban migration in the Hanoi region.
(Occasional paper/Institute of Southeast Asian Studies: no. 91)
I. Rural-urban migration - Vietnam - Hanoi.
2. Migrant labor - Vietnam - Hanoi - Economic conditions.
3. Migrant labor- Vietnam - Hanoi - Social conditions.
4. Urbanization - Vietnam - Hanoi.
I. Title.
II. Series
DS50 I 159 no. 89 1996 sis 95-82335
ISBN 981-3055-07-3
ISSN 0073-9731
Published by
Institute of Southeast A ian Srudies
Heng Mui Keng Terrace
Pasir Panjang
Singapore 119596
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sion of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
1.0 1996 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies
The responsibility for facts and opinions expressed in this publicaJion rests
exclusively with the author and her interpretations do not necessarily reflect
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Printed in Singapore by Stamford Press Pte Ltd
Contents
[ntroduction
II The Background 3
m Hanoi City 15
IV Socio-Economic Characteristics of the Migrants 18
v A Migrant's Lot 41
Vl Government Policy and Solutions 59
Appendix 68
References 76

Acknowledgements
Through the endless streets of Hanoi, the weary peasant trudges ... He is
tired but has to uep wandering. from one street to another, and sometimes
returns to the same place without knowing it ...
Arriving at a junction, he sees a crowd, the majority of whom were also
weary peasants. like himself ...
Vu Trong Phung, Com thay com co (Kindness of Strangers), 1936
This study was made possible by funding from the Konrad Adenauer
Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation.
The author thanks Prof. Nguyen Van Thieu, Nguyen Van Dai and other
friends at the Centre for Population and Human Resources Studies whom I
co-operated with, and Prof. Pham Do Nhat Tan, Director of the Centre for
Scientific Information on Labour and Social Affairs of Vietnam's Ministry
of Labour and Invalids, for the suppon and generous help. I owe a debt of
gratitude to Professors Le Dang Doanh, Dao The Tuan, Bui Huy Khoat, and
Diep Dinh Hoa. I also wish to thank Phi Van Ba, Prof. Tuong Lai, Pham
Bich San, and Nguyen Thi Van Anh of the Institute of Sociology, National
Centre of Social Sciences in Vietnam, for their professional advice on the
questionnaires and help on relevant information. Prof. Pham Due Duong,
Nguyen Van Cu, Quach Nghiem, Chu Viet Cuong, Tran Khanh, Duong Thi
Back Kim, Do Tbinh also helped.
To Russell Heng, who spent many hours discussing and editing the
manuscript, I remain deeply in debt. I would like to thank the Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, for providing me with a Research
Fellowship that made this work possible.
I am grateful to Twang Peckyang, Dean Forbes, Peter Xenos, Diana
Wong, Stephanie Fahey, David Marr, Benedict Kerkvliet, Michael
DiGregorio, Adam McCarty, Momoki Shiro, and Mya Than, for their
encouragement and valuable help.
To those Vietnamese peasants who sought their livelihood and fonune
in Hanoi, and who spent their valuable time talking to me and our team
mem~rs, under the sun and in the dim light of evening during the hot and
humid summer of 1993, I am deeply grateful.

I Introduction
A consistent characteristic throughout Vietnamese history is the
government's influence on population movement. In traditional Vietnam,
prisoners, soldiers and recruited poor peasants were sent to the southern
frontier, decade after decade, from the tenth century AD. The French perhaps
made more effort to recruit labourers for their mines and plantations. None
of them, however, was as effective as the policy of compelling people to
move to the New Economic Zones. carried out by the current regime.
Between 1960 and 1992, it was reported that 5.3 million people moved to
the New Economic Zones.'
In the past 40 years, another important feature of Vietnamese population
movement was that migration in northern Vietnam were predominantly
organized movements to the rural frontiers. and hence the current pattern of
reverse traffic from the rural parts to urban centres like Hanoi is a rather
recent phenomenon. Although labour was sold widely as a commodity in the
French colonial period just as in traditional Vietnamese society, after 40
years of Marxist government in the North, when thousands of peasants
reappeared on the streets of Hanoi in the early 1990s looking for unskilled
jobs, it was regarded as "a completely new phenomenon"2 to officials and
Hanoians. Indeed, virtually no historical record exists in any government
department files about those people. These movements are also absent from
contemporary statistics: census results allow an estimate of the volume and
direction of the permanent migrations organized by the state but are not
useful for separating those who are permanently settled and those who are
periodicaJly on the move; this mobile population cannot be estimated even
indirectly via the national census of 1989, such as through the "place of
previous residence five years ago" question, because the phenomenon itself
became of some significance only in the last two to three years. What makes
a large population flowing back and forth, come and go? How do they live?
What do they think? All these are basically unknown to the public, as well as
to scholars.
1
2 PEASANTS ON THE MOVE
Although it encompasses only a little over 5 per cent of Vietnam's total
natural area, population in the Red River delta is 21 per cent of the country's
total.3 There is no doubt th~t this region is "subject to population pressure
and is reaching the limit of its capacity", as Vietnamese authorities admitted.4
Increasing unemployment is one of the major challenges to the state. This
makes a study on rural to urban migration, in Vietnam in general and on
Hanoi in particular, timely.
This study is mainly based on a survey and on interviews with the
unskilled workers, the principal participants of the spontaneous migration
from the rural areas to Hanoi, and were conducted by the author and the
Centre for Population and Human Resources Studies of Vietnam's Ministry
of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs between August and September 1993.
Through this survey, the study seeks to estimate the main trends, directions
and patterns of the population movement in the Red River delta. It will
examine the basic institutional changes in the countryside since Vietnam's
formally endorsed market reforms, known as doi moi, began in 1986; and
the new changes such as the improved transportation system and lodging
houses for migrants, all of which are relevant to labour force movement.
Within this context, the study will analyse Vietnamese Government policy
on voluntary migration, and its possible consequences.
Notes
l. Pham Do Nhat Tan, "Migration for New Economic Zone Building: Achieve
ments, Problems and Solutions", Scientific Bulletin on Labour and Social
Affairs, Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs, no. 2 ( 1993), p. 5.
2. In Vietnamese "coi nhu hoan toan moi me", see Pham Kien Cuong. "Van de
lao dong doi du tap trung ra thanh pho kiem viec lam voi cong tac dang Icy
quan ly ho khau: thuc trang va giai phap" (Redundant rural workforce
moving to cities for jobs and residence registration: Situation and solution),
in Symposium on Social Policies and Residence, Travel and Traffic Safety in
Market Mechanism (Hanoi: Ministry of Interior, 1993), p. 60.
3. Its population density is higher than that of the Pearl River delta in southern
China, most parts of Java, and of Bangladesh, a country which is frequently
referred as the most crowded country in Asia, according to some statistics.
See Le Trong Cue, Kathleen Gillogly, and A. Terry Rambo, "Too Many
People, Too Little Land: The Human Ecology of A Wet Rice-Growing
Village in the Red River Delta of Vietnam", Program on Environment, East
West Center/Center for National Resources Management and Environmental
Studies, Hanoi University, 1993, p. l.
4. Report on the Economy of Vietnam (Hanoi: Vietnam State Planning Com
mittee, 1990), p. 80.