For those of you who like statistics I have an overload here.  Here’s a breakdown of the ethnic Chinese in America.  There are a few conclusions that may be surprising.  Firstly the median household income is considerably higher than average – about 27% higher.  Secondly the Chinese population are under-represented as self employed – although working for a family business will not show as being self employed.

Two interesting facts are the number of foreign born Chinese Americans and the number who speak a language other than English.

One of the eye openers about China is the number of ethnic Chinese people who live outside China.  Some notable numbers from Wikipedia:

• The United States has 3 million Chinese, of whom 2 million claim not to speak English “very well”.
• Canada has 1.3 million ethnic Chinese – almost 4% of the population
• In Australia and New Zealand the Chinese population is around 2.5% of the total population
• France and the United Kingdom each have around 300,000 ethnic Chinese people
• Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia have a combined Chinese population of 22.8 million.  As they tend to be more wealthy than their non-Chinese neighbours, that’s quite a nice market.

That looks like quite a few valuable niches to market to.

For those of our readers in the tourist sector we have found a paper on two of our favourite subjects – the Overseas Chinese and tourism.  It’s a long read.