| Group: | Vietnamese people in the Czech Republic |
| Population: | 61,012[1] –80,000[2] 0.6–0.8% of the Czech population |
| Regions: | Prague, Cheb, Varnsdorf |
| Languages: | Vietnamese, Czech |
| Religions: | Vietnamese folk religion, Mahayana Buddhism,[3] Roman Catholicism, Protestantism |
Vietnamese people in the Czech Republic, including citizens and non-citizens, are the third-largest ethnic minority in the country overall (after Slovaks and Ukrainians), and the largest Asian ethnic group, numbering more than 83,000 people according to the 2011 census.
It is the fourth-largest Vietnamese diaspora in the world, after the United States, France and Germany.[4]
According to the 2001 census, there were 17,462 ethnic Vietnamese in the Czech Republic.[5] The Vietnamese population has grown very rapidly since then, with the Czech Statistics Office estimating that there were 62,842 Vietnamese citizens residing in the Czech Republic in December 2020 (not including those with Czech citizenship).[1] Nguyen, the most common Vietnamese surname, is now the 9th most common surname in the Czech Republic.[6]
Vietnamese immigrants began settling in the Czech Republic during the communist period, when Vietnam, which sought to bolster its skilled workforce, sent students and guest workers to socialist Czechoslovakia for education and training.[7] The Vietnamese communist government was told to pay the western communist countries for their help in the Vietnam War. In lieu of money, they sent their citizens there as indentured workers for subsistence wages. Following the collapse of communism in Czechoslovakia, a significant number have moved towards establishing their own businesses and integrating more broadly into society, similar to the experience of other overseas Vietnamese in Western countries. However, the small business sector remains the key economic domain of first-generation Vietnamese people in the Czech Republic.[8]
The largest group of Vietnamese people (13,995 in 2020) lives in Prague, and 2% of the population of Karlovy Vary Region have Vietnamese citizenship,[9] with the border town of Cheb being a main centre for Vietnamese people. The town of Varnsdorf also has a significant Vietnamese population.
In the Czech Republic, national minorities are afforded classic national minority rights, including government funding for the protection of their language and culture. In recent years, the Vietnamese community has sought recognition as a national minority. In 2004, however, the Government Council for National Minorities, the advisory body of the Czech Government on the issues of national minorities, concluded that the Vietnamese do not constitute a "national minority", as this term only applies to indigenous minorities who have inhabited the Czech territory for a long period of time.[10] Eventually in 2013, a representative of the Vietnamese was accepted as a member of the Government Council for National Minorities, which in the absence of precise legal criteria, has been understood as an official recognition of the Vietnamese ethnic minority as a national minority by both authorities and the public.[11] [12] In Prague, which has the largest community of Vietnamese, a Vietnamese representative had been a member of the city's National Minority Council and Vietnamese had been included in Prague's policy for national minorities before this happened at the national level.