Vietnamese people in the Czech Republic, including citizens and non-citizens, are the third-largest ethnic minority in the country overall (after Slovaks and Ukrainians), numbering more than 83,000 people according to the 2011 census.
It is the third-largest Vietnamese diaspora in Europe, after Germany and France, and one of the most populous Vietnamese diasporas of the world.
According to the 2001 census, there were 17,462 ethnic Vietnamese in the Czech Republic.[4] The Vietnamese population has grown very rapidly since then, with the Czech Statistics Office estimating that there were 62,842 Vietnamese citizens residing in the Czech Republic in December 2020 (not including those with Czech citizenship).[1]Nguyen, the most common Vietnamese surname, is now the 9th most common surname in the Czech Republic.[5]
History
Vietnamese citizens legally residing in the Czech Republic as of 31 December (excluding Czech citizens of Vietnamese ethnicity)
Vietnamese immigrants began settling in the Czech Republic during the communist period, when Vietnam, which sought to bolster its skilled workforce, sent students and guest workers to socialist Czechoslovakia for education and training.[7] The Vietnamese Communist government was told to pay the Western Communist countries for their help in the Vietnam War. In lieu of money, they sent their citizens there as indentured workers for subsistence wages most of which were further taxed by the Vietnamese government. Following the collapse of communism in Czechoslovakia, many Vietnamese people were stranded in, or decided to remain in the country rather than return to communist Vietnam. Unable to speak fluent Czech and compete for Czech jobs, this first generation of immigrants later made a sparse living as vendors in street markets, especially on the Czech borders. In recent years, however, a significant number have moved towards establishing their own businesses and integrating more broadly into society, similar to the experience of other overseas Vietnamese in Western countries. However, the small business sector remains the key economic domain of first-generation Vietnamese people in the Czech Republic.[8]
Geography
The largest group of Vietnamese people (13,995 in 2020) lives in Prague, and 2% of the population of Karlovy Vary Region have Vietnamese citizenship,[9] with the border town of Cheb being a main centre for Vietnamese people. The town of Varnsdorf also has a significant Vietnamese population.
Status
In the Czech Republic, national minorities are afforded classic national minority rights, including government funding for the protection of their language and culture. In recent years, the Vietnamese community has sought recognition as a national minority. In 2004, however, the Government Council for National Minorities, the advisory body of the Czech Government on the issues of national minorities, concluded that the Vietnamese do not constitute a "national minority", as this term only applies to indigenous minorities who have inhabited the Czech territory for a long period of time.[10] Eventually in 2013, a representative of the Vietnamese was accepted as a member of the Government Council for National Minorities, which in the absence of precise legal criteria, has been understood as an official recognition of the Vietnamese ethnic minority as a national minority by both authorities and the public.[11][12] In Prague, which has the largest community of Vietnamese, a Vietnamese representative had been a member of the city's National Minority Council and Vietnamese had been included in Prague's policy for national minorities before this happened at the national level.[10]
Notable people
Monika Leová (born 1991), TV presenter and model, Czech Miss 2013
↑ Sloboda, Marián (2016). "Historicity and citizenship as conditions for national minority rights in Central Europe: old principles in a new migration context". Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. 42 (11): 1808–1824. doi:10.1080/1369183x.2015.1132158. S2CID146245837.
Czechoslovakia was a landlocked state in Central Europe, created in 1918, when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. In 1938, after the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland became part of Nazi Germany, while the country lost further territories to Hungary and Poland. Between 1939 and 1945, the state ceased to exist, as Slovakia proclaimed its independence and the remaining territories in the east became part of Hungary, while in the remainder of the Czech Lands, the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was proclaimed. In 1939, after the outbreak of World War II, former Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš formed a government-in-exile and sought recognition from the Allies.
Demographic features of the population of the Czech Republic include population density, ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, and religious affiliations.
Vietnamese Americans are Americans of Vietnamese ancestry. They comprise approximately half of all overseas Vietnamese and are the fourth-largest Asian American ethnic group following Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, and Indian Americans. There are approximately 2.2 million people of Vietnamese descent residing in the U.S.
Overseas Vietnamese refers to Vietnamese people who live outside Vietnam. There are approximately 5 million overseas Vietnamese, the largest community of whom live in the United States.
The majority of Vietnamese do not follow any organized religion, instead participating in one or more practices of folk religions, such as venerating ancestors, or praying to deities, especially during Tết and other festivals. Folk religions were founded on endemic cultural beliefs that were historically affected by Confucianism and Taoism from ancient China, as well as by various strands of Buddhism. These three teachings or tam giáo were later joined by Christianity which has become a significant presence. Vietnam is also home of two indigenous religions: syncretic Caodaism and quasi-Buddhist Hoahaoism.
