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Chinese overseas
This Week in AsiaEconomics

What happened to India’s disappearing Chinese migrants?

  • New but long overdue census data shows thousands fewer Chinese migrants now call the South Asian country home
  • Difficulty in obtaining long-term visas and a trend in Tibetan refugees leaving for the West cited as contributing factors

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Chinese workers of the ‘Statue Of Unity’, near Vadodara in India’s western Gujarat state. New census data shows thousands fewer Chinese now live in India. Photo: AFP
Omkar Khandekar
More than a few eyebrows were raised when the Indian government released its latest census data in the last week of July – and not just because it was nearly eight years late.
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One of the biggest surprises was that the survey showed a massive drop in the number of Chinese immigrants in the country.

Between 2001 and 2011, the overall number of Chinese immigrants fell from 23,712 to 14,951, with the trend even more noticeable in certain segments of the population. The number of Chinese who had been living in India for more than 20 years, for example, had more than halved, dropping from 11,588 in 2001 to 5,164 in 2011.

While the data provides a snapshot of 2011 (an official attributed the delay to “manpower issues”), experts said the forces driving the decline – both difficulty in obtaining long-term visas and a trend in Tibetan refugees leaving for Western countries – continued today.
Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives in Ahmadabad, welcomed by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. New Indian census data shows far fewer Chinese call India home. Photo: AP
Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives in Ahmadabad, welcomed by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. New Indian census data shows far fewer Chinese call India home. Photo: AP
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Expatriate businessmen and Tibetan refugees make up a significant portion of the migrant Chinese population in India. While Kolkata and Mumbai are both home to populations of ethnic Chinese families, many of these settled generations ago so were not counted as Chinese migrants for the purposes of the census.

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