Chinese People in Germany - Community Relations and Divisions

Community Relations and Divisions

Germans generally perceive the Chinese as a monolithic group, owners of grocery stores, snack bars, and Chinese restaurants, and sometimes as criminals and triad members. In actuality, the community is wracked by internal divisions, largely of political allegiances; pro-Taiwan (Republic of China) vs. pro-Mainland (People's Republic of China), supporters vs. opposers of the Chinese democracy movement, etc. One rare example of the various strands of the community coming together in support of a common cause arose in April 1995, when Berlin daily Bild-Zeitung published a huge feature item alleging that Chinese restaurants in the city served dog meat; the story appears to have been sparked by an off-color quip by a German official during a press conference about a pot of mystery meat he had seen boiling in a Chinese restaurant kitchen. Chinese caterers and restaurants suffered huge declines in business, as well as personal vilification by their German neighbours. The protests which the various Chinese associations organised in response carefully sidestepped the issue of German racism towards the Chinese, instead focusing mainly on the newspaper itself and the fact that it had published false statements which harmed people's businesses and livelihoods, in an effort to avoid alienating the mainstream community. They eventually achieved what one scholar described as a "meagre victory": a retraction by Bild-Zeitung. However, the success of the protests laid some foundation for further professional cooperation among Chinese restaurateurs.

Germany also boasts a small number of Uyghurs, a Turkic-speaking ethnic minority of China who live in the Xinjiang region in northwest China; they form one of the few obvious communities of Chinese national minorities in Europe. Though they are Chinese nationals or formerly held Chinese nationality, their cultural and political identity is defined largely by opposition to China, and for the most part they do not consider themselves part of the Chinese community. The initial Uyghur migrants to Germany came by way of Turkey, where they had settled after going into exile with the hope of one day achieving independence from China; they remigrated to Munich as a small part, numbering perhaps fifty individuals, out of the millions of gastarbeiter who came from Turkey to Germany beginning in the 1960s. Most worked in semi-skilled trades, with some privileged ones of a political bent achieving positions in the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Their numbers were later bolstered by post-Cold War migration directly from Xinjiang to Germany, also centred on Munich.