Chinese people in the New York metropolitan area
The New York metropolitan area is home to the largest and most prominent ethnic Chinese population outside of Asia, with populations representing all 34 provincial-level administrative units of China. Estimated at 924,619 in 2024, it is the largest and most prominent metropolitan Asian national diaspora outside Asia. New York City proper contained an estimated 628,763 Chinese Americans in 2017, by far the highest ethnic Chinese population of any city outside Asia.
New York City and its surrounding metropolitan area, including Long Island and parts of New Jersey, is home to 12 Chinatowns: districts where Chinese immigrants were made to live for economic survival and physical safety that are now known as important sites of tourism and urban economic activity. The city proper includes six Chinatowns. There are also Chinese communities in more suburban areas such as Jersey City, New Jersey, Nassau County, Long Island; Edison, New Jersey; West Windsor, New Jersey; and Parsippany-Troy Hills, New Jersey.
China City of America in Sullivan County, New York, was proposed in 2012 but whose development has stalled due to the 2022 arrest of its CEO. Dragon Springs serves as the de facto headquarters for both the global Falun Gong New religious movement as well as its Shen Yun performance arts troupe.
The Chinese American community in the New York metropolitan area is rising rapidly in population as well as economic and political influence. Continuing immigration from mainland China has boosted the Chinese population in the New York metropolitan area. In 2023, illegal Chinese immigration to New York City rose, particularly in Queens.
History
Among the earliest documented arrivals of Chinese immigrants in New York City were of "sailors and peddlers" in the 1830s. These arrivals were followed in 1847 by three students who came to continue their education in the United States. One of these scholars, Yung Wing, soon became the first Chinese American to graduate from a U.S. college in 1854, when Wing graduated from Yale University.Many more Chinese immigrants arrived and settled in Lower Manhattan throughout the 1800s, including an 1870s wave of Chinese immigrants searching for "gold." By 1880, the enclave around Five Points was estimated to have from 200 to as many as 1,100 members. However, the Chinese Exclusion Act, which went into effect in 1882, caused an abrupt decline in the number of Chinese who emigrated to New York and the rest of the United States. Later, in 1943, the Chinese were given a small quota, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 caused a revival in Chinese immigration, and the community's population gradually increased until 1968, when the quota was lifted and the Chinese American population skyrocketed.
In 1992, New York City officially began providing language assistance for electoral materials in Chinese, given that this population had reached a critical mass in numbers. The Sino-American Friendship Association was established in Midtown Manhattan in 1992. In 2022, "police service stations" serving as espionage arms of the Chinese Communist Party were discovered and shut down in Chinatown, Manhattan and Chinatown, Flushing.
Demographics
New York City boroughs
New York City has the largest Chinese population of any city outside of Asia and within the U.S. with an estimated population of 573,388 in 2014, and continues to be a primary destination for new Chinese immigrants. New York City is subdivided into official municipal boroughs, which themselves are home to significant Chinese populations, with Brooklyn and Queens, adjacently located on Long Island, leading the fastest growth. After the City of New York itself, the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn encompass the largest Chinese populations, respectively, of all municipalities in the United States.Large-scale immigration continues from China
In 2013, 19,645 Chinese legally immigrated to the New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA core based statistical area from Mainland China, greater than the combined totals for Los Angeles and San Francisco, the next two largest Chinese American gateways; in 2012, this number was 24,763; 28,390 in 2011; and 19,811 in 2010. These numbers do not include the remainder of the New York-Newark-Bridgeport, NY-NJ-CT-PA Combined Statistical Area, nor do they include the smaller numbers of legal immigrants from Taiwan and Hong Kong. There has additionally been a consequential component of Chinese emigration of illegal origin, most notably Fuzhou people from Fujian and Wenzhounese from Zhejiang in mainland China, specifically destined for New York City, beginning in the 1980s.Many airlines connect Asia to New York. As of April 2019, China Airlines, China Eastern Airlines, China Southern Airlines, EVA Air, Hainan Airlines, and XiamenAir all served John F. Kennedy International Airport, while Air China and Cathay Pacific Airways served both JFK and Newark Liberty International Airport in the New York metropolitan areaand among U.S. carriers, United Airlines flew non-stop from Newark to Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Hainan Airlines flies non-stop from JFK to both Chengdu and Chongqing in Western China; while China Southern Airlines is expected to start non-stop flights from JFK to Wuhan, in Central China, in July 2019. Meanwhile, Singapore Airlines flies to Singapore, where Standard Chinese is one of the official state languages, both from Newark and from JFK.
