The Chinese newspaper ‘People’s Daily Online’ reports that “More than 9 million Chinese emigrated in 2013” referring to a blue book published by the CCG, ‘Center for China and Globalization’, and the ‘Social Sciences Academic Press’.
The United States topped the destination countries for Chinese migrants. According to data published by ‘US Citizenship and Immigration Services’, Chinese received more than three-fourths of the total visas the US issued to investment immigrants in 2013. China is second only to Mexico in the number of migrants it provides to the US, and is the biggest national provider of migrants to Canada. Chinese migrants to Australia have also been on the rise for 10 years. About 60 percent of foreigners who receive permanent resident visas to the country are Chinese. Data from Australia’s population census in 2011 shows Chinese will soon comprise the biggest migrant nationality, surpassing the British.
South-East Asian countries. According to Wikipedia there are over 50 million overseas Chinese. Most of them are living in Southeast Asia where they make up a majority of the population of Singapore and significant minority populations up to 9 million in Thailand, 9 million in Indonesia, 7 million in Malaysia, 1.6 in Myanmar, 1.2 in the Philippines and one million in Vietnam. The overseas populations in those areas arrived between the 16th and 19th centuries mostly from the maritime provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, followed by Hainan. There were incidences of earlier emigration from the 15th centuries in particular to the Malaysian state of Malacca. Urban areas with large Chinese populations within Asia include the Thai capital Bangkok and the city-state of Singapore – with each approximately 3 million – and the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian state of Penang and the Indonesian capital Jakarta with hundreds of thousands.
Approximately 4 million Chinese live in the US, and 1.5 in Canada. As for as Latin America, approximately 1.5 million live in Peru. Australia has approx. 900.000 Chinese immigrants, and the UK and France count a bit less Chinese immigrants than Australia.
Peru is the only Latin American country with a large Chinese population. Why is that? Wikipedia explains: “Chinese immigrants, who in the 19th century took a four-month trip from Macau (then a Portuguese territory), settled as contract laborers or ‘coolies’. Other Chinese coolies from Guangdong followed.
One hundred thousand Chinese contract laborers, 95% of which were Cantonese and almost all of which were male, were sent mostly to the sugar plantations from 1849 to 1874 during the termination of slavery. They were to provide continuous labor for the coastal guano mines and especially for the coastal plantations where they became a major labor force (contributing greatly to the Peruvian Guano Boom) until the end of the century. While the ‘coolies’ were believed to be reduced to virtual slaves, they also represented a historical transition from slave to free labor. Another group of Chinese settlers came after the founding of Sun Yat-sen‘s republic in 1912 World War II, and the establishment of Communist rule in 1949.
Recent Chinese immigrants settled in Peru from Hong Kong and, again, Macau because of fear of their return to Communist rule in 1997 and 1999, while others have come from other places in mainland China, Taiwan, and Southeast Asian Chinese communities, These recent Chinese immigrants make Peru the home of the largest ethnic Chinese community in Latin America.
As for Africa, “while there is a long history of limited migration from China to Africa, the past decade has brought tens of thousands of Chinese to African cities, towns, and rural areas. These migrants are part of the growing political, economic, and sociocultural ties between China — now the world’s second largest economy — and the poorest and most underdeveloped continent. In 2009, the Chinese population in Africa was estimated at between 580,000 to 820,000. Today, that number is likely closer to (or even over) 1 million, although exact counts are virtually impossible to ascertain due to the mobility of Chinese migrants as well as highly porous borders within Africa” publishes the ‘Migration Policy Institute’, a Washington, US, think-tank.
Investment migration. “In recent years, ‘investment emigration’ has made up a larger part of China’s overseas emigration wave,” said Wang Huiyao, director of CCG in the Chinese paper China.org.cn.
Meanwhile, overseas real estate investment has skyrocketed. According to data from CCG, Chinese people have been the second largest group of overseas buyers in the American housing market since 2011, after the Canadians.
“Nearly half of China’s millionaires consider emigration” publishes the Chinese newspaper ‘Xinhua’ in 2011. Still in 2011, forty-six percent of the 980 respondents said they intended to emigrate in the survey jointly conducted by the ‘Hurun Research Institute’ and ‘Bank of China’. The survey findings have been published in the ‘Private Banking White Paper’ 2011. The survey targeted China’s ‘high net worth individuals’ with personal asset above 10 million yuan (1.58 million U.S. dollars) in 18 major cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, Nanjing, Dalian and Suzhou.