NEGOTIATING THE STATE IN VIETNAM || Rules and Resources: Negotiating the Household Registration...

Rules and Resources: Negotiating the Household Registration System in Vietnam underReformAuthor(s): Andrew HARDYSource: Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, Vol. 16, No. 2, NEGOTIATING THESTATE IN VIETNAM (October 2001), pp. 187-212Published by: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41057062 .

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SOJOURN Vol. 16, No. 2 (2001), pp. 187-212

Rules and Resources: Negotiating the Household Registration

System in Vietnam under Reform

Andrew HARDY

Under Vietnam's subsidy system that lasted until the late 1980s, the state made many decisions about people's lives. Among these rules were those on household registration (ho khau), which closely regulated people's movement. The doi moi reforms dismantled the state's hold on employment, but the ho khau system - administered by the police - remained an important tool of control over the population. It is used for the purposes of identification, eligibility for state employment, and police work, as well as to restrict migration into the cities. This article argues that the limited room for manoeuvre around the household registration system before reform has greatly expanded since the 1980s. The resources that ordinary people drew upon to negotiate the state's attempts to control their place of residence have also undergone a transformation. While contacts were always necessary for any negotiation with officialdom before doi moi, these have become increasingly commercialized. The need for their use, however, has diminished as people find it convenient in many circumstances to ignore the rules.

In Vietnam everyone has to be recorded as belonging to a household (ho). The name of every household member (khau) has to be entered, at declaration of birth, in a booklet, registered at a particular place. The administration of the rules governing household registration (ho khau) has had wide-ranging consequences for Vietnamese citizens. Instituted in the 1950s, the rules in question governed where Vietnamese people live. These rules presented many restrictions on freedom. The purpose of this article is to explore these rules and the ways they were negotiated both before and since the doi moi (renovation) market reforms.

In pre-reform Vietnam, it was possible to negotiate the rules. Peo- ple simply had to decide what they were prepared to give up or, rather,



188 Andrew HARDY

what resources they could draw on. As the doi moi reforms progressed, this principle remained the same. Along with the rules, however, the resources required for negotiation underwent a certain "renovation". This is the nature of rules. They are "made to be broken", they become sig- nificant only when they are broken and are transformed in the break-

ing. With reference to the rules on household registration, this article asks what have changed and what remain the same in Vietnam under reform? Who made the changes? And how did these changes affect the rules?

The Rules on Household Registration

Registration of households was not new in Vietnam in the 1950s. One

elderly villager explained the ho khau system to me as the modern

equivalent of the French colonial regime, whereby a tax card was needed for travel and a village-issued transfer of residence paper for a permanent move.1 The colonial administration used the personalized tax-and-

identity (ID) cards to identify individual males.2 Colonial authorities'

knowledge of the population was itself built on an older system of tax-

payer registration. The French system was the result of reforms to the

pre-colonial regime whereby the state did not know its taxpayers, only their numbers in each village. Knowledge of individual adult males

owing tax and labour {suatdinh) was left to local village authorities. Un- der this ancient system, unregistered members of the population were restricted in their access to communal land and other services. Migrants arriving in a community were recorded as "guest sojourners" (khach ho) and "long-term sojourners" {thuoc ho) during the first and second gen- erations of their residence there, before service provision could be ap- proved in the third generation with inscription on the tax roll. Similar

categories of "outsiders" (ngoai tich) and "insiders" {noi tich) were also used. These were the rules. The manner of their implementation de-

pended on the initiatives of local officials.3 After 1945, identification was implemented in patches during the

chaos of war, and effective regulations only emerged after independence. Under the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), village-issued transfer papers persisted from previous decades, but the most important



Negotiating the Household Registration System in Vietnam under Reform 189

legislation governing population residence - the ho khau system - was an innovation. Imported from China - where it is known as the hu kou - it provided the state with a far superior administrative tool than had previously existed. The new government of the northern half of the country aimed to know the entire population, men, women, and children, and would use this knowledge to great effect over subsequent decades. With the establishment of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) after reunification in 1975, the system was extended to the South.

Household registration was developed in the People's Republic of China during the 1950s and it received definitive legislation in the Population and Household Registration Regulation of 1958 (Yu 1978, p. 431). In Vietnam, it was introduced gradually too. Before 1953, in Viet Minh zones, an identity system was managed by commune Peo- ple's Committees and by the police thereafter. Household registration was formally implemented in urban areas in 1955, and extended throughout the countryside in I960.4 As in China, a key initial aim of the registration system was to restrict the activities of "counter revolu- tionaries and criminals".5 After independence, opposition to the newly formed government in the North was a major concern and this was closely linked to the mobility of the population, as a million northerners had then chosen to move to the South. In this situation of partition and suspended war, fears of sabotage were rife. Household registration served, as it was originally intended, as a powerful technology of surveillance for internal security.

This became acutely evident to me when, in the archives, I came across a 1956 letter from Hanoi's Labour Department. The letter grouped people into three categories: people available for work were identified as "mechanics", people not recommended for employment, and people identified as "problematic". The latter two categories included former members of the Nationalist and Dai Viet parties, children of landlords, someone with a "hesitating attitude", someone described as a "right arm of the clergy", an "anti-communist youth", a "hooligan", a man "whose father was living in France and who himself was often away from home without a reason", as well as someone holding a suspect ho khau!" Information on the suspect ho khau, which may



190 Andrew HARDY

well have been forged, and other personal details was almost certainly drawn from another form of record - the ly lieh. Compiled secretly by the Ministry of Interior, the ly lieh constituted a record not only of

people's political activities, but also of their family backgrounds. The

ly lieh was thus a register of people associated by their own decisions, or by those of their relatives, with past or present activities deemed a threat to the country's social, economic, and above all political devel-

opment. Children of landlords and collaborators with the French, as well as members of banned political parties and relatives of migrants to the South, were noted down as "problematic" elements. A problematic ly lieh meant a denial of state employment, education, and a host of other services necessary for survival in the socialist economy. It could also lead to difficulties in household registration.

