page_title: Trần Ngọc Châu
section_title: Release, escape by boat
hierarchical_section_title: Trần Ngọc Châu / Under the Communist regime / Release, escape by boat
caption_attribution_description: English: 35 Vietnamese refugees wait to be taken aboard the amphibious command ship USS BLUE RIDGE (LCC-19). They are being rescued from a 35 foot fishing boat 350 miles northeast of Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, after spending eight days at sea.
context_page_description: Tran Ngoc Châu was a Vietnamese soldier, civil administrator, politician, and later political prisoner, in the Republic of Vietnam until its demise with the Fall of Saigon in 1975.
  Much earlier in 1944, he had joined the Việt Minh to fight for independence from the French. Yet as a Vietnamese Buddhist by 1949 he had decisively turned against Communism in Vietnam. He then joined pro-French forces. When Vietnam was divided in 1954, he became an officer in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.
  For many years he worked on assignments directly under President Ngô Đình Diệm. He became the mayor of Da Nang, and was later a province chief in the Mekong Delta. In particular, Châu became known for his innovative approaches to the theory and practice of counter-insurgency: the provision of security to civilian populations during the Vietnam War. The ultimate government goal of winning the hearts and minds of the people eventually led him to enter politics.
  In 1967, after resigning from the ARVN Châu was elected to the newly formed National Assembly in Saigon. He became a legislative leader.
context_section_description: After his unexpected release from prison in 1978, Châu went to live with his wife and children. He received family visitors, including his communist brother Trần Ngọc Hiền. Eight years earlier Hien's arrest in Saigon by the Thiệu regime had led to Chau's first imprisonment. Once a highly placed Communist intelligence officer, Hien had become disillusioned by the harsh rule imposed by victorious Hanoi. Subsequently, Hien's advocacy of Buddhist causes had gotten him disciplined then jailed by the Communist Party of Vietnam. Châu's sister and her husband, a civil engineer, also visited Châu. They had come down from northern Vietnam, where they had been living for twenty-five years.
  In the late 1970s top Communist leaders in the north seemed to understand victory in the exhausting war as the fruit of their efforts, their suffering, which entitled northern party members to privileges as permanent officials in the south. Châu viewed Communism negatively, but not in absolutist terms. While serving in the Việt Minh during the late 1940s, Chau had admired his companions' dedication and sacrifice, and the Communist self-criticism process; his break with them was due to his disagreement with their Marxist–Leninist ideology. Yet now, released from re-education camp and back in 'occupied' Saigon, Châu became convinced that in general the ruling Communists had lost their political virtue and were "corrupted" by power. When the country was divided in 1954, hundreds of thousands left the northern region assigned to Communist rule, journeying south. After the 1975 Communist military victory had reunited Vietnam, hundreds of thousands would flee by boat.
  Trương Như Tảng was present at the founding of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF) in 1960. A leftist member of Vietnam's urban intelligensia and a government official, Tang had served the NLF throughout the war, often secretly, supporting the Viet Cong in various capacities. At the war's end he was the NLF's Minister of Justice. Yet he soon totally soured on Communist rule. About the events in Saigon following the north's victory, Tang wrote in his memoir:
  Since shortly after the first days of liberation, escape by boat had been the single great topic of conversation throughout the South. Everyone talked about it but actually making the arrangements was a dangerous business. ... A host of unsavory elements discovered they could profit from what rapidly turned into a mass movement. ... The seas were infested with pirates, and beyond the pirates lay a string of squalid refugee camps... . ¶ Escape was truly a decision that could only be made out of desperation.
  The new Communist regime began to question Buddhist monks and laity about their loyalty to its official ideology. The state's religious repression methodically advanced. Most of the leading Buddhist monks were arrested, went underground, or fled the country; by 1985 their ranks had been cut down to one-third. Châu heard that his friend Thich Thien Minh, who had been called a Communist and jailed by Thiệu, "was beaten to death in a Communist prison in 1979." Catholics also endured state oppression.
  In 1977 the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) had encountered sharp opposition from the People's Republic of China (PRC) when the SRV challenged the murderous Communist tyranny in Cambodia. In late 1978 the People's Army of Vietnam moved to overthrow the Khmer Rouge regime. In response the PRC's People's Liberation Army attacked Vietnam across their mutual border in early 1979; this armed conflict was brief but intense.
  The long-standing Chinese minority in Vietnam, also called the Hoa, was centered in the Cholon district of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). By 1977 these Sino-Vietnamese began to feel the at-first subtle hostility of their new Communist government. Soon the SRV seized the 'opportunity' of the war with China to manifest its dominance over the Hoa. The SRV's tactics of oppression increased, step by step; at the end of 1977 it had become severe, with arbitrary arrests and deportations of its Chinese minori
caption: Vietnamese refugees
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