Legacy of the Overseas Chinese

See also: Imperial China, Chinese Revolutions, World War II in China

While Chinese people have been travelling overseas for millennia, most notably along the Silk Road, the first significant wave of Chinese emigration took place in the wake of the Voyages of Zheng He, who established a tributary relationship with the Malacca Sultunate in the early 1400s. Many Chinese men emigrated to Malacca and married the local Malays, giving rise to the Peranakan (or Straits Chinese) community whose culture is a unique fusion of Chinese and Malay cultures.

In the latter stages of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), China was being picked apart by foreign powers, while domestically it was plagued by corruption and incompetent governance, resulting in political instability and numerous civil wars. The Republic of China (1911-1949) also had internal problems such as warlordism, plus a Japanese invasion and then a civil war which it lost to the Communists. During these periods, many Chinese people left their homelands to search for greener pastures, putting down roots in foreign lands to establish overseas Chinese communities, most notably in Southeast Asia, but also with smaller pockets of settlement in Latin America, the Caribbean, India, South Africa, Mauritius, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Japan, Korea and Western countries.

The 18th and 19th century China trade certainly had its positive side; many legitimate commodities were traded and some merchants, both Chinese and foreign, amassed large fortunes. However, it also had a negative side revolving around "pigs and poison", indentured labourers and opium. In both Canada and the US, the first large influx of Chinese were workers to drive transcontinental railroads (see Rail travel in the United States and Rail travel in Canada) through the Rocky Mountains. These workers were treated quite badly and died in large numbers; the same could be said of the mainly Irish workers who built the eastern parts of the railroads. Some of the oldest and still largest Chinatowns in North America — in San Francisco and Vancouver — arose at the western ends of these railroads. Following the completion of the railroads, both countries would swiftly pass laws severely limiting Chinese immigration. Gold rushes also led to many Chinese people emigrating to Western countries to seek their fortunes in the gold mines, with the Chinese communities in San Francisco and Melbourne in particular tracing their origins to those gold rushes. San Francisco is still known as 舊金山/旧金山 in Chinese, meaning "old gold mountain", while Melbourne used to be called 新金山, meaning "new gold mountain" in reference to the earlier gold rush in San Francisco.

Since the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, as well as the start of the decolonisation process following the end of World War II, the overwhelming majority of Chinese emigration has been to Western countries, including much "secondary emigration" of non-Western overseas Chinese to Western countries. In particular, many of the "boat people" who fled Vietnam and Cambodia after the end of the Vietnam War were ethnic Chinese. While many of the defeated Nationalist troops fled to Taiwan, a group of Nationalist soldiers from Yunnan and their families instead fled by land into Myanmar and later, Thailand, eventually settling in remote mountainous villages on the Thai side of the border, where they would be granted Thai citizenship in exchange for help in fighting communist insurgents in Thailand. Moreover, many of the rich and well-educated upper class Chinese fled persecution at the hands of the communists following the Chinese Civil War to Taiwan, Hong Kong and Western countries, with more waves to follow during the upheavals of the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).

Following the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1985, in which the British agreed to return Hong Kong to China in 1997, many rich Hongkongers fled to English-speaking Western countries in the face of uncertainly over impending Chinese rule, with cities like London, Sydney, Melbourne, Vancouver, Toronto, San Francisco and New York City having many Cantonese speakers who fled from Hong Kong during that period. Following the imposition of the National Security Law in 2020, there has been a new wave of Hongkongers fleeing to Western countries in search of political freedom, with the United Kingdom and Canada receiving particularly large numbers of them.

Despite being ethnically Chinese, many immigrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan and their descendants reject the "Chinese" identity, and instead identify solely as overseas Hongkongers/Taiwanese.

Many cities around the world have a Chinatown district, some quite small and others with a population in the hundreds of thousands. These are often known in Chinese as táng rén jiē (唐人街), street of the Tang people. Wikivoyage has a list at Chinatown.

Main article: Overseas Chinese cuisine

Chinese immigrants often brought their culinary traditions with them, but also adapted their cooking to the tastes of locals in their destination countries and availability of ingredients, thus resulting in entirely new cuisines developed. For most Westerners, the most familiar type of overseas Chinese cuisine is American Chinese food, with virtually identical cuisines also having developed in Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

In Thailand, the ethnic Chinese have been so dominant in the street food industry that Thai cuisine would be virtually unrecognisable without its Chinese influences. Chinese-style baozi have also been widely adopted by the local populations in Japan and virtually all Southeast Asian countries.