If you are working with an online Chinese teacher or using a platform to learn Mandarin online, the Chinese diaspora is a subject you will probably encounter! That is, in cultural and historical contexts. The overseas Chinese population, known collectively as huáqiáo (华侨) or háiwài huárén (海外华人), numbers somewhere between 50 and 60 million people distributed across virtually every country in the world. It represents one of the largest and most geographically dispersed diaspora populations in human history, and understanding its origins, its internal diversity and its relationship to China as a state and as a cultural reference point is good for anyone engaging with Chinese culture and society.
The history of Chinese emigration a story of overlapping circumstances, originating in different regions of China and producing communities with distinct cultural characters. The earliest large-scale waves of emigration moved primarily southward and seaward, into the maritime world of Southeast Asia that Chinese merchants, sailors and labourers had been navigating since at least the Tang dynasty. By the Song and Ming periods, established Chinese communities existed in the ports of what are now Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, engaged primarily in trade and operating within the commercial networks that connected China’s southeastern coast to the broader Indian Ocean economy.
The Fujianese and Cantonese populations of China’s southeastern coast supplied the majority of these early migrants, a pattern that has left lasting traces in the cultural character of Southeast Asian Chinese communities. Hokkien, the southern Fujianese dialect, became the dominant language of Chinese communities across much of maritime Southeast Asia, functioning as a lingua franca among Chinese traders from different dialect backgrounds and maintaining that function in some communities to the present day.
The 19th century brought a qualitatively different wave of emigration. The combination of internal instability in China — the Taiping Rebellion alone killed tens of millions and displaced many more — colonial demand for cheap labour in newly opened territories, and the development of steamship routes that made transoceanic migration practically feasible for the first time produced a massive outflow of Chinese workers, predominantly from Guangdong province, to destinations including California, British Columbia, Australia, Peru, Cuba, the Caribbean and South Africa.
The contribution of Chinese labour to the infrastructure of the 19th century world is historically significant also. The transcontinental railroad of the United States, completed in 1869, was built substantially by Chinese workers who constituted the majority of the Central Pacific Railroad’s workforce on the western portion of the line. The Canadian Pacific Railway, completed in 1885, relied similarly on Chinese labour for its most difficult mountain sections. In Australia, Chinese miners played a significant role in the gold rushes of the 1850s before being progressively excluded by discriminatory legislation. In each of these contexts, the communities that remained after the immediate labour demand had passed established themselves under conditions of legal discrimination, social hostility and periodic violence, building institutions (clan associations, temples, benevolent societies, schools) that provided mutual support in environments where state protection was unavailable or withheld.
The legal frameworks governing Chinese emigration and the treatment of overseas Chinese communities varied dramatically by destination and period, but a common thread of exclusionary legislation runs through the 19th and early 20th century history of Chinese communities in white settler colonies.
The post-World War II period and particularly the liberalisation of immigration policies in Western countries from the 1960s onward produced a new wave of Chinese emigration with a substantially different demographic character. Better educated, more professionally qualified and increasingly drawn from Taiwan, Hong Kong and subsequently mainland China as well as from Southeast Asian Chinese communities, this wave of migrants established Chinese communities in European, North American and Australasian cities that were more economically integrated into host societies than their predecessors and less dependent on the insular clan and association structures that had sustained earlier communities.
Some Chinese language teaching institutions like GoEast Mandarin in Shanghai may also incorporate aspects of this diaspora history and the cultural diversity of overseas Chinese communities into their broader curriculum, recognising that a student whose understanding of Chinese culture is limited to mainland China could be missing a significant portion of the picture.
