The Largest Overseas Chinese Communities in Non-Asian Countries

China has long held the top spot in terms of population, but will probably lose that title soon. As the largest country by population, it's no surprise that especially during turbulent times, there have been rather large migrations out of the country. It's been well-documented through various historical research about the paths that some of these people took. There were "many first steps" for all of these migrants to other countries. Some countries took them with open arms while others did not. The overall population of overseas Chinese is one of the largest if not the largest migrant group in the world. There is a wide range of books available on Amazon for further reading about the general diaspora as well as the spread to certain countries.

I am one of many--an Asian American which represents currently about 6.5% of the total population. I know there are many other countries which have a significant population of Asian immigrants, and I was curious as to which non-Asian countries had the highest percentage of Asian immigrants by percentage of total population. I thought that was an easy question to answer, but after a search of readily available databases, I was not able to quickly look it up due to a few reasons that I will get into shortly.

I quickly found a Wikipedia article about "Overseas Chinese," but the information was incomplete as most entries were missing the percentages within each country of Chinese. I continued looking for other compilations of demographic information and as an example, I found that in the World Fact book, each country had their ethnic makeup listed, but for some countries (e.g. Kenya), Asians were grouped with other minority groups from other parts of the world.¹ For other countries, sometimes each original country was broken up individually while other countries grouped all Asians together. However, the definition of each ethnic minority group was a little vague as well. After looking into it, each country might have a different definition of Asian. Some countries include South Asian countries (e.g. U.K.) and others include Middle East countries (e.g. Sweden) while others exclude some of these countries (e.g. Canada) by having a separate category.²

The lack of standardization of the nomenclature of ethnic groups makes it a bit difficult to pinpoint the exact figures especially when there exist these varying definitions. Part of the problem with the groupings is that they could be based on race or biology or geographical definitions which by themselves are not that clearly defined. Racial and biological groupings can be controversial and up for debate as well especially with mixed race groups. What percentage of your ancestry is considered significant enough to be considered of that race? As a lot of the reporting is self-reported, it's probably mostly up to each individual what they consider themselves but when the government-provided questionnaire only contains their own pre-defined groupings, it ends up not truly determined by the individual. The U.S. Census Bureau provided a brief describing the history of the terminologies and groupings used for the census, and in the most recent census of 2010, people had the option to self-identify as multiple races. A Pew Research article has an interesting history of census-taking of multiracial Americans. It mentions that race was actually not self-reported until 1960, so before that year, the government decided your racial classification. The question of racial classification has a lot of political ramifications in today's government including drawing district boundary lines.

A quote from this article describes the changing nature of the census and categories over the years:

"The first census in 1790 had only three racial categories: free whites, all other free persons and slaves. 'Mulatto' was added in 1850, and other multiracial categories were included in subsequent counts. The most recent decennial census, in 2010, had 63 possible race categories: six for single races and 57 for combined races. In 2010, 2.9% of all Americans (9 million) chose more than one racial category to describe themselves. The largest groups were white-American Indian, white-Asian, white-black and white-some other race."

Within the World Factbook country demographic summaries, there were a few countries where "Other" and "Unspecified" were fairly large groups where Asians could be part of those groups. Belgium has 12.8% "Others" specified, and as no Asian groups are listed otherwise,¹ it would seem that Asian are considered as "Others." Belgium's official government website does not list any Asian minorities.³ It makes sense to perhaps use "Others" when it's a very small part of the population, but when the category represents over 10%, it seemed a little odd that it was not broken down further. Was it for the sake of consistency? I'm not sure, but in any case, that and other countries' classification system made it difficult to find out exact figures.

There are world population databases available, but they mostly focused on health, economic, age, or gender factors. The World Bank, the U.N., and the U.S. Census Bureau all have data analysis tools for the world population but none of them seemed to have ethnic information. However, after further digging through the U.N. Statistics Division website, I was able to find a tool to get ethnic information.

I downloaded the latest overall table from that tool to further examine the question. To make the question simpler, I chose to look at specifically the Chinese population. However, there were still issues with that because for some countries' demographic numbers, Chinese could be part of the Asian group and so you're left without a specific Chinese population count. Also, the years that certain countries did their census-taking differ so there's a combination of many years spread out with the demographic count information. Even the definition of Chinese could have issues as well as sometimes Taiwan and Hong Kong was broken out and other times included as Chinese.

My goal in going through the data was to find larger countries with a population more than 500,000 that had a Chinese population of 1% or higher. I cross-checked some information from the Wikipedia page on "Overseas Chinese" after making the filtering and tabulations of percentages from the raw data, and I noticed that Peru and Venezuela were listed in the Wikipedia page as above 1% for the countries that listed the percentage. The most recent figure I could obtain was 1.3 million Chinese in Peru.⁴ For Venezuela, according to the figures on Wikipedia (which may or may not be accurate), the Chinese population in Venezuela is around 1.3%. I was looking through and noticed that the original U.N. report data did not include France, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela in the downloaded overall table for some reason. In any case, I tried to verify the information with latest resources to get the final figures. For these final figures, it was often the case that the government website specifically stated only Chinese and did not include Hong Kong and Taiwan immigrants, so I used this definition to keep things simpler and more consistent.

Here's the final table of countries with population larger than 500,000 that had a Chinese population larger than 1% outside of Asia, and it includes the year data (i.e. population estimate or census date) are from:

Country	Year	Chinese Population	Total Population	Percentage
Australia	2016	1,310,505	23,401,8925	5.60%5
Peru	2008	1,300,0004	28,641,9806	4.54%
Panama	2003	135,0007	3,116,0008	4.33%
New Zealand	2013	171,4119	4,242,04810	4.04%
Canada	2011	1,324,70011	32,852,32012	4.03%
Suriname	2012	7,88513	541,63813	1.46%
USA	2015	4,760,80414	330,487,44215	1.44%
Venezuela	2016?	400,00016	31,568,17917	1.27%

As for the overall history and extent of the Chinese diaspora, here are a few overviews I found during a search on the Chinese diaspora:

• Mapping Migration
• Chinese Diaspora
• Migration from China

In terms of sheer numbers of Chinese without regard to percentage of population or geographic location of the country, you can find a pretty comprehensive list at the Wikipedia page.

Going through this whole exercise gave me more appreciation of the types of issues and questions that come up when analyzing such demographic data. What started as a simple question turned out to have more nuances and layers than originally expected--something that seems to happen quite often.

Exploring this topic also helped lead me to a website that is all about Chinatowns across the world. I've visited quite a few of these Chinatowns especially in North America and East Asia, but I never realized there were so many across other parts of the world as well. I hope to cover these and other overseas East Asian communities in more detail in future posts. Stay tuned.