Chinese people in Germany

Distribution of Chinese citizens in Germany (2021)
Total population
163,000[1]
Regions with significant populations
Berlin,[2]Frankfurt am Main,Ruhr Area,Munich,Hamburg,Braunschweig,Nuremberg,Hanover,Leipzig
Languages
Numerousvarieties of Chinese (predominantlyMandarin,Hokkien,Wu, andCantonese),German;[2]English not widely spoken[3]
Religion
Buddhism,[4]Christianity,Atheism,Non-adherence
Related ethnic groups
Overseas Chinese

Chinese people in Germany form one of the smaller groups ofoverseas Chinese in Europe, consisting mainly ofChinese expatriates living in Germany andGerman citizens of Chinese descent.^[5] As of 2024, the Chinese community in Germany was estimated to be around 163,000 by theFederal Statistical Office of Germany.^[1] In comparison to that, the TaiwaneseOCAC had estimated there were 110,000 people of Chinese descent living in Germany in 2008.^[6]

Though not well known even to local Chinese communities which formed later, the earliest Chinese in Germany, Feng Yaxing and Feng Yaxue, both fromGuangdong, first came to Berlin in 1822 by way of London.^[7]Cantonese-speaking seafarers, employed on Germansteamships asstokers,coal trimmers, and lubricators, began showing up in ports such as Hamburg and Bremen around 1870.^[5] Forty-three lived in Hamburg by 1890, 207 persons in 1910, mostly former seamen.^[8][9] Hamburg boasted the only Chinatown in Germany (actually only one or two streets). In the 1890s, many shipping companies began to replace their white crews with much cheaper Chinese (also Indian and African) labour, esp. for the extremely tiresome work in the engine rooms (often at more than 40 °C temperature). Among the 47,780 registered members of theSeeberufsgenossenschaft (roughly Seamen's Insurance Society) around 1900, more than 3,000 were Chinese.^[10] The labour unions and theSocial Democratic Party strongly disapproved of their presence; their 1898 boycott of Chinese crews, motivated by racial concerns, resulted in the passage of a law by theReichstag on 30 October 1898 stating that Chinese could not be employed on shipping routes to Australia, and could be employed on routes to China and Japan only in positions that whites would not take because they were detrimental to health. Mass layoffs of Chinese seafarers resulted.^[11]

Since the 1880s, there were debates about employing Chinese "coolies" as farm workers inEast Elbia, i.e.Prussia's extensive eastern provinces characterised by large agricultural estates. Usually Eastern Europeans, esp.Poles, provided the necessary labour there but German emigration from these areas, higher Polish fertility and an increasing political mobilisation of the Polish minority stoked anxieties about their "infiltration", esp. through mixing with the local Germans. Some observers saw a solution in introducing a totally alien ethnic element which would be easier to segregate (e.g.Friedrich Syrup, later director of the Reich Labour Bureau in lateWeimar andNazi times). The Chinese were seen as especially resistant to cultural assimilation, on the basis of experiences inAustralia andNorth America. Estate owners therefore pushed for their immigration or at least a consideration of such proposals, e.g. inPomerania in 1889. Public and administrative opinion was "almost totally negative", due to unfavorable opinions in the English-speaking world at the time (cf.Yellow Peril) and fears of racial miscegenation. Nevertheless, thePrussian Foreign Office made inquiries, e.g. about Chinese workers in theNetherlands East Indies. After receiving a comprehensive report from Beijing in 1895, the Office concluded on the grounds of transport and wage costs that such plans were not promising success. A new wave of proposals came in 1906/07 but failed similarly after a statement by German colonial authorities fromKiautschou, China.^[12]

Aside from seafarers, students formed the other major group of Chinese living in Germany at the turn of the century. In 1904, at the time ofSun Yat-sen's visit to Germany and otherWestern European countries, more than twenty joined the anti-QingChinese United League he organised in Berlin.^[13] There were also groups of travelling entertainers fromShandong, with a smaller proportion fromZhejiang, who came to Germany overland, travelling throughRussia andPoland to reach Berlin.^[14]

