  | |
 | |
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| 60,000 (2018)[1] | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Karachi,Lahore,Peshawar,Faisalabad,Port Qasim andIslamabad | |
| Languages | |
| English · Urdu · Mandarin Chinese · Cantonese · Uyghur · other languages of China | |
| Religion | |
| Irreligion,Buddhism | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Chinese diaspora |
TheChinese people in Pakistan (Urdu:چینی) comprise one ofPakistan's significant expatriate communities. TheChina-Pakistan Economic Corridor has raised the expatriate population, which has grown from 20,000 in 2013 to 60,000 in 2018.[1][2]
During the 1940s manyChinese Muslims fled unrest inChina and settled inKarachi.[3] However the Chinese community there is primarily of non-Muslim origins; their ancestors wereBuddhists, but subsequent generations follow other religions or none at all. About 30% are estimated to have converted toIslam.[4]
Most Chinese in Karachi aresecond generation children of immigrants—the oldest generation have mostly died off, while the third generation have emigrated to other countries.[4] Common destinations for emigrants are the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, or to their ancestral country China.[3] They rarely wear Chinese clothing, but still retain the Chinese language, though in recent years they have shown increasinglanguage shift towardsUrdu.[3][4] Previously, the community was segregated by provincial origin, but with the establishment of a Chinese Committee to represent the community, they have become more integrated. They are concentrated in a few neighbourhoods, including near thePECHS andTariq Road, as well asSaddar and more recentlyClifton and Defence neighbourhoods inSaddar Town.[4] TheClifton andDefense Society areas has about 15Chinese restaurants; the area is sometimes unofficially referred to as "Chinatown".[5] One of the more well-known of these, the ABC Chinese Restaurant, founded by Li Dianxian (李殿贤) in the 1930s, was once patronised byZhou Enlai, and continued operating until 1988.[6]
Common professions include beauticians, shoemakers, dentists, and the restaurant trade; most members of the second generation tend to follow the same trade as their parents did.[4] Chinese dentists, in particular, have a reputation for providing quality service to the low-income residents of the city. Yet many of them are unlicensed and lack any formal training indentistry. Instead, many of their parents had previously lived among theChinese community in British Malaya (present-dayMalaysia) and worked as dental assistants; when they came to Pakistan in the 1940s, they began practicing as full dentists themselves. There was a shortage of dentists in Karachi at that time, as there was only one dental school in the entire province ofSindh, atHyderabad. They primarily provided simple procedures such as manufacture and fitting ofdentures as well asextraction of teeth; however, in later years, some prospered enough that they were able to hire formally trained dentists to provide more complex procedures.[7]
InLahore,Chinese Muslims established a mosque called theChini Masjid (Chinese Mosque). They typically intermarried with local people and assimilated.[8] The two Chinese shoemakers there, Hopson and Kingson, had a reputation for high quality.[9]
Despite the emigration of members of older communities, the Chinese population in Pakistan has been bolstered by new expatriate residents. As of 2007[update], there were roughly 3,500 Chinese engineers temporarily residing in Pakistan for work on various state-run projects in various locations, especially in the construction of theGwadar Port. Their total number might have been as high as 5,000.[10] About 1,200 were estimated to reside inIslamabad.[11] Then, between 2008 and 2009, the number of Chinese working in Pakistan grew sharply, to an estimated 10,000, even as expatriate workers of other nationalities left the country.[12] Year to date numbers of migrant Chinese approximate half a million due to the string of pearls policy for China oil consumption.
Some members ofethnic minorities of China, primarily MuslimUyghurs andTajiks fromXinjiang, have also settled in the northern parts of Pakistan.[citation needed] The earliest migrants, numbering in the thousands, came in the 1940s in fear ofcommunist persecution.[13] A few hundred more fled to Pakistan in the aftermath of a failed uprising inKhotan in 1954.[14] Later waves of migration came in 1963 and again in 1974.[15] Beginning in the 1980s, more Uyghurs who had left China to go on thehajj began settling in Pakistan instead of returning to China.[16]
There are Chinese community organisations in a number of Pakistani cities:
Because of the various threats to Chinese workers in Pakistan, the Chinese embassy have also formed a liaison committee with the Pakistani government to look into safety issues.[11]
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