A consistent characteristic throughout Vietnamese history is the government's influence on population movement. In traditional Vietnam, prisoners, soldiers and recruited poor peasants were sent to the southern frontier, decade after decade, from the tenth century ad. The French perhaps made more effort to recruit labourers for their mines and plantations. None of them, however, was as effective as the policy of compelling people to move to the New Economic Zones, carried out by the current regime. Between 1960 and 1992, it was reported that 5.3 million people moved to the New Economic Zones.

In the past 40 years, another important feature of Vietnamese population movement was that migration in northern Vietnam were predominantly organized movements to the rural frontiers, and hence the current pattern of reverse traffic from the rural parts to urban centres like Hanoi is a rather recent phenomenon. Although labour was sold widely as a commodity in the French colonial period just as in traditional Vietnamese society, after 40 years of Marxist government in the North, when thousands of peasants reappeared on the streets of Hanoi in the early 1990s looking for unskilled jobs, it was regarded as “a completely new phenomenon” to officials and Hanoians. Indeed, virtually no historical record exists in any government department files about those people. These movements are also absent from contemporary statistics: census results allow an estimate of the volume and direction of the permanent migrations organized by the state but are not useful for separating those who are permanently settled and those who are periodically on the move; this mobile population cannot be estimated even indirectly via the national census of 1989, such as through the “place of previous residence five years ago” question, because the phenomenon itself became of some significance only in the last two to three years. What makes a large population flowing back and forth, come and go? How do they live? What do they think? All these are basically unknown to the public, as well as to scholars.