community at large, attending Chinese institutions, marrying within the Han Chinese community, while projecting a sense of Han "superiority", "clannishness", and affirmed a distinctive sense of their own Han "ethnic identity, nationalism, and cultural exclusivity" against the Kinh majority. After the French colonial authorities withdrew from Vietnam in the 1950s, the Ngo Dinh Diem government tried to Vietnamize the economy and reduce the amount of Hoa and French participation while trying to increase the amount Vietnamese economic participation to gain a proportionate foothold relative to their population size. Inauspiciously, Kinh entrepreneurs were unable to compete against their Hoa counterparts and ultimately went bust and folded due to a deficiency of capital and weak business ties outside Vietnam. In 1961, the Hoa controlled 80 percent of all the capital in Vietnam's retail trade and 75 percent of the entire nation's commercial activities. Utilizing the Confucian paradigm of personal networks, the Hoa dominated several types of businesses such as financial services, food, information technology, chemicals, electronic and electrical equipment, machinery, fabricated metals, wholesale trade, transportation equipment, and other miscellaneous services. Constituting a mere 1 percent of Vietnam's population, the Hoa controlled an estimated 90 percent of non-European private capital in the mid-1960s and dominated Vietnam's entire retail trade, financial services provisions, manufacturing establishments, transportation sectors, and all aspects of the country's rice trade. In the hospitality industry, the Hoa owned more than 50 percent of all the largest hotels and 90 percent of small hotels and boarding houses in the Saigon-Cholon and Gia Dinh areas respectively, in addition to 92 large restaurants, 243 tea and beer shops, 48 hotels, and 826 eateries. Furthermore, the Chinese controlled much of the restaurants, drink and hotels, amusement and recreation, medical, educational, and other miscellaneous establishments. In particular, Hoa businessmen operated restaurants and hotels as a stepping stone to eventually scale up and venture out into other businesses since these businesses turned in a quick profit while requiring negligible amounts of startup capital to launch. Furthermore, due to the lack of red tape, hospitality companies were not regulated by the Vietnamese government or were subject to local discriminatory policies. Although there were also numerous wealthy Kinh in the commercial class, the vast disproportionations of economic power were still concentrated in the hands of the Hoa minority, incurring the resentment, envy, and hostility from the Kinh majority. The Hoa were also the pioneers of the Vietnamese financial