Human rights in Vietnam are among the poorest in the world, as considered by various domestic and international academics, dissidents and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as Amnesty International (AI), Human Rights Watch (HRW), and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
The Polish minority in the Czech Republic is a Polish national minority living mainly in the Trans-Olza region of western Cieszyn Silesia. The Polish community is the only national minority in the Czech Republic that is linked to a specific geographical area. Trans-Olza is located in the north-eastern part of the country. It comprises Karviná District and the eastern part of Frýdek-Místek District. Many Poles living in other regions of the Czech Republic have roots in Trans-Olza as well.
The expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia after World War II was part of a series of evacuations and deportations of Germans from Central and Eastern Europe during and after World War II.
The history of Czechoslovak nationality involves the rise and fall of national feeling among Czechs and Slovaks. Once forming a rather unified group, they were historically separated, unified under a democratic system, separated during threat of war, and reunified under a socialist authoritarian regime. However, a democratization process has led to a definition of separate statehood for the majority of Czechs and Slovaks.
Vietnamese Cambodians refers to ethnic group of Vietnamese who live in Cambodia or it refers to Vietnamese who are of full or partial Khmer descent. According to Cambodian sources, in 2013, about 15,000 Vietnamese people live in Cambodia. A Vietnamese source stated that 156,000 people live in Cambodia, while the actual number could be somewhere between 400,000 and one million people, according to independent scholars. They mostly reside in southeastern parts of Cambodia bordering Vietnam or on houseboats in the Tonlé Sap lake and Mekong rivers. The first Vietnamese came to settle modern-day Cambodia from the early 19th century during the era of the Nguyễn lords and most of the Vietnamese came to Cambodia during the periods of French colonial administration and the People's Republic of Kampuchea administration. During the Khmer Republic and Khmer Rouge governments in the 1970s under the Pol Pot regime, the Vietnamese amongst others were targets of mass genocides; thousands of Vietnamese were killed and many more sought refuge in Vietnam.
Following centuries of relative ethnic diversity, the population of modern Poland has become nearly completely ethnically homogeneous Polish as a result of the altered borders as well as both the Nazi German and Soviet Russian or Polish Communist campaigns of genocide, expulsion and deportation during and after World War II in the country. Nevertheless, various ethnic minorities of various origin remain in Poland today, including some newly arrived or grown in size in recent decades.
The Greeks in the Czech Republic have a presence dating back to the 20th century. Roughly 12,000 Greek citizens, mainly from Greek Macedonia in Northern Greece, who fled from the 1946–1949 Greek Civil War were settled in several formerly German inhabited areas in Czechoslovakia.
Vietnamese people in Germany(Vietnamese: Việt kiều Đức / Người Việt tại Đức; German: Vietnamesen in Deutschland) form one of the country's largest groups of resident foreigners from Asia. Federal Statistical Office figures show 103,260 Vietnamese nationals residing in Germany at the end of 2020, which is the fourth largest community from Asia excluding transcontinental, Caucusus and Middle Eastern states. Not included in those figures are individuals of Vietnamese origin or descent who have been naturalised as German citizens. Other data from 2020 shows 183,000 people of Vietnamese descent, of which 117,000 have a migration background.
Vietnamese people in France consist of people of full or partial Vietnamese ancestry who were born in or immigrated to France. Their population was about 400,000 as of 2017, making them one of the largest Asian communities in the country.
Chinese people in the Czech Republic form one of the country's smaller migrant communities.
The Belarusian diaspora refers to emigrants from the territory of Belarus as well as to their descendants.
The Czechoslovak–Hungarian population exchange was the exchange of inhabitants between Czechoslovakia and Hungary after World War II. Between 45,000 and 120,000 Hungarians were forcibly transferred from Czechoslovakia to Hungary, and their properties confiscated, while around 72,000 Slovaks voluntarily transferred from Hungary to Czechoslovakia.
This article describes ethnic minorities in Czechoslovakia from 1918 until 1992.
Asian diasporas in France consist of foreign residents and French citizens originating from Asian countries living in France. French citizens of Asian descent primarily have ancestry from the former French colonies of Indochina, as well as China or Turkey. Other Asian ethnic groups found in France include other West Asians, South Asians, Japanese, and Koreans.
Czech Republic–Vietnam relations are foreign relations between the Czech Republic and Vietnam.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
