recognized by the Chinese, British and French authorities. Unlike their Vietnamese predecessors, the French were very receptive of these Chinese immigrants as it provided an opportunity to stimulate trade and industry, and they generally found employment as laborers or middlemen. The French established a special Immigration Bureau in 1874 requiring Chinese immigrants to register with the Chinese clan and dialect group associations and eased trade restrictions that were previously in place. Historians such as Khanh Tran viewed this as a divide-and-conquer policy, and its implementation intended to minimize the chances of any Vietnamese revolt against the French authorities. The Chinese population witnessed an exponential increase in the late 19th century and more so in the 20th century; between the 1870s and 1890s, some 20,000 Chinese settled in Cochinchina. Another 600,000 arrived in the 1920s and 1930s, and peaks in the migration patterns were especially pronounced during the 1920s and late 1940s when the effects of fighting and economic instability arising from the Chinese Civil War became pronounced. The inter-ethnic marriage between Chinese and Vietnamese brought Chinese customs into Vietnam society. For example, crocodiles were eaten by Vietnamese while they were taboo and off-limits for Chinese. Vietnamese women who married Chinese men adopted the Chinese taboo. Vietnamese women were wedded to the Chinese who helped sell Viet Minh rice. Statehood under North Vietnam and South Vietnam: 1950–1975 At a party plenum in 1930, the Indochinese Communist Party made a statement that the Chinese were to be treated on an equal footing with the Vietnamese, specifically defining them as "The workers and laborers among the Chinese nationals are allies of the Vietnamese revolution". One year after the state of North Vietnam was established, a mutual agreement was made between the Chinese Communist Party and Communist Party of Vietnam to give ethnic Chinese living in North Vietnam Vietnamese citizenship. This process was completed by the end of the 1950s. During the Vietnam War, the initially favorable situation of the Chinese minority in North Vietnam began to deteriorate. In 1967–1968, friction started to occur in Sino-DRV relations, because the People's Republic of China disapproved of both Hanoi's broadening cooperation with the Soviet Union and the North Vietnamese decision to start negotiations with the U.S. in Paris. Inspired by the Chinese embassy, the official newspaper of the ethnic Chinese community published a number of anti-Soviet articles until the DRV authorities replaced its editors with some