Chinese workers were also employed in theGerman overseas colonies, similar to British and French practices. Until 1894, about 1,000 "coolies" were recruited forGerman East Africa butcorporal punishment and the tropical climate were so severe the British colonial authorities inSingapore andHong Kong did not permit further emigration. Another focus of migration were the Pacific colonies where Chinese workers were deemed indispensable for the lucrative plantations. In 1914, there were 1,377 Chinese inGerman New Guinea (against 1,137 whites) and 2,184 Chinese onSamoa (against 373 Germans). Tensions with the Chinese government about the brutal treatment of workers never fully ceased. The Chinese were never given the same rights as whites, but were treated similar to the natives due to their supposedly "inferior level of culture". There were, however, also efforts to prevent mixing with the natives.^[15]

Chinese formed the fourth largest group of foreign students in Germany by the mid-1920s. Many became involved with radical politics, especially in Berlin; they joined theCommunist Party of Germany, and were responsible for setting up its Chinese-language section, theZirkel für chinesische Sprache.^[16] Chinese communists such asZhu De andLiao Chengzhi remained active in the late 1920s and early 1930s; Liao succeeded in organising a strike among Chinese sailors in Hamburg to prevent the shipment of armaments to China.^[17]

The Nazis, who came to power in 1933, did notclassify the Chinese as racially inferior to the Japanese, but because so much of the Chinese community had ties to leftist movements, they fell under increased official scrutiny regardless, and many left the country, either heading toSpain to fight in theCivil War that was raging there, or returning to China.^[18] As late as 1935, theOverseas Chinese Affairs Commission's statistics showed 1,800 Chinese still living in Germany; more than one thousand of these were students in Berlin, while another few hundred were seafarers based in Hamburg.^[13] However, this number shrank to 1,138 by 1939.^[19]

After the Chinese government declared war on Nazi Germany following theattack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, theGestapo launched mass arrests of Chinese Germans and Chinese nationals across Germany,^[20] In 1942, the 323 who still lived in Berlin were all arrested and sent to the Langer Morgenwork camp.^[21] Many were tortured or worked to death by the Gestapo.^[22] By the end of World War II, every Chinese restaurant in Hamburg had closed.^[23]

After the war, the Chinese government sent officials to organise repatriation for the few hundred Chinese who remained in Germany. Of the 148 from Hamburg, only one, a survivor of Langer Morgen, declined repatriation; he opened the Peace Restaurant, Hamburg's first post-war Chinese restaurant. However, those who departed were soon replaced by new immigrants. In 1947, there were 180 Chinese inBerlin's western sector, and another 67 in theeastern sector; a year later, those numbers had grown to 275 and 72, respectively. With the establishment of the People's Republic of China and its subsequent recognition by East Germany, many traders moved to East Berlin, expecting that there they would be better protected there by their homeland's new government.^[24] West Germany did not formally recognise theRepublic of China onTaiwan (ROC) and did notestablish relations with the People's Republic of China PRC until 1972.^[24]

Migration of ethnic Chinese toWest Germany in the 1960s and 1970s was drawn primarily from the communities ofBritish Chinese andChinese in the Netherlands.^[25] Other re-migrants came from Italy, Portugal, and Spain.^[26] German authorities generally preferred not to issue residence permits toPRC nationals.^[25] Regardless, numbers of PRC and ROC nationals in Germany continued to increase, with 477 from the former and 1,916 from the later by 1967.^[27] In addition to individual migrants, both the PRC and the ROC provided workers with specific skills to Germany under bilateral agreements. The ROC sent a total of 300 nurses in the 1960s and 1970s.^[24] In the case of the PRC, the agreement signed in 1986 for China to provide 90,000 industrial trainees to East Germany was barely implemented by the time theBerlin Wall fell; out of the 90,000 whom the Chinese agreed to send, barely 1,000 went, and all but 40 had gone back home by December 1990.^[24] Immigration from the PRC to West Germany was much larger than that to East Germany; in 1983, the number of PRC nationals living there surpassed the number of ROC nationals, and by 1985 had grown to 6,178, versus only 3,993 ROC nationals. By just eight years later, their numbers had more than quintupled; 31,451 PRC nationals lived in Germany, as opposed to only 5,626 ROC nationals.^[27] There were also tens of thousands of ethnic Chinese not included in either of the above categories, primarilyVietnamese people of Chinese descent and Hong Kong residents withBritish National (Overseas) passports.^[28]