There were two distinct types of registration: ho tich and ho khau. The ho tich - a statistical record of births, marriages, and deaths - was the basic system of identification. The ho khau was linked to this, but it was more detailed in that it noted people's names, place and date of birth, ethnicity, religion, profession, and membership of a household. Households were classified into two types: family and collective. Fami- lies in urban areas kept their own registration booklets. In the countryside, village authorities kept records on their behalf, although nowadays families hold their own booklets. Collective "households" like factories, hospitals, state farms, and forestry enterprises maintained a single booklet for all their members. The ho khau was distinct from the ho tich in that it also recorded people's movements. It noted each person's place of normal residence along with all movements into and away from the administrative area responsible. There were, and still remain, rubrics for

recording the date of each migration and the point of departure or destination.7 The management of household registration by the police en- sured that it was always closely linked to information held on the ly lieh

political record.

Purpose of the Rules

I asked an officer at the police station in the Hai Ba Trung district of central Hanoi what the rules were intended to accomplish. He explained




that their main purpose today remains identification for the control of people y the implementation of the law with regard to the country's citizens? But with any identification system, we must ask how people were identified, and what the information was actually used for.

Identity was based on knowledge of people's belonging to two places: their places of birth and residence. As the policeman pointed out, in the 1990s, the system existed for the purpose of national security, allowing the police to work out who people were, for law and order purposes. In the past, however, he said it was linked to many other issues. This had been true for pre-colonial and colonial systems, when identification was used to levy taxation, corvee labour, and military conscripts. Under the DRV too, the ho khau technology was put to all sorts of uses. Certainly, security was important, as evidenced by the link to the ly lieh. But household registration became tied to two other types of policies. One provided the government with socio-economic knowledge about the population, while the other used this knowledge to regulate people's access to goods and services.

Knowledge of the population was used for regional economic planning, and for the redistribution of the population in accordance with the plan. It was used for local population planning, for the administration of social services, and up to the 1980s, for the distribution of com- modities under the command economy. Under this system, only those people recognized by the state, through the ho khau, as resident in a locality had access to services delivered to that locality. If provision of so many tons of rice to a district was calculated according to the numbers of people registered in the district, evidently only those registered as residents there could claim the rice. The same went for access to land and housing, education, health, and employment.9

The ho khau, moreover, was not simply an instrument of linkage between macro and micro sections of the economy. It was a linkage by means of identification. And the identification aspect of the ho khau also had its own consequences. Births, marriages, migrations, and deaths all required registration. This implied that someone whose birth was not declared would not be able to claim rights to services such as education and health (school and hospital places were not planned for), and the



192 Andrew HARDY

declaration of their marriage (the union's registration is conditional on

presentation of identification). Even when one died, the ho khau was still of importance. Unregistered residents were not entitled to commune land for burial.10

Before doi moi, the link between identification and access to rights and services was all embracing. As Le Bach Duong explained:

Almost all the civil rights of an individual can be guaranteed only with the presence of ho khau. Other benefits and rights including rations for food and almost all necessary consumer items, ranging from cook- ing oil to the "rights" to be on the waiting list for purchasing a bicy- cle or government house assignments, even summer vacation, all were bound to and determined by his specific position under the administration of a specific employer within the state sectors (in the countryside, people were also in the similar situation as their work and benefits were tied to the agricultural, fishing, or handicraft coopera- tives) (Le Bach Duong 1998, p. 131).

To live without a ho khau was to live without the rights granted to Vietnamese citizens under the law. And the ho khau, as we have seen, was intimately tied to place of residence. Rights were granted in the place of registered residence, and in that place alone.

The place of residence could change, and the ho khau could follow.

Complex procedures existed for the implementation of the transfer. Manuals may still be found in the bookshops of Vietnam's cities and towns, to help people find their way through the labyrinth.11 Accord-

ing to one of these manuals, a 1964 law required aspiring migrants to obtain a "moving certificate" (giay chung nhan chuyen dì) from the place they wished to leave. The police authority competent to issue this certificate varied according to destination. Movements within the same province were authorized by the commune, to another province by the district, to border or urban areas by the province.12 In practice, despite regular changes in the legislative details, the system has always aimed at

channelling migration in two directions, to rural areas and to the up- lands. Household registration was thus used as a tool of Vietnams socialist vision of regional planning. This involved the restriction of urban growth, deemed detrimental to economic progress, and the development of upland areas, carried out by migrants from the plains




to state farms, forestry enterprises and agricultural co-operatives known as new economic zones.13 The practical result of these policies was that country folk found it hard to obtain permission to live in cities, but city people moved easily to the countryside. Upland folk found it hard to move to the plains, but delta dwellers moved easily to the hills.

Negotiating the Rules before Reform

Before doi moi, this system was implemented at many levels. The first was at administrative boundaries, where police and customs checkpoints verified travellers' papers. The second was at destination, where new- comers had to report to the local police. If they failed to do so, their presence there would soon be announced by someone else. Those without letters of introduction, travel documents and convincing reasons for the trip could be turned back or arrested.14 Hitchcox describes the necessary steps travellers had taken in order to legalize a trip:

The procedure for travelling or visiting any other place in Vietnam first involved going to the employer for permission. If she/he agreed, a paper was provided that had then to be confirmed by the local police and stamped. On arrival at the destination the paper had again to be stamped by local police and once more at the end of the visit. On return, the paper was shown to the employer who returned it to the local police for a final stamp. (1994, p. 207)

These procedures presented a major obstacle to many prospective boat people13 in the late 1970s. Boat people departures were officially illegal for much of their twenty-year history, but different branches of the Vietnamese state, and notably local security services, were at this time involved in their promotion for profit. Passage out of the country might thus be arranged with the help of the authorities of one province, but other provinces had to be crossed to get there. Aspiring refugees were regularly apprehended and subject to theft and threats for trying to leave the country, and had to await intervention from their official backer. Such regulations hindered internal migration at a time when (illegal) international migration was actually organized by certain state officials.16

The third and fourth methods of implementation proved by far the most effective. These were the use of the ho khau as a system of identi-



194 Andrew HARDY

fication, as described above, and, by extension, its use for controlling access to rights and services. While this link existed, the ho khau constituted a most effective technology of population control. How did the link work?

