Power, Politics, and ‘Vietnamese Brides’

Abstract

Mass media has recently attracted public attention to ‘Vietnamese brides,’ a large group of female immigrants in China whose situation is both unique and clearly gendered. Still, that media attention has not been accompanied either by a clear definition or by clear understandings of why bridal immigration exists between Vietnam and China and is unidirectional. The inherited wisdom is that the immigration of Vietnamese brides to China is related to the Chinese economic boom and the widening development gap between China and Vietnam, but this article argues that these inherited accounts are incomplete without paying attention to the various power relations involved in Vietnamese ‘bridal’ immigration to China from interstate power between China and Vietnam to power politics within marriages.