In East Germany, there were slightly fewer than 1,000 Chinese "contract workers" (Vertragsarbeiter) from the People's Republic in the late 1980s. TheSED leadership signalled its support to theCCP's handling of theTiananmen massacre in the summer of 1989. In return, when increasing emigration deepened the GDR's socio-economic crisis in autumn 1989, the PRC Minister of HousingLin Hanxiong offered "to provide the GDR with the number and qualification of workers as desired." As this proposal came only days before the collapse of the East German regime however, it was quickly made obsolete by the rapid political changes.^[29]

Food service has remained a dominant means of making a livelihood in the Chinese community.^[30] Even students in Germany who earned doctorates in the sciences have ended up starting restaurants or catering services, rather than engaging in any work related to their studies.^[2]

In Berlin, many Chinese restaurants can be found inWalther Schreiber Platz, as well as alongAlbrechtstrasse andGrunewaldstrasse.^[23] The travel agency business is another one in which intra-ethnic networks have proven valuable; Chinese travel agencies in Germany sell primarily to other Chinese making return trips to their country of origin. Estimates of the number of Chinese travel agencies in Germany range between thirty-five and a few hundred.^[31] In contrast, marine-based industries no longer employ a very large proportion of the Chinese community; by 1986, Chinese formed no more than 2%, or 110 individuals, of the foreign workforce on German vessels.^[2]

Students also continue to form a large portion of Germany's Chinese population. In comments to German chancellorHelmut Kohl in 1987,Deng Xiaoping stressed his desire to diversify the destinations of Chinese students going overseas, aiming to send a larger proportion to Europe and a smaller proportion to the United States.^[32] By 2000, Chinese formed the largest group of foreign students in German universities, with 10,000 in 2002 and 27,000 in 2007.^[33][34] Schools aimed at the children of Germany's Chinese residents have been set up as well; as early as 1998, there were two Chinese schools in Berlin, one run by the city government, and the other privately established by a group of parents.^[23]Stuttgart boasts one such school as well; however, Chinese graduate students who intend to return to China after graduation typically choose instead tohome-school their children in accordance with China's national curriculum, to aid their re-integration into the public school system.^[35]

Second-generation Chinese students were more likely to attend a Gymnasium (college preparatory school) than their ethnic German counterparts.^[36]

In 2023, there were 155,955 nationals of thePeople's Republic of China living in Germany.^[1] The number of Taiwanese citizens living in the country stood at 5,885 (as of 2013).^[37] In addition, there is a large number of Chinese people who naturalized as German citizens or who are natively born in the country. Between 2004 and 2007 alone, 4,213 PRC nationalsnaturalized as German citizens.^[38] In addition to that, the Chinese community in Germany also consists of tens of thousands^[2] of ethnic Chinese from countries such asSingapore,Malaysia andIndonesia.

The growth of the Chinese community can be exemplified by the city ofDuisburg. In 2010, there were 568 citizens of the PRC inDuisburg; in 2018, the population was approximately 1,136.^[39] The number does not include naturalized German Chinese.

After 1989, the number of illegal mainland Chinese immigrants who arrived in Germany by way of Eastern Europe began to increase, only to decrease in the mid-1990s; on average, authorities caught 370 each year in the late 1990s, though they believe the actual extent of illegal migration to be much larger. Many illegal migrants work in restaurants, whose managers sponsor their migration costs and require them to pay them back.^[40] Such costs usually amount between toRMB 60,000 and 120,000, paid tosnakeheads (Chinesepeople smugglers). Due to network effects, illegal Chinese migrants to Germany largely come from the vicinity ofQingtian,Zhejiang; they are mostly men between twenty and forty years old.^[41] Migrants may come as tourists and then overstay (either by applying for a tourist visa on their genuinePRC passport, or obtaining a forged passport from a country with a large Asian population whose nationals are granted visa-free travel to Germany), or they may be smuggled across the Czech-German border.^[42]

Germans generally perceive the Chinese as a monolithic group, owners of grocery stores, snack bars, and Chinese restaurants, and sometimes as criminals andtriad members.^[43] 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 theChinese democracy movement, etc.^[44] One rare example of the various strands of the community coming together in support of a common cause arose in April 1995, when Berlin dailyBild-Zeitung published a huge feature item alleging that Chinese restaurants in the city serveddog meat; the story appears to have been sparked by an off-color quip by a German official during a press conference about a pot ofmystery 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.^[45] 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.^[46] They eventually achieved what one scholar described as a "meagre victory": a retraction byBild-Zeitung. However, the success of the protests laid some foundation for further professional cooperation among Chinese restaurateurs.^[44]

