Czechoslovakia and Vietnam: an unplanned citizenship

If you take the red metro line from central Prague to Kačerov station, change to bus 113, ride twelve stops south through housing estates and warehouses, and step off at Sídliště Písnice, you will come across the address Libušská 126. There is no English signage. The complex was built on the site of a former meat-packing plant that closed in 1999; on the grounds of a one-time poultry farm, the smell of pho now rises from stalls that once held slaughtered chickens. This is Sapa, the Vietnamese marketplace of Prague: twenty-five hectares of vendors, a Buddhist temple, a wedding hall, a kindergarten, several gambling rooms, a recording studio, and the third generation of a Vietnamese community that first entered Czechoslovakia in 1967. Neither the market nor the community were planned by the state, and yet they remain an illustrative example of how durable cultural integration and international cooperation can be in post-Communist Europe, revealing that cultural relationships extend far beyond treaties. 

The Czechoslovak-Vietnamese labour exchange began as a Vietnam War-era arrangement: in lieu of paying for Semtex and other military aid, Hanoi sent workers, as the historian Alena Alamgir documents from Czechoslovak archives. The first cohort of 2,100 arrived in June 1967 to train in heavy industry, chemicals, energy, food processing, and, oddly, filmmaking. By 1983 there were 23,000 Vietnamese in Czechoslovak factories; by August 1989 there were 29,600, by far the largest single group of foreign workers in the country, ahead of the Cuban and Polish contract-labor cohorts Czechoslovakia also hosted. But migrants were not welcomed into idyllic conditions. Workers received only forty percent of their wages directly, with the Vietnamese state taking the remainder to service its debt, and any pregnancies came with the guarantee of deportation. Alamgir calls the final phase of the program “beleaguered internationalism”: the contract involved cheap labour under a Marxist veil. Czechoslovakia ran similar contract-labour arrangements with Cuba and Mozambique, and Vietnamese workers were never alone in the country’s network of socialist guest-labour schemes. What set the Vietnamese program apart was its longevity and its scale: where the Cuban arrangement was bounded by fixed four-year rotations and the Mozambican one stayed comparatively small, the Vietnamese exchange ran continuously for over two decades and grew with each renewal, producing a long-term settled population.

However, with the monumental symbolism of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, these contracts fell with it. The expectation was that workers would return home to Vietnam, and in East Germany they mostly did: the Vertragsarbeiter program there had peaked at nearly 60,000 Vietnamese, and after reunification the German state offered DM 3,000 (around $1,850 in 1990 dollars) to anyone willing to repatriate; tens of thousands accepted, as the anthropologist Christina Schwenkel recounts. Yet in Czechoslovakia, no such buy-out was made possible. Around 13,000 Vietnamese were still in the country when the state contracts ended, and they were not paid to leave or invited to stay. Ignored, many obtained small-scale retail licences in the chaotic early 1990s and went into trade. Corner grocery stores called potraviny spread across the country while the Czech state busied itself privatising its old enterprises. By 2011, Nguyễn was the ninth most common surname in the Czech Republic, per Czech Statistical Office census data.

A strange relationship ensued between the Vietnamese and Czech people. The sociologist Adéla Souralová, in fieldwork published in 2015 and in a dedicated chapter on the practice, documented one of the more surprising kinship arrangements in post-Communist Europe. Vietnamese parents, working sixteen-hour days at their shops, hired recently retired Czech women, often pensioners with adult children of their own, as nannies for their children. The nannies would read Czech fairy tales, sing Czech lullabies, and cook Czech food, and the children grew up bilingual, biculturally raised, often calling the nanny babička. Souralová’s respondents describe these women as grandmothers rather than employees; one teenager in her study, when asked what would change in her life if she did not have her babička, replied that she would simply be alone. The integration was unplanned by the Czech state, occurring through a match in the needs of Vietnamese parents for caretakers, and Czech women on pensions who needed the work.

The second generation were named banánové děti, banana children: yellow on the outside, white inside. A Vietnamese-Czech tour guide named Nicolas explained the term to a journalist from Expats.cz in 2024: “It’s not offensive. It’s true. We may look Vietnamese on the outside, but we speak Czech better than Vietnamese.” The self-mocking phrase reflects the rupture, cultural and linguistic, between first and second generation Vietnamese: a testament to the degree of integration seen in the country.

In July 2013 the Czech government adopted Resolution No. 530, which restructured the Council for National Minorities to include a Vietnamese representative. The post went to Phạm Hữu Uyển of the civic association Văn Lang. In Czech administrative terms, it was the recognition the community had asked for nine years earlier and been refused, on the grounds that “national minority” was a status reserved for indigenous groups. The 2013 decision also required the Council to invent a new category: a minority defined by cultural and regional rather than historical significance. Vietnam is now the fourteenth recognised national minority of the Czech Republic, the only one originating from a Comecon labour contract.

The COVID-19 pandemic deepened the relationship between the two cultures. In March 2020, the Czech government made face masks mandatory in public, one of the first European countries to do so, despite having a supply shortage as Al Jazeera reported at the time. In response to hospital rationing of masks, within days an organisation called Làm Cha Mẹ CZ (“Being Parents in Czech”), a Prague-based group of Vietnamese mothers, was sewing cloth masks at home and routing them to hospitals through a Facebook group. Their tally was over 30,000 masks in the first weeks of lockdown, according to Balkan Insight. The hashtag #vietnamcipomahaji, “Vietnamese are helping,” aggregated similar efforts: free meals to police officers, baskets of gloves left outside grocery stores, and fundraising for a ventilator at the hospital in Ústí nad Labem. A blogger named Tran Van Sang, who pushed the hashtag, told the same outlet that “I felt that we had stopped a wave of xenophobia” that had been building in the first weeks of the pandemic, when Vietnamese in public masks were treated with racism. In October 2020, President Miloš Zeman awarded the Medal of Merit to Tan Trinh, head of the Vietnamese Association in the Moravian-Silesian Region. The grandchildren of people who had once been sent to repay a war debt were now distributing equipment to Czechia’s hospitals.

