Inner-city
Johannesburg has a Chinatown on
Commissioner Street, but a newer Chinatown can be found on Derrick Avenue in the hilly suburb of
Cyrildene. Most of the inhabitants of the Cyrildene Chinatown are recent immigrants from
mainland China. A Chinatown also exists in the city of
Port Elizabeth with the first settlement located in the South End district of the city until the
Apartheid government forcibly removed the Chinese from the district. The Chinese were later removed to Kabega Park area. In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s immigrants from Taiwan settled extensively in South Africa. South Africa's first Taiwan-born legislator was elected in the 1980s. After South Africa recognised the People's Republic of China in 1998 large numbers of
mainland Chinese immigrated to the country.
South African Chinese are dispersed throughout South African cities. During the
Apartheid regime (1948–93) Chinese South Africans were classified as "
Coloureds" or "
Asian South Africans", while certain East Asian nationals (such as Japan and Taiwan) in South Africa were declared
honorary whites and thus avoided most forms of official discriminatory laws (they could live in reserved
white neighborhoods unlike
native/black, and
Asian-
Indian South Africans), since Apartheid created a strict racial segregation system for non-white/European persons (esp. the black majority) in South Africa. =="Africatowns" in China==