Within the Chinese population, New York City is also home to between 150,000 and 200,000 Fuzhounese Americans, who have exerted a large influence upon the Chinese restaurant industry across the United States; the vast majority of the growing population of Fuzhounese Americans have settled in New York.
The Chinese immigrant population in New York City grew from 261,500 foreign-born individuals in 2000 to 350,000 in 2011. Chinese immigrants represented 12,000 of the country's asylum requests in fiscal year 2013, of which 4,000 applied for asylum to the New York-area asylum office.
Movement within and outside the metropolitan area
As many immigrant Chinese to New York City move up the socioeconomic ladder, many have moved to the suburbs for more living space as well as seeking particular school districts for their children. In this process, new Chinese enclaves and Chinatown commercial districts have emerged and are growing in these suburbs, particularly in Nassau County on Long Island and in some counties of New Jersey. Some Chinese New Yorkers are also migrating to Boston, Philadelphia, and eastern Connecticut.Geography
The Manhattan Chinatown was the original Chinatown. Little Fuzhou in Manhattan is an ethnoculturally distinct neighborhood within the Manhattan Chinatown itself, populated primarily by Fujianese people. The Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn houses another such Little Fuzhou. Queens and Brooklyn are home to other Chinatowns. The Flushing as well as Elmhurst areas of Queens, Bensonhurst and Homecrest, neighborhoods in Brooklyn also have spawned the development of numerous other Chinatowns. Most of Manhattan, as well as Corona in Queens, the Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope areas of Brooklyn, and northeast Staten Island, have also received Chinese settlement.Chinatowns
Manhattan (曼哈頓華埠)
holds the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere. Manhattan's Chinatown is also one of the oldest Chinese ethnic enclaves. The Manhattan Chinatown is one of nine Chinatown neighborhoods in New York City, as well as one of twelve in the New York metropolitan area, which contains the largest ethnic Chinese population outside of Asia, comprising an estimated 893,697 uniracial individuals as of 2017.Manhattan's Chinatown is actually divided into two different portions. The western portion is the older and original part of Manhattan's Chinatown, primarily dominated by Cantonese populations and known colloquially as the Cantonese Chinatown. Cantonese were the earlier settlers of Manhattan's Chinatown, originating mostly from Hong Kong and from Taishan in Guangdong Province, as well as from Shanghai. They form most of the Chinese population of the area surrounded by Mott and Canal Streets.
However, within Manhattan's Chinatown lies Little Fuzhou or The Fuzhou Chinatown on East Broadway and surrounding streets, occupied predominantly by immigrants from the province of Fujian in mainland China. They are the later settlers, from Fuzhou, Fujian, forming the majority of the Chinese population in the vicinity of East Broadway. This eastern portion of Manhattan's Chinatown developed much later, primarily after the Fuzhou immigrants began moving in.
Areas surrounding "Little Fuzhou" consist of Cantonese immigrants from the Guangdong of China; however, the main concentration of people speaking the Cantonese language is in the older western portion of Manhattan's Chinatown. Despite the fact that the Mandarin speaking communities were becoming established in Flushing and Elmhurst areas of Queens during the 1980s–1990s and even though the Fuzhou immigrants spoke Mandarin often as well, however, due to their socioeconomic status, they could not afford the housing prices in Mandarin speaking enclaves in Queens, which were more middle class and the job opportunities were limited. They instead chose to settle in Manhattan's Chinatown for affordable housing and as well as the job opportunities that were available such as the seamstress factories and restaurants, despite the traditional Cantonese dominance until the 1990s. Eventually this pattern was repeated in Brooklyn's Sunset Park Chinatown, but on a much more immense scale.
The Cantonese dialect that has dominated Chinatown for decades is being rapidly swept aside by Mandarin, the national language of China, which is becoming the lingua franca. This can be attributed to the influx of immigrants from Fuzhou who often speak Mandarin, as well as the increase in Mandarin-speaking visitors coming to visit the neighborhood.
The modern borders of Manhattan's Chinatown are roughly Delancey Street on the north, Chambers Street on the south, East Broadway on the east, and Broadway on the west.