Germany also boasts a small number ofUyghurs, aTurkic-speakingethnic minority of China who live in theXinjiang region innorthwest China; they form one of the few obvious communities of Chinese national minorities in Europe.^[47] Though they are Chinese citizens or formerly held Chinese citizenship, their ethnic 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.^[48] The initial Uyghur migrants to Germany came by way of Turkey, where they had settled after going into exile with the hope of one dayachieving independence from China; they remigrated toMunich as a small part, numbering perhaps fifty individuals, out of the millions ofgastarbeiter whocame 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.-fundedRadio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Their numbers were later bolstered by post-Cold War migration directly from Xinjiang to Germany, also centred on Munich.^[49]

In 2005, figures from Germany'sFederal Statistical Office showed 71,639People's Republic of China nationals living in Germany, making them the second-largest group of immigrants fromEast Asia in the country.^[50] In 2005, only 3,142 Chinese, or 4.3%, were born in Germany; this was far below the average of 20% for all non-citizens.^[51]

• China–Germany relations
• Germany-Taiwan relations
• Sino-German cooperation until 1941

• Benton, Gregor (2007), "Germany",Chinese Migrants and Internationalism, Routledge, pp. 30–37,ISBN 978-0-415-41868-3
• Cheng, Xi (2002), "Non-Remaining and Non-Returning: The Mainland Chinese Students in Japan and Europe since the 1970s", in Nyíri, Pál; Savelev, Igor Rostislavovich (eds.),Globalizing Chinese Migration: Trends in Europe and Asia, Ashgate Publishing, pp. 158–172,ISBN 978-0-7546-1793-8
• Christiansen, Flemming (2003),Chinatown, Europe: An Exploration of Overseas Chinese Identity in the 1990s, Routledge,ISBN 978-0-7007-1072-0
• Giese, Karsten (1999), "Patterns of Migration from Zhejiang to Germany", in Pieke, Frank; Malle, Hein (eds.),Internal and International Migration: Chinese Perspectives, Surrey, United Kingdom: Curzon Press, pp. 199–214
• Gütinger, Erich (1998), "A Sketch of the Chinese Community in Germany: Past and Present", in Benton, Gregor; Pieke, Frank N. (eds.),The Chinese in Europe, Macmillan, pp. 199–210,ISBN 978-0-312-17526-9
• Gütinger, Erich (2004),Die Geschichte Der Chinesen in Deutschland: Ein Überblick über die ersten 100 Jahre ab 1822, Waxmann Verlag,ISBN 978-3-8309-1457-0
• Kirby, William C. (1984),Germany and republican China, Stanford University Press,ISBN 978-0-8047-1209-5
• Leung, Maggi W. H. (2003), "Notions of Home among Diaspora Chinese in Germany", in Ma, Laurence J. C.; Cartier, Carolyn L. (eds.),The Chinese Diaspora: Space, Place, Mobility, and Identity, Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 237–260,ISBN 978-0-7425-1756-1
• Leung, Maggi (2005), "The working of networking: Ethnic networks as social capital among Chinese migrant businesses in Germany", in Spaan, Ernst; Hillmann, Felicitas; van Naerssen, A. L. (eds.),Asian Migrants and European Labour Markets: Patterns and Processes of Immigrant Labour Market Insertion in Europe, Routledge, pp. 309–331,ISBN 978-0-415-36502-4
• Van Ziegert, Sylvia (2006),Global Spaces of Chinese Culture: Diasporic Chinese Communities in the United States and Germany, CRC Press,ISBN 978-0-415-97890-3

• Giese, Karsten (2003), "New Chinese Migration to Germany: Historical Consistencies and New Patterns of Diversification within a Globalized Migration Regime",International Migration,41 (3):155–185,doi:10.1111/1468-2435.00245
• Leung, Maggi Wai-han (2004),Chinese Migration in Germany: Making Home in Transnational Space, Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation,ISBN 978-3-88939-712-6

• Asian diaspora in Germany
• Chinese expatriates in Germany
• Chinese diaspora by country
• Chinese diaspora in Europe

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