The introduction of the state system of supply and the prohibition of free market trading took place gradually during the late 1950s. Ac- cess to coupons for subsidized purchase became conditional on ho khau

possession.17 By 1960, with collectivization largely completed, access to

employment in the countryside - and to the work points which were the rural equivalent of the urban coupons - was limited to members of the co-operatives. I spent a long afternoon with a policeman in the commune of Dong Xa (Dong Hung district, Thai Binh province), in the heart of the Red River Delta, discussing the impact of these rules on life in the countryside.18 He informed me that without a ho khau, the

village authorities were not obliged to look after you. In those days, people without household registration were not allowed to work at the co- operative. Without work at the co-operative, they could not be paid in work points. Without work points, they could not obtain food. If you queued up but had no ration booklet, you couldn't buy. Whatever you wanted to buy, you had to have tickets and stamps. If you settled in a place without arranging your ho khau, the policeman concluded, you couldn 't work on the paddies (which belonged to the co-operative), you couldn 't do

trading (it was illegal), couldn 9t work for wages (nobody hired wage workers). Without a ho khau, how could you eat? he asked rhetorically.19

It was, however, possible to negotiate these rules in 1960s Vietnam. The population of two Catholic villages in Dong Xa commune survived without entering the co-operative system. They learnt how to fish, selling their catch on the local black market. And one group of inhabitants, whose ho khau was transferred in 1 974 to an upland new economic zone, managed to survive at Dong Xa for several years after their return from the hills. The rules stated that these people should remain in their settlement site in Nghia Lo province, a remote part of the northern

highlands. But the village policeman answered his own rhetorical question with reference to this group: they had to rely on other people for eve-

rything. They could live, but only very miserably.




What resources did they have to draw on? For their return to the delta, they had to find money for black market train tickets. Once home, the policeman explained, they lived with relativesy but the relatives had to look after them. Everyone got poorer. And one of the returnees noted that government officials also helped out: Authorities in Thai Binh accepted the people back from Nghia Lo, because everyone came back, even the head of the co-operative. Another settler from the same district confirmed this view, after his neighbours returned from a similar experience in the central highlands province of Dak Lak. The co-operative didn 't supply them with anything. Well, a little. We are all compatriots, they could not throw them away, so they gave them some supplies™ Very often, however, official empathy of the returnees' predicament was temporary. Two years after their return, the Nghia Lo settlers found their ho khau transferred to another new economic zone in Dak Lak.21

Monetary resources, family and official support offered opportunities for manoeuvre within the system. This can be attributed to the complex structure of the Vietnam state. Different government departments were responsible for the administration of different policies. Household registration and identification was a police matter. Employment was managed by the co-operative. Distribution of foodstuffs was supervised by the cereals department. The rules governing each policy, moreover, were often incomplete and subject to regional variation. A 1964 Min- istry of Police circular complained:

The administration of the ho khau has not yet achieved its full effect, because some important aspects of the system have not yet been regulated, like the restriction on migration from rural to urban areas, or to border areas, the line of demarcation, the coast, and important military and economic areas. Regulations on ho khau registration were, in the past, issued on a temporary basis with local applicabil- ity only, and the formalities for the registration and administration of ho khau are not yet cohesive: urban areas, rural areas, offices, factories and building sites throughout the country all have their own regulations, and the result is that the implementation of the rules is neither coherent nor closely controlled.22

Seven years later, a further circular from the same ministry recognized that the situation had not improved:



196 Andrew HARDY

There are nowadays many people in the countryside who have not been issued a ID card yet, and as a result we cannot fulfil the people's needs in terms of travel and transactions; also this creates numerous difficulties for those controlling the paperwork of government departments.23

The state was, by consequence, unable to apply the rules to all its citizens.

These interstices created opportunities for negotiation. Formal navi-

gation of the rules was complicated by contradictions in the rules, but the same contradictions facilitated informal navigation. While formal navigation required formal relationships with each department, personal negotiations with only one of them could result in informal access to the required service. The main resource required under the DRV, where money was scarce and its use subject to presentation of coupons, was a personal relationship with someone in a position to make a favourable decision. Expressions of sentiment (tinh cam) and sympathetic under- standing {thong cam) on the part of officials smoothed the successful (though not always legal) functioning of this complex system.

More substantial resources were required, however, for movement to the cities. From the early days of the DRV, migration to urban areas followed two main channels: employment by the state and family reunion (Le Bach Duong 1998, p. 1). Rural-urban migration depended on prior access to employment or the presence of a close family member in the city. It depended too on the acceptability of one's political record, as noted in the ly lieh. In the absence of these officially sanctioned resources, registration could still be obtained, if a relevant government department could be persuaded to approve it. And such approvals were fairly common. In 1964, officials in Thai Nguyen city noted that in addition to family reunion arrivals of 10,388 people, 7,716 "free migrants" were accepted for settlement (VNA3/Tong Cue Thong Ke 1964). The government had to launch campaigns to remind employ- ers not to "recruit illegally". Co-operation was sought between employ- ers and local authorities, to "prevent the tendency of people migrating spontaneously in search of work" (VNA3/Bo Lao Dong 1961).

Free migrants' use of such resources was by no means easy. Success-




ful negotiation required skill and good contacts on the part of the migrant, as well as sympathy on the part of the authorities. Sympathy was quite common in towns like Thai Nguyen, Hong Gai, and Viet Tri, the new industrial centres on the periphery of the Red River Delta. In Hanoi, by contrast, the authorities achieved 85 per cent of a plan to re- duce the population by 44,000 in 1964 (VNA3/Tong Cue Thong Ke 1996). Migrants' dependence on official ratification of their move to the city remained an effective brake to unregistered growth in the urban population. As one official told me in Hanoi, before doi moi those few migrants who flouted the rules remained poor for long periods.24

However, people did move without resources. This phenomenon was observed by a journalist in Hanoi, who wrote of the 1960s return of former residents of the city who had been resettled in a new economic zone in the highlands.

