In Vietnam everyone has to be recorded as belonging to a household (ho). The name of every household member (khau) has to be entered, at declaration of birth, in a booklet, registered at a particular place. The administration of the rules governing household registration (ho khau) has had wide-ranging consequences for Vietnamese citizens. Instituted in the 1950s, the rules in question governed where Vietnamese people live. These rules presented many restrictions on freedom. The purpose of this article is to explore these rules and the ways they were negotiated both before and since the doi moi (renovation) market reforms.

In pre-reform Vietnam, it was possible to negotiate the rules. People simply had to decide what they were prepared to give up or, rather, what resources they could draw on. As the doi moi reforms progressed, this principle remained the same. Along with the rules, however, the resources required for negotiation underwent a certain "renovation". This is the nature of rules. They are "made to be broken", they become significant only when they are broken and are transformed in the breaking. With reference to the rules on household registration, this article asks what have changed and what remain the same in Vietnam under reform? Who made the changes? And how did these changes affect the rules?

The Rules on Household Registration

Registration of households was not new in Vietnam in the 1950s. One elderly villager explained the ho khau system to me as the modern equivalent of the French colonial regime, whereby a tax card was needed for travel and a village-issued transfer of residence paper for a permanent move.(1) The colonial administration used the personalized tax-and-identity (ID) cards to identify individual males.(2) Colonial authorities' knowledge of the population was itself built on an older system of taxpayer registration. The French system was the result of reforms to the pre-colonial regime whereby the state did not know its taxpayers, only their numbers in each village. Knowledge of individual adult males owing tax and labour (suat dinh) was left to local village authorities. Under this ancient system, unregistered members of the population were restricted in their access to communal land and other services. Migrants arriving in a community were recorded as "guest sojourners" (khach ho) and "long-term sojourners" (thuoc ho) during the first and second generations of their residence there, before service provision could be approved in the third generation with inscription on the tax roll. Similar categories of "outsiders" (ngoai rich) and "insiders" (noi tich) were also used. These were the rules. The manner of their implementation depended on the initiatives of local officials.(3)

After 1945, identification was implemented in patches during the chaos of war, and effective regulations only emerged after independence. Under the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), village-issued transfer papers persisted from previous decades, but the most important legislation governing population residence -- the ho khau system -- was an innovation. Imported from China -- where it is known as the hu kou -- it provided the state with a far superior administrative tool than had previously existed. The new government of the northern half of the country aimed to know the entire population, men, women, and children, and would use this knowledge to great effect over subsequent decades. With the establishment of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) after reunification in 1975, the system was extended to the South.

Household registration was developed in the People's Republic of China during the 1950s and it received definitive legislation in the Population and Household Registration Regulation of 1958 (Yu 1978, p. 431). In Vietnam, it was introduced gradually too. Before 1953, in Viet Minh zones, an identity system was managed by commune People's Committees and by the police thereafter. …