Yet Czechia remains an anomaly in the former Eastern bloc. The same integration that occurred in Prague was absent from Berlin. The anthropologist Christina Schwenkel, comparing socialist mobility regimes across the Eastern Bloc, finds the post-1989 trajectories sharply divergent: in East Germany, structural exclusion and the skinhead violence of the early 1990s pushed the Vietnamese community into invisibility; in Czechoslovakia, the economic upheaval and chaos of privatisation meant that they went unnoticed, allowing them to remain. Interestingly, the integration was not the result of Czech action, such as the passing of inclusivity laws or the extending of rights. Rather, it was inaction that facilitated the Vietnamese entry into small commerce, the only sector with low enough barriers to entry. 

A useful comparator outside Europe is the United States Bracero programme, which ran from 1942 to 1964 and ended, like the Czechoslovak contract, in a formal termination rather than a managed transition. However, the Mexican-American case featured an absence of any legal path to citizenship once the contracts ended, forcing the descendants of Braceros to build their lives largely outside the protection of the law for a generation, in conditions more similar to the East German policy of exclusion than to the Czech one of indifference.

Yet none of this should be viewed as romantic. The first generation of Vietnamese-Czechs was indentured under Gustáv Husák’s government and their children were called Vietnamec as a slur; the Sapa market has been raided more than once on suspicion of money laundering and counterfeit goods, and Czech-language media circulated the image of Vietnamese marijuana grow-houses as a national security threat for two decades. The community’s most successful businesses still remain concentrated in low-margin retail. Souralová titled one of her studies after a recurring theme in her interviews: that Vietnamese parents had given their children everything for them and nothing with them. The Vietnamese community in Czechia did not and have not experienced what might be viewed as a traditional success story. 

Thus, the Czech-Vietnamese case suggests three things about how cultural relationships between countries can deepen. First, official recognition follows facts on the ground rather than producing them. Vietnamese became a Czech national minority in 2013 because by then the relationship was already a routine matter, involving pho deliveries, school runs, and shared grandmothers. Official recognition served only to close the gap between the law and the street rather than creating it. Second, the bilateral relationships that survive global shocks and changes to the world order are not necessarily the ones in which governments share the most ambassadorial niceties. Instead, they can be the ones whose citizens have something each side wants and an opportunity to acquire it. In March 2020, Hanoi did not send aid to Prague. It was Vietnamese-Czech mothers, with sewing machines, that cemented the relationship. Third, global citizenship does not require individuals to feel at home. A shared marketplace can serve as a stronger bond than shared values. This poses an uncomfortable implication for policy given that the European Union has spent the last decade attempting to enable integration through values screening, something achieved in Czechia by leaving a community alone long enough that it became a part of the nation organically.

In January 2025, Vietnamese Prime Minister Phạm Minh Chính visited Sapa during an official trip hosted by Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala, and at a community gathering that same week called the Vietnamese-Czech community a “solid bridge” in the relationship between Hanoi and Prague. Yet this metaphor may be slightly misrepresentative: a bridge presumes that the two sides exist separately and that the crossing is the goal. But the trip on bus 113 to Libušská 126 offers an alternative: a third place, built originally on an expired labour contract, by people who became citizens of Czechia over time. 

The evolution of the relationship between the Czech Republic and its Vietnamese population offers a peculiar insight into the possibilities of citizenship: it can work in the absence of policy, perhaps more effectively than in the presence of it, through an alignment in supply and demand. Values, cultures, and language can transform over time when the economic and social needs of a nation are met. Czechia and Vietnam teach us that communities are more malleable than they might seem, and that real human connection can transcend seemingly insurmountable differences in culture. 

Bibliography

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: TTTM Sapa Prague-south entrance | Image sourced from Wikimedia Commons | CC License, no changes made

Alamgir, Alena J. “Socialist Internationalism at Work: Changes in the Czechoslovak-Vietnamese Labor Exchange Program, 1967–1989.” Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University, 2014.

Cohen, Deborah. Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Kušniráková, Tereza, and Andrea Gerstnerová. “Vietnamese ‘Guests’ in Socialist Czechoslovakia: Apprentices, Contract Workers, and Illegal Entrepreneurs.” In Asian Migrants in Europe. Springer, 2025.

Schwenkel, Christina. “Rethinking Asian Mobilities: Socialist Migration and Post-Socialist Repatriation of Vietnamese Contract Workers in East Germany.” Critical Asian Studies 46, no. 2 (2014): 235–258.

Souralová, Adéla. New Perspectives on Mutual Dependency in Care-Giving. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015.

Souralová, Adéla. “‘My parents did everything for us but nothing with us’: Parenting and mothering in Vietnamese immigrant families in the Czech Republic.” Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 30, no. 1 (2021): 39–59.

Souralová, Adéla. “‘Můžeš prostě říct, že máš babičku’: Vietnamské děti, české babičky a význam prarodičovství v jejich biografiích.” Sociologický časopis 51, no. 5 (2015): 815–844.

Souralová, Adéla. “Vietnamese Immigrants in the Czech Republic: Hiring a Czech Nanny.” In Asian Migrants in Europe, edited by Sylvia Hahn and Stan Nadel, 95–112. Goettingen: V&R unipress, 2014.