Anyone who was in Hanoi at that time will take a long time to for- get a phenomenon which stung everyone deep in their hearts. In a general atmosphere of enthusiastic labour, there inexplicably appeared on the roads and streets numerous families carrying their children, shouldering poles, looking truly pitiful. They lived like vagabonds, like disaster victims out on the pavements or pitching canvas tents under bridges, in narrow alleyways . . . like people staging a sit-down protest. People whispered to each other: "Are they the new economic zone people coming back?" If you spoke to them, that clinched it: "Either place is difficult," they said, "so we'd rather return to the city we know, where it's easier to live!" (Le Khanh 1983, p. 18)

This return resembles the experience of the Nghia Lo migrants re- turning to Dong Xa, mentioned above. In the city, however, resources for survival were harder to find. Urbanités were more dependent on coupons for items of daily necessity. Social networks offered fewer opportunities for official sympathy. Police surveillance was more effective. In the south after 1975, new economic zone returnees "occupied public land, lived in slums, collected garbage, sold cigarettes and low-value things" (Institute for Economic Research of Ho Chi Minh City 1996, p. 58). Some found their way to boats overseas (Hitchcox 1994, p. 219; Hawthorne 1982, pp. 176-77). Others subsisted on smaller boats in the shelter of city bridges, or on the narrow strip of land on the wrong



198 Andrew HARDY

side of the Red River dike in Hanoi. I interviewed a man of Haiphong origin, seated on the sandbank in the middle of this river next to the small boat which is his home. He told me that he had been living there for many years. He had no ho khau registration and lived off the earn-

ings of his two wives. Neither of his marriages, of course, was registered. I remarked on the French word for misfortune, "malheurreur" [sic], which was tattooed on his arm. He told me that Victor Hugo's Les Miserables (Nhung nguoi khon kho) knew nothing of poverty compared with people living on the sandbank.25 The fear of ending up in such a situation was a powerful influence on many people's imaginations, effectively limiting unauthorized migration before doi moi.

Negotiating the Rules under Reform

It did not, however, influence Mr Binh, whom I met in the central highlands. He moved to a new economic zone there in 1978. And when, four years later, he decided to return to his home village on the plains of central Vietnam near Hue, he acted out of a different and keener fear. His family were going down with malaria. The unauthorized trip was planned in advance and resources were mustered. His sister gave money for black market bus tickets. Relatives promised to help with ho khau arrangements. In the end, they were unable to make good on this prom- ise, as the officials wouldn V allow the ho khau transfer, but they did sym- pathise with our situation and let us stay. The family lodged with his parents, and lived off money and rice donated by relatives. They survived like this for two years, until the co-operative started dividing up the land. Binh's family were not registered in the village and had no right to a share. We had nothing and no capital to start again, so we decided to return to Dak Lak. The epidemic was over. The ho khau was still there. In 1984, they returned to the new economic zone.26

Binh was a victim of Vietnam's economic reforms. Decollectivization turned every ho khau into a title to land and into capital for use in development. Without a ho khau, Binh's family had less than in previous years when the land was owned in common, and so belonged to no one. At that time, its meagre product could be distributed "with sympathy". But in the new situation he understood that his ho khau in Dak Lak had




become an asset. He returned to Dak Lak to claim it, at a time when large numbers of free migrants were arriving in the hopes of finding land. The new economic zone co-operative was dismantled a year after he returned. And when I visited a decade later, Binh had a small coffee farm, and many of the new arrivals, even those without papers, enjoyed the same prosperity. After the co-operative was broken up, a local official told me, people had more freedom, so their economic situation improved. Since 1990 about one hundred families have arrived to settle every year, 27

Binh's experience was an early example of the changes do i moi brought to the economic value of the ho khau. From the necessary condition for access to most essential goods and services, possession of a ho khau had become one form of capital asset among many. With the dis- mantling of co-operatives and the abolition of ration coupons in the 1980s, greater freedom of choice emerged. People could choose whether to use this resource for migration, and pass along the traditional channels of state employment, family reunion, and formal application for ho khau transfer. Or they could tap the much wider range of resources available from the market economy. Li Tana wrote of the freedom this engendered:

The abolition of the state subsidy system in the late 1980s has made individual movement possible, because even though registration is still mandatory, being unregistered no longer affects a person's livelihood that critically. To ordinary Vietnamese it can almost be seen as a kind of liberation, because it means that the power to control people's movement by the Party and state has been greatly reduced. (Li Tana 1996)

People could now move and work freely; they could register as temporary residents {tarn tru) if necessary, and live off the income from their labour rather than depend on the state.

What resources were required to take advantage of this new-found freedom? As in the past, money, family, and official sympathy were keys to the success of any venture. But the relative importance of these fac- tors changed in the new economy. In Dak Lak, Binh said that when he moved back to the plains, his failure to arrange for household registration was an inconvenience but nothing more. Ration coupons were not



200 Andrew HARDY

such a big deal for farmers, and relatives helped out. The main problem was being allowed to stay. Official sympathy and family aid were crucial to his survival. And while these resources might be obtained in exchange for favours, before reform these relations remained relatively uncommercialized. Doi moi changed that. Money became the essential resource, empowering people to shop in the market and, where necessary, negotiate the state.

