Abstract
In this chapter we present historical overviews and analyses of current data on the overseas Chinese populations in the three Southeast Asian countries of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines and in the three Pacific countries of the United States, Canada, and Australia. We also present and discuss current data on the numbers of overseas Chinese throughout the world and its major regions, and we note how these distributions have changed over the past decades. We also present a discussion of the different types of emigrations from China and show how they figured into the immigrations of Chinese into the six Southeast Asian and Pacific countries just noted. In our chapter, we define an overseas Chinese person as a Chinese individual who resides outside the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Macau. We discuss and justify this definition in more detail in our chapter. We show that in around 2018, there were nearly 48.7 million overseas Chinese residing in over 149 countries. Also, of the three Southeast Asian countries receiving the major focus in our chapter, Indonesia has the most Chinese of all the countries in the world, almost 8.4 million. The other two Southeast Asian countries, Malaysia and the Philippines, have, respectively, the third largest number of overseas Chinese (6.6 million) and the seventh largest number (1.5 million). The United States has the fourth largest number of Chinese of all the countries in the world (4.6 million). The other two Pacific countries of Canada and Australia have, respectively, the sixth largest number of Chinese (1.6 million) and the eleventh largest number (0.95 million).
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Poston, D.L., Zhang, H. (2021). The Overseas Chinese Communities in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. In: Minas, H. (eds) Mental Health in China and the Chinese Diaspora: Historical and Cultural Perspectives. International and Cultural Psychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65161-9_11
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