Chinese Americans

Chinese Americans are Americans of Chinese ancestry. Chinese Americans constitute a subgroup of East Asian Americans which also constitute a subgroup of Asian Americans. Many Chinese Americans have ancestors from mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, as well as other regions that are inhabited by large populations of the Chinese diaspora, especially Southeast Asia and some other countries such as Australia, Canada, France, South Africa, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Chinese Americans include Chinese from the China circle and around the world who became naturalized U.S. citizens as well as their natural-born descendants in the United States.

The Chinese American community is the largest overseas Chinese community outside Asia. It is also the third-largest community in the Chinese diaspora, behind the Chinese communities in Thailand and Malaysia. The 2016 Community Survey of the U.S. Census estimated the population of Chinese Americans of one or more races to be 5,081,682. According to the 2010 census, the Chinese American population numbered about 3.8 million. In 2010, half of the Chinese-born people in the United States lived in California and New York.

About half or more of the Chinese ethnic people in the U.S. in the 1980s had roots in Taishan, Guangdong, a city in southern China near the major city of Guangzhou. In general, much of the Chinese population before the 1990s consisted of Cantonese or Taishanese-speaking people from southern China, predominately from Guangdong province. During the 1980s, more Mandarin-speaking immigrants from Northern China and Taiwan immigrated to the U.S. In the 1990s, a large wave of Fujianese immigrants arrived in the US, many illegally, particularly in the NYC area. The Chinese population in much of the 1800s and 1990s was almost entirely contained to the Western U.S., especially California and Nevada, as well as New York City. Originally, Chinese immigrants and their descendants generally lived in Chinatowns (especially the ones in San Francisco and New York), or Chinese populated districts in downtowns of major cities.