Where, after doi moi, did people need to negotiate the state? In what ways were the rules on household registration still important? A conver- sation with some elderly Hanoi residents gave me an indication of the first of these. In the past, the ho khau was crucial for travel. For urbanités, they said, possession of a ho khau was also essential in the past: If you didn V have a ho khauy then you could get no coupons, no paddy, no rice, and life was very hard. This had now changed, since the abolition of the subsidy system. But nowadays, you still need your ho khau if you want to buy land or build a housed In other words, household registration remained the necessary condition for access to housing in the city. Legal ownership of land was conditional on presentation of the ho khau booklet. I asked one migrant from the country whether, after thirteen years living in the city, he intended to bring his family to Hanoi, and arrange for a ho khau there. No, he replied, landis too expensive.1* In his mind, household registration was primarily a condition for access to a permanent living space.29

The elderly Hanoi residents also told me how this rule could be negotiated. You could register ownership under the ho khau of a relative or friend, at the risk of losing your property if you fall out with them. Or you could, they implied, just go ahead and build your house. In the latter case, if you don ì have a ho khau, your house will be illegal. It was, in fact, quite conceivable to build a house in contravention of the rules.

During the 1990s, large numbers of illegal buildings appeared throughout the city of Hanoi.30 Officers in the Hai Ba Trung police station

complained of the construction of temporary houses, which didn 't used to exist.51 The destruction of numerous such houses along Hanoi's Yen Phu dike in 1995, by order of Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet, was one instance where this practice was not tolerated. But in countless others,



Negotiating the Household Registration System in Vietnam under Retorm 201

people preferred to pay fines imposed for contravention rather than navigate the complex and costly paths of ho khau and other building regulations necessary for legal construction. They might equally prefer to pay a "fee" in advance.32 The difference between legal and illegal be- haviour had become a play-off between costs and benefits, a matter for the family balance sheet.

One man who housed himself successfully outside of the system was Luy, a returnee from the refugee camps of Hong Kong. His experiences were related in a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) monitor's report, after a 1996 interview in An Giang province in the Mekong Delta.

Luy has no Ho Khau. [He] stated that before departure he had lived without having a Ho Khau and then moved around to earn his living also without family registration. After return, he constructed illegally a small cottage along the national road ... He said he can not register his Ho Khau here as the area is zoned for demolition and urban renewal in the near future. During our visit, Luy was seen at his younger sisters's house, near the highway, where [he] and his sisters are conducting business selling general merchandise. He noted that his sister's house was also bought from the previous owner with personal contract without going through the Department of Hous- ing and Land - the proper state channel. They therefore have no legal ownership for the house on which to base Ho Khau registration. However, neither Luy nor his sisters have experienced any problem living at their respective houses despite not having Ho Khau. (UNHCR 1998, p. 91)

Luy's decision was based on a calculation that proximity to the road was good for business. The time spent illegally in this commercially ad- vantageous spot on the "street front" represented a precious capital for the future development of his family economy, and could be set against no clear short-term gain from costly legal negotiations with the state for residence elsewhere.

Luy did not say why he experienced no problems living in his illegally built house. Officials may have ignored his construction because of its presence on a site earmarked for demolition. He may also have made arrangements for them to ignore it. There are many ways to go about unofficial transactions with officials to bypass the regulations.



202 Andrew HARDY

Those interested in exploring them need look no further than the pages of newspapers such as Phap Luat, Thanh Nien, and Lao Dong. These dai- lies periodically publish scandal stories, in an attempt to uphold the laws of the government from abuse by its servants, and of course to increase their readership. Newspaper vigilance and laws against corruption, however, make it increasingly difficult to "shake the hand" of officials, es-

pecially on matters relating to household registration. Those who take this route must call upon resources other than their wallet, relying on

personal relationships as well as the "ability to talk". Many Vietnamese citizens who are averse to this method of negotiation must look for other resources.

Examination of the second sphere in which household registration was still important under doi moi offers insights into the other strate-

gies and resources. The ho khau remains the basis for identification (according to the ho tich), although reference to the ly lieh is now less important than in the past. Births, marriages, and deaths remain linked to

migration. Let us look at each of these in turn to examine the different strategies of negotiation employed.

Some people simply ignore the rules. It is often on registry of a birth that the consequences of this become apparent. The declaration requires presentation of four documents. These include a medical "witness of birth" form, a certificate of marriage, the family ho khau, and the ID card of the person making the declaration. The child's existence may be recorded at the place of the mother's household registration, or at the place of birth. In circumstances where the mother does not have permanent household registration, the certificate of temporary registration {tarn tru) may be presented instead.33 For families resident at their place of household registration, these formalities require little navigation. A short visit to the local People's Committee and the business is com-

pleted. For the thousands of spontaneous migrants who are now a feature of Vietnam's social landscape, however, they pose great problems. This was the experience of Mrs Thuy, whose ho khau was registered at the commune of Quang Loi (Quang Xuong district, Thanh Hoa province), in the northern part of central Vietnam.

Thuy was married at Quang Loi in the mid-1990s.34 The marriage




failed, however, and she obtained a divorce at the local court. Shortly afterwards, she moved to South Vietnam. The law states that people moving across administrative boundaries must declare their departure, motivations, and their new address to the police station where their ho khau registered. On arrival, they then have to register as temporary residents presenting a "certificate of temporary absence".33 Many migrants do not inform local authorities of their departure. They're afraid - as one official put it - not to be allowed to go. As a result they hold no such certificate.36 This was the case for Thuy when she arrived in the South. This was fine until she started a new relationship. She did not marry her new partner, although this would have saved her a great deal of trou- ble if he had a suitable ho khau. Then she had a child.

Authorities at the place of the child's birth could register it after see- ing her certificates of marriage and temporary registration. As they saw neither, they were not authorized to sign the papers. As a recent migrant, she would have found negotiation of the rules difficult in the South, not least for her lack of contacts in the right places.37 So she made the long journey back to her home village, in the hopes of successful registration there. She was lucky that her name had not been struck from her ho khau, as required by law for people who are absent for more than six months without declaration (Tran Huyen Nga 1999, p. 83). But the officials refused to register the birth. They explained their decision to me quite frankly: if you want to register a birthy you have to show a marriage certificate. Hardly content with their offer to certify the child born "out of wedlock", she returned empty handed to the South. Officials did not tell me whether she tried to use other resources to persuade them to help (though they did mention that she was very beautiful). Thuy' s failure to negotiate the rules meant that her child was not recognized by the state.

