Vietnamese business enclaves on Czech-German speaking borders : intricate network of ethnic economies or conglomerate of individual enterprises?
Abstract
Vietnamese acquiring qualifications in socialist Czechoslovakia were meant to become prominent socialist workers to help their war-torn country. Instead, they proved to be pioneers of Czechoslovak/Czech capitalism.
During the 1990s transition period, they took advantage of the 1,277 km-long Czech border with affluent German-speaking countries. Over three decades, they transformed the majority of these border crossings into a variety of more or less important or successful centres of Vietnamese financial, entrepreneurial and social capital, with multilevel transnational overlap.
Stemming from longitudinal qualitative research consisting of interviews with Vietnamese entrepreneurs, customers and stakeholders on both sides of the border, the paper contributes to the understanding of ethnic economies in post-socialist countries. Through a comparative case study of communities on the Austrian (České Velenice) and German border (Strážný, Železná Ruda and Folmava), we explain how the Vietnamese border business was formed, diversified and interconnected.
We argue that an initial advantage concentrated on mutual support and increasing their attractiveness to German-speaking customers changed into a source of competition and gradual disintegration within local Vietnamese communities while preventing the formation of networks between individual enclaves.