Colonialism and European Chinatowns
Some European Chinatowns have extraordinary histories while others are still relatively new developments. Many early Chinese traders settled in several European port cities and established several communities. The oldest Chinatown in Europe is in Liverpool, England. It was established in the early 19th century when Liverpool began importing cotton and silk from Shanghai. In the 1910s, Mainland Chinese labourers from the Zhejiang province who remained in France established the first Chinatown of Paris. There are other Chinese who "jumped ship" to Europe after working as hired hands on European ships or docks.
As a legacy of European colonialism in Asia, many Asian subjects of British and Continental European empires immigrated to the colonizing country. During the 1950s, immigrants from Hong Kong began migrating to the United Kingdom in large numbers, which resulted in the formation of London's second Chinatown in the Soho district. Some Chinese from the former Portuguese colony of Macau have resettled in Portugal.
In 1998, many more Chinese Indonesian immigrants arrived to escape the violent pogroms in Indonesia towards ethnic Chinese (mainly as a result of the Asian financial crisis of 1997).
After the fall of Saigon at the close of the Vietnam War, the ethnic Chinese boat people from Vietnam were resettled in France and Germany in the late 1970s and 1980s and began settling extensively in Paris's Chinatown and immensely revitalising the area during that time. Paris's Chinatown currently has a vibrant Southeast Asian ethnic Chinese character, while its newer counterpart in the Belleville is largely consists of fairly recent Mainland Chinese. Some Chinese Vietnamese refugees also ended up in Hong Kong, then a British-administered territory. These Vietnamese were resettled in the United Kingdom, (there are several Vietnamese businesses in London's Chinatown).
Although Mainland China was carved into several Western spheres of influence, the country as a whole was not a colony of a foreign maritime power. Nevertheless, many mainland Chinese, legal and undocumented immigrants, have especially contributed to the development of Chinese communities in Europe, including the currently nascent Chinatown in the Esquilino district of Rome, Italy. There has been new immigration from Fujian and Zhejiang provinces of China, many of whom are illegal immigrants who work in the unskilled service industries–especially in restaurants and garment sweatshops—of Europe.
Read more about this topic: Chinatowns In Europe
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