Thuy must have been disappointed at the failure of her expensive trip. But villagers at Quang Loi tend not to register their children at birth. Indeed, birth declarations are closely associated with migration, according to local authorities. They don 't bother with birth registration, regarding it as unnecessary. It's only later on, when they have some objec- tive, when they want to go somewhere, that they come and declare these



204 Andrew HARDY

births. People up to fifty years old come to us and ask to register their birth. Thuy's children may, later on, apply again for a birth certificate. If unsuccessful, they will have to forego certain services, or use market resources to go to school or hospital, to obtain a ho khau or identity card, or register their marriage.

Marriage registration requires presentation of three documents. These include the birth certificates of both bride and groom, and the ho khau of either of them. For ho khau holders, these formalities are hardly onerous. A short ceremony at the local People's Committee com- pletes the process.38 But for unregistered migrants, difficulties arise. A tale of two sisters in Hanoi allows us to see two other ways in which people get around the problem - in this case, an unregistered migration from one district of the city to another. The two sisters (known in official parlance as KT2 people39) reacted differently to the difficulties of registering their respective marriages (in 1999 and 2000). One pre- tended that the migration had never taken place. During the marriage registration process, she returned regularly to the family's former home, as yet unsold, to give the impression she was still living there. The other, meanwhile, was unwilling to bear the cost in terms of time and money of the marriage procedures. While the marriage was celebrated in style, its registration was postponed.40 On the birth of a child, this couple may face consequences similar to those of Thuy.41 Both sisters, moreover, re- tain their household registration with their parents, and have not been included on their husbands' ho khau, although in both cases they live with his parents. Such manœuvres are quite common, and evidently practical when the migration is made over a short distance.42

Regulations for the declaration of a death also require presentation of the ho khau of the deceased, as well as the ID card of the person mak-

ing the declaration. In the absence of the ho khau, the state does, however, recognize the individual. A rubric stating that the "deceased is of unknown origins" may be written on the declaration and the certificate of death issued.43 The lack of a ho khau, however, means refusal by commune authorities to provide a plot of land for the person's burial. In such cases, the family may resolve the issue by buying a plot on the free market.44




The Legacies of Population Control

Market strategies for getting around the ho khau system, and the resources required to feed them, are new to Vietnam since doi moi. The system itself is no longer the all-embracing tool of population control it used to be, when it was linked to the subsidy system. This is the in- tention of both the legislation and its implementation, if officials at the Hai Ba Trung police station are to be believed. Household registration, as explained to me there, was designed to safeguard citizens' rights, in terms above all of security, and to limit pressure on urban services. That is why recent ho khau legislation aimed to simplify the application process: we want people to stabilize their living situation and register, to make it easier for us to control them. And while I sat listening to the policeman explain this, he apologized for the periodic interruptions by his secre- tary, bringing completed ho khau forms for him to sign.45 The impression he wished to convey was one of a state surveillance system using a simple and sympathetic tool to ensure the safety and comfort of all its citizens.

The system has been simplified, but remains far from simple. Its administration remains complex and multi-layered, coming under the responsibility of four separate ministries: the Ministry of Interior (now the Ministry of Police), the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Wel- fare, the National Family Planning Committee, and the General Sta- tistical Office. Their duties include

the coordination of household registration with the administration of the civil registry {ho tich), the labour registry, population statistics and family planning... to ensure coherence both of situation and statistics in order to provide for the needs of social control and the requirements of the people for the state.46

Contradictions between this and other policies create anomalies, as experienced by Hanoi's Labour Department where a fee-paying labour registration scheme introduced in 1995 had to be abandoned the fol- lowing year. Officials there told me it was contrary to a law whereby labourers have the free right to seek work.47 Contradictions between state policy and local implementation are also commonplace, as Pham Thanh Binh noted:



206 Andrew HARDY

There remain many irrational aspects to the system: for example, over the last ten years, province and city People's Committees have been setting conditions for household registration which are contrary to the Government's Laws, creating many obstacles for local people. (Pham Thanh Binh 1997, p. 4; see also pp. 14-16)

The system's relationship with other aspects of everyday life has also been simplified. Under the law, household registration is no longer a condition of eligibility for a state job. But among many state employ- ers, especially in urban areas, administrative psychology remains influ- enced by the old link between ho khau and employment. In the late 1990s, people were still denied employment for lack of a local ho khau. Police in Hanoi's Hai Ba Trung district described these practices as unfortunate. Apart from population control, the ho khau is no longer linked to any other activity. It is no longer necessary for organisations in Hanoi to insist on recruiting someone holding a Hanoi ho khau when the Thanh Hoa

applicant is better qualified. Organisations [doing so] give away their own

power to the police. Such practices may be compared to a man asking his

wife's opinion on a matter of his own responsibility.^ Obstacles are indeed created for local people by such varied and il-

legal applications of the household registration laws. Changes in the legislation and in the economic system have mitigated their effects: difficulties are now experienced in terms of identity, as in the case of Thuy, rather than livelihood, as in the case of Binh. While the links between migration, identity, and livelihood have been removed, the link between migration and identity is still in place. As Pham Thanh Binh put it:

We need adequately to implement the people's democratic residen- tial rights, but must seriously maintain the principle of household registration and management in the conditions of the market economy. (Pham Thanh Binh 1997, p. 4)

The obstacles created by this system can, nowadays, be more easily negotiated. Pham Thanh Binh noted that the change in attitude of the

population towards household registration is demonstrated in the ex- tent of undeclared migration to the South and central highlands, to




Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, as well as practices of non-migration and non-registration (Pham Thanh Binh 1997, p. 3). The link between identity, migration, and livelihood was effectively broken with the de- mise of the command economy. While ties of personal relationship with officials remain important, the key resource is now economic. Market reforms have made money the determining form of relation in people's attempts to negotiate the identity system, although it still presents major difficulties for country people wishing to move to the city. The ho khau laws, based on policies of socialist economic management, political record determinism, and wartime surveillance, are looking increasingly outdated. Continued market development will undoubtedly effect further change in the link between identity and migration. Is it really possible, as Pham Thanh Binh hoped, "in the conditions of the market economy" to "maintain the principle of household registration"? Using resources drawn from the market and from their own ingenuity to negotiate the state, people will increasingly take matters into their own hands.

