in the past set up small enterprises such as street vending to eke out a living.
Commercial success Chinese emigrants are estimated to control US$2 trillion in liquid assets and have considerable amounts of wealth to stimulate economic power in
China. The Chinese business community of Southeast Asia, known as the
bamboo network, has a prominent role in the region's private sectors. In Europe, North America and Oceania, occupations are diverse and impossible to generalize; ranging from catering to significant ranks in
medicine,
the arts and academia. Overseas Chinese often send
remittances back home to family members to help better them financially and socioeconomically. China ranks second after India of top remittance-receiving countries in 2018 with over US$67 billion sent.
Assimilation , 2006 Overseas Chinese communities vary widely as to their degree of
assimilation, their interactions with the surrounding communities (see
Chinatown), and their relationship with China.
Thailand has the largest overseas Chinese community and is also the most successful case of
assimilation, with many claiming
Thai identity. For over 400 years, descendants of Thai Chinese have largely intermarried and assimilated with their compatriots. The present royal house of Thailand, the
Chakri dynasty, was founded by King
Rama I who himself was partly of Chinese ancestry. His predecessor, King
Taksin of the
Thonburi Kingdom, was the son of a Chinese immigrant from Guangdong Province and was born with a Chinese name. His mother, Lady Nok-iang (), was
Thai (and was later awarded the
noble title of Somdet Krom Phra Phithak Thephamat). In the
Philippines, the Chinese, known as the
Sangley, from
Fujian and
Guangdong were already migrating to the islands as early as 9th century, where many have largely intermarried with both
native Filipinos and
Spanish Filipinos (
Tornatrás). Early presence of
Chinatowns in overseas communities start to appear in
Spanish colonial Philippines around 16th century in the form of
Parians in
Manila, where Chinese merchants were allowed to reside and flourish as commercial centers, thus
Binondo, a historical district of Manila, has become the world's oldest Chinatown. Under Spanish colonial policy of
Christianization,
assimilation and
intermarriage, their colonial mixed descendants would eventually form the bulk of the
middle class which would later rise to the
Principalía and
illustrado intelligentsia, which carried over and fueled the elite ruling classes of the
American period and later independent Philippines. Chinese Filipinos play a considerable role in the
economy of the Philippines and descendants of Sangley compose a considerable part of the
Philippine population.
Ferdinand Marcos, the former president of the Philippines was of Chinese descent, as were many others. community. Most of them in Singapore were once concentrated in
Katong.
Myanmar shares a long border with China so ethnic minorities of both countries have cross-border settlements. These include the
Kachin,
Shan,
Wa, and
Ta'ang. In
Cambodia, between 1965 and 1993, people with Chinese names were prevented from finding governmental employment, leading to a large number of people changing their names to a local, Cambodian name. Ethnic Chinese were one of the minority groups targeted by
Pol Pot's
Khmer Rouge during the
Cambodian genocide.
Indonesia forced Chinese people to adopt Indonesian names after the
Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66. In
Vietnam, all Chinese names can be pronounced by
Sino-Vietnamese readings. For example, the name of the previous
paramount leader Hú Jǐntāo () would be spelled as "Hồ Cẩm Đào" in Vietnamese. There are also great similarities between Vietnamese and Chinese traditions such as the use Lunar New Year, philosophy such as
Confucianism,
Taoism and ancestor worship; leads to some
Hoa people adopt easily to Vietnamese culture, however many Hoa still prefer to maintain Chinese cultural background. The official census from 2009 accounted the Hoa population at some 823,000 individuals and ranked 6th in terms of its population size. 70% of the Hoa live in cities and towns, mostly in Ho Chi Minh city while the rests live in the southern provinces. On the other hand, in Malaysia, Singapore, and
Brunei, the ethnic Chinese have maintained a distinct communal identity. In
East Timor, a large fraction of Chinese are of
Hakka descent. In Western countries, the overseas Chinese generally use romanised versions of their Chinese names, and the use of local first names is also common.
