Overseas Chinese
Overseas Chinese people or the Chinese diaspora are a diaspora people of Chinese origin who reside outside Greater China. As of 2011, there were over 40.3 million overseas Chinese. As of 2023, there were 10.5 million people living outside mainland China who were born in mainland China, corresponding to 0.7 percent of China's population. Overall, China has a low percent of its population living overseas.
File:Samuel Ting.jpg|thumb|Nobel Prize winner Samuel Ting traces Chinese ancestry to Shandong peninsula.
File:Brooklyn Chinatown.png|thumb|upright=1.35|Typical grocery store on 8th Avenue in one of the Brooklyn Chinatowns in New York City, New York. Multiple Chinatowns in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn are thriving as traditionally urban enclaves, as large-scale Chinese immigration continues into New York. The New York metropolitan area contains the largest ethnic Chinese population outside of Asia, comprising an estimated 893,697 uniracial individuals as of 2017.
Terminology
labels = no refers to people of Chinese citizenship residing outside of either the PRC or ROC. The government of China realized that the overseas Chinese could be an asset, a source of foreign investment and a bridge to overseas knowledge; thus, it began to recognize the use of the term Huaqiao.Ching-Sue Kuik renders huáqiáo in English as "the Chinese sojourner" and writes that the term is "used to disseminate, reinforce, and perpetuate a monolithic and essentialist Chinese identity" by both the PRC and the ROC.
The modern informal internet term labels = no refers to returned overseas Chinese and guīqiáo qiáojuàn to their returning relatives.
labels = no refers to people of Chinese descent or ancestry residing outside of China, regardless of citizenship. Another often-used term is p=Hǎiwài Huárén or simply p=Huárén. It is often used by the Government of the People's Republic of China to refer to people of Chinese ethnicities who live outside the PRC, regardless of citizenship.
Overseas Chinese who are southerners, such as the Toisanese, Cantonese or Hokkiens refer to themselves as . Literally, it means Tang people, a reference to Tang dynasty China when it was ruling. This term is commonly used by the Cantonese as a colloquial reference to southern Han people and has little relevance to the ancient dynasty. For example, in the early 1850s when Chinese shops opened on Sacramento St. in San Francisco, California, United States, the Chinese emigrants, mainly from the Pearl River Delta west of Canton, called it Tang People Street and the settlement became known as Tang People Town or Chinatown.
The term ' is added to the various terms for the overseas Chinese to indicate those who would be considered ethnic minorities in China. The terms ' and are all in usage. The Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the PRC does not distinguish between Han and ethnic minority populations for official policy purposes. For example, members of the Tibetan people may travel to China on passes granted to certain people of Chinese descent. Various estimates of the Chinese emigrant minority population include 3.1 million, 3.4 million, 5.7 million, or approximately one tenth of all Chinese emigrants. Cross-border ethnic groups are not considered Chinese emigrant minorities unless they left China after the establishment of an independent state on China's border.
Some ethnic groups who have historic connections with China, such as the Hmong, may not or may identify themselves as Chinese.
History
The Chinese people have a long history of migrating overseas, as far back as the 10th century. One of the migrations dates back to the Ming dynasty when a Chinese of Iranian ancestry Zheng He became the envoy of Ming empire. He sent people – many of them Cantonese and Hokkien – to explore and trade in the South China Sea and in the Indian Ocean.Early emigration
In the mid-1800s, outbound migration from China increased as a result of the European colonial powers opening up treaty ports. The British colonization of Hong Kong further created the opportunity for Chinese labor to be exported to plantations and mines.During the era of European colonialism, many overseas Chinese were coolie laborers. Chinese capitalists overseas often functioned as economic and political intermediaries between colonial rulers and colonial populations.
The area of Taishan, Guangdong Province was the source for many of economic migrants. In the provinces of Fujian and Guangdong in China, there was a surge in emigration as a result of the poverty and village ruin.
San Francisco and California was an early American destination in the mid-1800s because of the California Gold Rush. Many settled in San Francisco forming one of the earliest Chinatowns. For the countries in North America and Australia saw great numbers of Chinese gold diggers finding gold in the gold mining and railway construction. Widespread famine in Guangdong impelled many Cantonese to work in these countries to improve the living conditions of their relatives.
From 1853 until the end of the 19th century, about 18,000 Chinese were brought as indentured workers to the British West Indies, mainly to British Guiana, Trinidad and Jamaica. Their descendants today are found among the current populations of these countries, but also among the migrant communities with Anglo-Caribbean origins residing mainly in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada.
Some overseas Chinese were sold to South America during the Punti–Hakka Clan Wars in the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong.
File:Chinese women and children in Brunei.JPG|thumb|left|Chinese women and children in Brunei,.