How will they do so? Market resources have now replaced many of those services formerly available only with a valid ho khau in hand. The remaining services for which a ho khau is indispensable are those of identification, including ID cards and passports for legal travel overseas, and certification of births, marriages, and deaths. These will remain the prin- cipal arenas of negotiation between the security services and the people for some time to come, as it is unlikely that the ho khau system will disappear in the near future. While the people must rely on their own ingenuity for this, so do the police. Demands for "breakfast money" remain a feature of ordinary life for all Vietnamese. Some manage to dodge or thwart these demands, while others - particularly those in a hurry, in a tight spot like Thuy, or without other resources for negotiation - have to pay. These complex relations of commercialized clientelism, even as the laws on household registration are simplified and opened up, will long remain an important element in most people's experience of negotiating the Vietnamese state.



208 Andrew HARDY

NOTES

This research was partly funded by a grant from the National University of Singa- pore. I would like to express my thanks to Tran Van Ha for his help with the gath- ering of data.

1. Interview, Thai Nguyen, January 1997. 2. This system is clearly explained in Vu Van Hien (1940, pp. 84-107). 3. Details of these residence categories are found in the section on the province of

Cao Bang, in The Geography of the Emperor Dong Khanh (Nguyen Duc Tho et al. forthcoming).

4. According to Ministry of Police circular no. 1OO5P3, Hanoi, 24 September 1964, reproduced in Ty Cong An Yen Bai (1973, p. 12).

5. Ibid. For a survey of the Chinese hu kou system, see Mallee (1995, pp. 1-29). 6. Vietnam National Archives Centre no. 3 (VNA3), Bo Lao Dong (Ministry of La-

bour) 379 w, So Lao Dong (Labour Department) to Bo Lao Dong, 24 Febru- ary 1956. This letter had itself gone astray from its normal home without a clear reason: it found its way to a file entitled "Bao cao cua Uy ban mat tran trung uong ve ket qua cuoc di tham anh chi em cong nhan Mien Nam tai cae cong truong nong truong va cae co quan tinh Ninh Binh".

7. Council of Ministers Decision no. 104, 27 June 1964, "Dieu le dang ky va quan ly ho khau", reproduced in Ty Cong An Thai Binh (1972, pp. 18-21).

8. Interview, Hanoi, September 1999. Note that interview information is presented in italics, in an attempt to convey the overlap between the voice of informants and my own, which impinged by means of language, field notes, and translation.

9. Interview, Hanoi, May 1996. 10. Interviews, Thanh Hoa, February 2000; Hanoi, December 2000. 1 1 . Two of the more recent ones are Pham Thanh Binh (1997) and Tran Huyen Nga

(1999). 12. Council of Ministers Decision no. 104, 27 June 1964, in Ty Cong An Thai Binh

(1972, p. 20). 13. Details of these policies may be found in Forbes and Thrift (1985) and Hardy

(forthcoming). 14. These barriers were lifted in January 1987 (Hitchcox 1994, p. 207). 15. "Boat people" is the term used to describe refugees or asylum-seekers, most of

whom braved the seas to leave Vietnam in the late 1970s and 1980s. 16. For the best account of this, see Wain (1981). 17. See Nguyen Thi Ngoc Thanh (1999) and Hoang Thi Thu Ha (1999). My thanks

to the authors for permission to reference their work here. 18. Vietnam's countryside is administratively divided into provinces, districts, and

communes. Each commune is made up of a number of villages.




19. Interview, Thai Binh, January 1997. 20. Interview, Dak Lak, May 1996. 21. According to a former resident of Dong Xa commune, interviewed in Dak Lak,

November 1996. 22. Ministry of Police circular no. 1OO5P3, 24 September 1964, reproduced in Ty

Cong An Yen Bai (1973, p. 13). 23. Ministry of Police circular no. 1366/K55, 3 October 1971, reproduced in Ty

Cong An Thai Binh (1972, p. 3). 24. Interview, Hanoi, April 1996. 25. Resourceful people can avoid the state identification wherever they are, but in

the past the area beyond Hanoi's dike was an easy place to do so. While the state's administrative capacity on the river bank was extended during the late 1990s, the strip of sand in the middle of the river is still inhabited by people who prefer to remain outside of the formal structures of identification.

26. Interview, Dak Lak, May 1996. 27. Interview, Dak Lak, May 1996. 28. Interview, Hanoi, May 1998. 29. Note too that access to housing is one of the two conditions for the issue of house-

hold registration. The other is a family relationship, as defined in Government Decision 51/CP, 5 October 1997, "Ve viec dang ky va quan ly ho khau".

30. Note that in 1994 legal purchase of housing without permanent household registration became possible in Ho Chi Minh City, according to Government De- cisions nos. 60/CP and 61/CP, 5 July 1994, as recorded by Truong Si Anh, Patrick Gubry, Vu Thi Hong, and Jerrold W. Huguet (1996, p. 16).

31. Interview, Hanoi, September 1999. 32. Interview, Hanoi, November 2000. 33. Government Decision 83/1998/ND-CP, 10 October 1998, "Ve dang ky ho

tich"; Tran Huyen Nga (1999, pp. 1 1-13). 34. Thuy's story was related by a policeman at Quang Loi (interview, Thanh Hoa,

February 2000). 35. Government Decision 51/CP, Hanoi, 10 May 1997; Ministry of Interior Cir-

cular 6/TT-BNV (13), Hanoi, 20 June 1997, "Huong dan thuc hien Nghi dinh so 51/CP ngay 10.5.1997 cua Chinh phu ve vice dang ky va quan ly ho khau". See explanation of temporary absence legislation in Tran Huyen Nga (1999, pp. 79-83).

