became increasingly important in the 1980s as a way of circumventing the boycott on trade with Vietnam imposed by a number of Continental Asian and Western nations. The Hoa have dominated several types of businesses such as selling rice, crewed junk, rice transportation, and shipbuilding during their early arrival to Vietnam. Through enterprise, organization, and cooperation, many Chinese became part of a garishly prosperous, urban middle and upper class that controlled the country's entire retail trade. Chinese retail outlets filled every major Vietnamese town and sea route as rice selling and transportation were one of the most profitable businesses that generated some of the highest returns on equity in the country. In addition, the Hoa business community became economically dominant in Saigon, where the Chinese worked as vendors and sold an array of products as an industrious entrepreneurial ethnic group, behind responsible for producing much of the city's economic output and commercial business activities. Many budding and up-and-coming Hoa entrepreneurs and investors started off working as butchers and tailors and then ventured into confectionery. Other Hoas also worked as money lenders, bankers, and money changers and sold products such as tea, porcelain, pharmaceuticals and medicine, furniture, and cabinet-work that were shipped to Vietnam from China. Southern Vietnamese politicians said the Han Chinese in Cholon remained politically active in municipal interests and the Vietnamese Communist Party, but their main interest of focus was entrepreneurship and investing. Regardless of the Vietnamese political climate, the Chinese felt secure when partaking in business as well as engaging in activities that improved and enriched their social and cultural lives. About 20 percent of the 6,000 private companies and 150,000 individual small businesses in the city were Chinese-run, as their commercial activities accounted for more than 30 percent of Ho Chi Minh City's business output due to better equipment used by the businesses. Prior to 1975, the influx of Chinese capital, entrepreneurship, and skilled manpower in South Vietnam played an important role in developing Vietnam's domestic markets and international trade. In South Vietnam, Hoa controlled more than 90 percent of the non-European capital, 80 percent of the food, textile, chemical, metallurgy, engineering, and electrical industries, 100 percent of the wholesale trade, more than 50 percent of the retail trade, and 90 percent of the import-export trade. Economic dominance by the Hoa presided accusations from the Kinh majority who felt that they could not compete with Chinese