Discrimination Overseas Chinese have often experienced hostility and
discrimination. In countries with small ethnic Chinese minorities, the
economic disparity can be remarkable. For example, in 1998, ethnic Chinese made up just 1% of the population of the Philippines and 4% of the population in Indonesia, but have wide influence in the Philippine and Indonesian private economies. The book
World on Fire, describing the Chinese as a "market-
dominant minority", notes that "Chinese market dominance and intense resentment amongst the indigenous majority is characteristic of virtually every country in Southeast Asia except Thailand and Singapore". This asymmetrical economic position has incited
anti-Chinese sentiment among the poorer majorities. Sometimes the anti-Chinese attitudes turn violent, such as the
13 May Incident in Malaysia in 1969 and the
Jakarta riots of May 1998 in Indonesia, in which more than 2,000 people died, mostly rioters burned to death in a shopping mall. During the Indonesian killings of 1965–66, in which more than 500,000 people died, ethnic Chinese Hakkas were killed and their properties looted and burned as a result of
anti-Chinese racism on the excuse that
Dipa "Amat" Aidit had brought the
PKI closer to China. The
anti-Chinese legislation was in the Indonesian constitution until 1998. The state of the
Chinese Cambodians during the Khmer Rouge regime has been described as "the worst disaster ever to befall any ethnic Chinese community in Southeast Asia." At the beginning of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1975, there were 425,000 ethnic Chinese in Cambodia; by the end of 1979 there were just 200,000. It is commonly held that a major point of friction is the apparent tendency of overseas Chinese to segregate themselves into a subculture. For example, the anti-Chinese
Kuala Lumpur racial riots of 13 May 1969 and
Jakarta riots of May 1998 were believed to have been motivated by these racially biased perceptions. This analysis has been questioned by some historians, notably
Kua Kia Soong, who has put forward the controversial argument that the 13 May incident was a pre-meditated attempt by sections of the ruling Malay elite to incite racial hostility in preparation for a
coup. In 2006, rioters damaged shops owned by Chinese-
Tongans in
Nukualofa. Chinese migrants were evacuated from the riot-torn
Solomon Islands. Ethnic politics can be found to motivate both sides of the debate. In Malaysia, many "
Bumiputra" ("native sons")
Malays oppose equal or meritocratic treatment towards Chinese and
Indians, fearing they would dominate too many aspects of the country. The question of to what extent ethnic Malays, Chinese, or others are "native" to Malaysia is a sensitive political one. It is currently a taboo for Chinese politicians to raise the issue of Bumiputra protections in parliament, as this would be deemed ethnic incitement. Many of the overseas Chinese emigrants who worked on railways in North America in the 19th century suffered from racial discrimination in Canada and the United States. Although discriminatory laws have been repealed or are no longer enforced today, both countries had at one time introduced statutes that barred Chinese from entering the country, for example the United States
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (repealed 1943) or the Canadian
Chinese Immigration Act, 1923 (repealed 1947). In both the United States and Canada, further acts were required to fully remove immigration restrictions (namely United States' Immigration and Nationality Acts of
1952 and
1965, in addition to Canada's). In Australia, Chinese were targeted by a system of discriminatory laws known as the "
White Australia Policy" which was enshrined in the
Immigration Restriction Act 1901. The policy was formally abolished in 1973, and in recent years
Australians of Chinese background have publicly called for an apology from the Australian Federal Government similar to that given to the 'stolen generations' of indigenous people in 2007 by the then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. In September 2004, the
Spanish city of
Elche experienced an anti-Chinese riot, where around 500 people demonstrated in the city's Carrus industrial zone chanting "Chinese out" and set fire to the warehouse of a Chinese shoe shop and a container causing losses of 800,000 euros (US$984,000). The locals reported that the Chinese caused resentment not because of their numbers (there are far more
North African and
Latin American immigrants), but because they felt that the Chinese economic practices threatened their age-old social customs, employment norms, and labor relations in Spain. In South Korea, the relatively low social and economic statuses of
ethnic Korean-Chinese have played a role in local hostility towards them. Such hatred had been formed since their early settlement years, where many Chinese–Koreans hailing from rural areas were accused of misbehaviour such as
spitting on streets and
littering. despite the
Korean Justice Ministry recording a lower crime rate for Chinese in the country compared to native South Koreans in 2010. ==Relationship with China==