Research conducted in 2008 by German researchers who wanted to show the correlation between economic development and height, used a small dataset of 159 male labourers from Guangdong who were sent to the Dutch colony of Suriname to illustrate their point. They stated that the Chinese labourers were between 161 to 164 cm in height for males. Their study did not account for factors other than economic conditions and acknowledge the limitations of such a small sample.
File:Gu family of Chinese-Indonesian.jpg|thumb|1958 old photograph of Indonesian-Chinese of Gu surname, first until third generations
File:Chinese merchants grouped outside their club house on Penang Island, 1881.jpg|thumb|left|Chinese merchants in Penang, Straits Settlements,.
The Lanfang Republic in West Kalimantan was established by overseas Chinese.
In 1909, the Qing dynasty established the first Nationality Law of China. It granted Chinese citizenship to anyone born to a Chinese parent. It permitted dual citizenship.
Republic of China (1912–1949)
In the first half of the 20th Century, war and revolution accelerated the pace of migration out of China. The Kuomintang and the Communist Party competed for political support from overseas Chinese.The military conflicts and economic mayhem under the Beiyang and Nationalist rule pushed increasing numbers of people to migrate, mostly through the coastal regions via the ports of Fujian, Guangdong, Hainan and Shanghai. These migrations are considered to be among the largest in China's history. Many nationals of the Republic of China fled and settled down overseas mainly between 1911 and 1949 before the Nationalist government led by Kuomintang lost the mainland to Communist revolutionaries and relocated. Most of the nationalist and neutral refugees fled mainland China to North America while others fled to Southeast Asia.
After World War II
Those who fled during 1912–1949 and settled down in Singapore and Malaysia automatically gained citizenship in 1957 and 1963 as these countries gained independence. Kuomintang members who settled in Malaysia and Singapore played a major role in the establishment of the Malaysian Chinese Association and their meeting hall at Sun Yat Sen Villa. There was evidence that some intended to reclaim mainland China from the CCP by funding the Kuomintang.After their defeat in the Chinese Civil War, parts of the Nationalist army retreated south and crossed the border into Burma as the People's Liberation Army entered Yunnan. The United States supported these Nationalist forces because the United States hoped they would harass the People's Republic of China from the southwest, thereby diverting Chinese resources from the Korean War. The Burmese government protested and international pressure increased. Beginning in 1953, several rounds of withdrawals of the Nationalist forces and their families were carried out. In 1960, joint military action by China and Burma expelled the remaining Nationalist forces from Burma, although some went on to settle in the Burma–Thailand borderlands.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the ROC tended to seek the support of overseas Chinese communities through branches of the Kuomintang based on Sun Yat-sen's use of expatriate Chinese communities to raise money for his revolution. During this period, the People's Republic of China tended to view overseas Chinese with suspicion as possible capitalist infiltrators and tended to value relationships with Southeast Asian nations as more important than gaining support of overseas Chinese, and in the Bandung declaration explicitly stated that overseas Chinese owed primary loyalty to their home nation.
From the mid-20th century onward, emigration has been directed primarily to Western countries such as the United States, Australia, Canada, Brazil, The United Kingdom, New Zealand, Argentina and the nations of Western Europe; as well as to Peru, Panama, and to a lesser extent to Mexico. Many of these emigrants who entered Western countries were themselves overseas Chinese, particularly from the 1950s to the 1980s, a period during which the PRC placed severe restrictions on the movement of its citizens.
Due to the political dynamics of the Cold War, there was relatively little migration from the People's Republic of China to southeast Asia from the 1950s until the mid-1970s.Statistics show that between 1949 and 1978, Qingtian, a county in Zhejiang known for its large diasporan communities abroad, only permitted 752 people to go abroad throughout this entire period.
In 1984, Britain agreed to transfer the sovereignty of Hong Kong to the PRC; this triggered another wave of migration to the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, US, South America, Europe and other parts of the world. The 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre further accelerated the migration. The wave calmed after Hong Kong's transfer of sovereignty in 1997. In addition, many citizens of Hong Kong hold citizenships or have current visas in other countries so if the need arises, they can leave Hong Kong at short notice.
In recent years, the People's Republic of China has built increasingly stronger ties with African nations. In 2014, author Howard French estimated that over one million Chinese have moved in the past 20 years to Africa.
More recent Chinese presences have developed in Europe, where they number well over 1 million, and in Russia, they number over 200,000, concentrated in the Russian Far East. Russia's main Pacific port and naval base of Vladivostok, once closed to foreigners and belonged to China until the late 19th century, bristles with Chinese markets, restaurants and trade houses. A growing Chinese community in Germany consists of around 76,000 people. An estimated 15,000 to 30,000 Chinese live in Austria.