36. Interview, Thai Nguyen, July 1995. 37. It should be noted that she may not have found negotiation of the rules as diffi-

cult as many southerners, for whom the right people are often from the North. A migrant from the provinces of the former DRV might find contacts easier to cultivate, on the basis of shared social and political culture, than a southerner, associated by ly lieh and by temperament with the old ways before reunification.



210 Andrew HARDY

The nature of SRV administration of the South made patron-client relations structurally more difficult for all concerned, and ultimately more costly.

38. Government Decision 83/1998/ND-CP, 10 October 1998. It is, however, possible to do without these documents: "If these documents are missing then legal substitute documentation may be presented". Explanation of the legislation does not specify how substitute papers may be obtained, raising further questions on how the regulations may be negotiated (Tran Huyen Nga 1999, pp. 19-22).

39. KT2 denotes people registered in one district but living in another, within the same province. KTl denotes people holding regular household registration. KT3 people are registered in one province but living permanently in another. KT4 denotes students and seasonal workers temporarily registered in a different province from their ho khau. My thanks to the Hanoi Labour Department for explain- ing this classification (interview, Hanoi, September 1999).

40. Unmarried couples living together have received visits from the local police to encourage them to regularise their marital status (interview, Hanoi, December 2000).

41. A few days before this article went for publication, I learnt that the second sister had delivered her first child a month earlier. She declared her marriage to the authorities shortly afterwards, so as to register the child's birth (interview, Ha- noi, June 2001).

42. Interviews, Hanoi, February and November 2000. 43. Government Decision 83/1998/ND-CP, 10 October 1998. 44. Interview, Hanoi, December 2000. 45. Interview, Hanoi, September 1999. 46. Government Decision 51/CP, Hanoi, 10 May 1997. 47. Interview, Hanoi, September 1999. 48. Interview, Hanoi, September 1999.

REFERENCES

Forbes, Dean and Nigel Thrift. The Price of War, Urbanisation in Vietnam, 1954- 1985. London: Allen and Unwin, 1985;

Hardy, Andrew. Red Hills. Richmond: Curzon Press, forthcoming. Hitchcox, Linda. "Relocation in Vietnam and Outmigration: The Ideological and

Economic Context". In Migration: The Asian Experience, edited by Judith M. Brown and Rosemary Foot. New York: St. Martins Press, 1994.

Hoang Thi Thu Ha. "The System of Rationing by Stamps and Tickets in North Vietnam, 1955-1975". Paper presented at the conference on the Economic History of Vietnam in the Context of Southeast Asia, National University of




Singapore, 11 October 1999. Institute for Economic Research of Ho Chi Minh City. Migration, Human Resources,

Employment and Urbanisation in Hochiminh City. Hanoi: National Political Publishing House, 1996.

Le Bach Duong. "State, Economic Development, and Internal Migration in Viet- nam". Ph.D. dissertation, Binghamton University, 1998.

Le Khanh. Que moi nguoi Ha Noi o Lam Dong. Hanoi: Nha Xuat Ban Nong Nghiep, 1983.

Lesleyanne Hawthorne ed. Refugee: The Vietnamese Experience. Oxford, Auckland, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Li Tana. Peasants on the Move: Rural-Urban Migration in the Hanoi Region. Singa- pore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1996.

Mallee, Hein. "China's Household Registration System under Reform". Development and Change 26, no. 1 (January 1995): 1-29.

Nguyen Thi Ngoc Thanh. "The Reform of Capitalists and Capitalism in North Vietnam (1958-1960)". Paper presented at the conference on the Economic History of Vietnam in the Context of Southeast Asia, National University of Singapore, 11 October 1999.

Nguyen Due Tho, Nguyen Van Nguyen, Philippe Papin, and Andrew Hardy, trans. The Geography of the Emperor Dong Khanh. Hanoi: Ecole Française d'Extrême- Orient and Vien Han Nom, forthcoming.

Pham Thanh Binh. Nhung dieu can biet ve quan ly va dang ky ho khau (nhung qui dinh moi nhat). Hanoi: Nha Xuat Ban Chinh Tri, 1997.

Tong Cue Thong Ke (General Bureau of Statistics). ' Bao cao so lieu dong bao mien xuoi len xay dung kinh te mien nui va tinh hinh bien dong nhan khau o thanh pho Thai Nguyen". Thai Nguyen Statistical Office, 26 December 1964.

. "Bao cao tinh hinh van dong nhan dan di xay dung kinh te mien nui, ve nong thon san xuat va tinh hinh giam nhan khau cua Ha Noi". Hanoi Statis- tical Office, 15 December 1964.

Tran Huyen Nga. Nhung dieu can biet ve ho tich, ho khau va cong chung nha nuoc. Ho Chi Minh City: Nha Xuat Ban Thanh Pho Ho Chi Minh, 1999.

Truong Si Anh, Patrick Gubry, Vu Thi Hong, and Jerrold W. Huguet. Ho Chi Minh Ville, de la migration à l'emploi. Paris: Centre français sur la Population et le développement (CEPED), 1996.

Ty Cong An Thai Binh. Tai lieu hoc tap ve cong tac kiem tra doi so ho khau va cap giay chung nhan can cuoe cho cac khu pho, xa, ho tap the. Thai Binh, 1972.

Ty Cong An Yen Bai. Tai lieu hoc tap ve cong tac quan ly ho tich, ho khau. Yen Bai, 1973.

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Insight into the Return of the 'Boat People': UNHCR s Monitoring Experience in Vietnam, 1989-1998. Hanoi: UNHCR, 1998.



212 Andrew HARDY

Vu Van Hien. "Les institutions annamites depuis l'arrivée des Français: L'impôt personnel et les corvées de 1862 à 1936". Revue Indochinoise Juridique et Economique 13 (1940): 84-107.

Wain, Barry. The Refused: The Agony of the Indochina Refugees. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981.

Yu Y.C. "The Demographic Situation in China". Population Studies 32, no. 3 (1978): 431.

Andrew Hardy is Fellow at the Southeast Asian Studies Programme, Faculty ot Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore.



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