Latest news with #Chinatowns
18-05-2025
- Business
Students and the Wealthy Drive Growth in Japan's Chinese Community
As Japan's Chinese population continues to grow, the latest arrivals include many students, as well as wealthy people hedging against future uncertainty in China. Waves of Migration Since the 1980s Chinese people living in Japan have become a growing presence, with the total population rising to 870,000 as of the end of 2024—2.6 times higher than in 2000. Some are fourth- or fifth-generation descendants living in Chinatowns in cities like Yokohama and Kobe. In this article, however, I will look at the shinkakyō, or new overseas Chinese, who settled after China's reform and opening up in 1978, as well as the more recent shin-shinkakyō—'new newcomers'—and examine how these groups differ. A store in Ikebukuro, Tokyo, selling foods targeting Chinese residents. Nearby are many Chinese restaurants. Photo taken March 21, 2025. (© In the wake of China's economic reforms, the first arrivals were mainly government-sponsored science students in their thirties or older. By the 1980s, these were joined by younger students in their twenties, including those studying the humanities. Many returned to China after their studies, but some remained and became the shinkakyō. One woman I know came to Japan in 1985 to join her husband who was studying here. She enrolled at a Japanese university and has lived in Japan for 40 years. Her friends are in the same generation, in their mid- to late sixties, and some are already retired. When they first arrived, there was a huge income gap between Japan and China, so even the elite, state-sponsored students had to work part time, including in physical labor. Through efforts to learn the language and integrate into Japanese society, many have established successful careers here. Some, whose parents in China have already passed away, have acquired Japanese citizenship and intend to stay permanently. The 1990s through the 2000s saw a rapid rise in the number of self-funded Chinese students and labor migrants who are now in their forties and fifties. Many who came to study at a Japanese university were in their twenties and have since become fluent in the language. They are also well versed in the rules and customs of Japanese society, largely because they needed to adapt quickly, given that there were not as many Chinese people in Japan at the time. Their second-generation children are often native Japanese speakers. Tokyo is home to 270,000 Chinese residents—about a third of the total in Japan—but the generation that arrived in the 1990s and 2000s has increasingly moved out to neighboring prefectures like Saitama, Kanagawa, and Chiba. More than half of residents of the Shibazono public housing project in Kawaguchi, Saitama, for example, are from China. A Post-Pandemic Shift The latest arrivals from China have quite different motives and backgrounds from their predecessors. These are people who came to Japan after around 2017, when the government of Xi Jinping began tightening its grip on Chinese society, even as the country gained unprecedented economic clout. Their numbers have risen sharply since the COVID-19 pandemic, and they are clearly of a younger, wealthier demographic. These 'new newcomers' come on student or work visas, as well as under business manager visas required to run a business in Japan; according to the Immigration Services Agency, 19,000 Chinese nationals in Japan had business manager visas as of the end of 2023. The ages of the recent arrivals vary widely, from their twenties to their sixties, with most students belonging to Generation Z. The number of Chinese people seeking to enroll in Japanese universities has increased since the early 2010s. Cram schools have capitalized on this trend, and there are now many schools for Chinese students in neighborhoods like Tokyo's Takadanobaba. Attending only a Japanese language school is not enough to pass a university entrance exam, so many Chinese students attend both kinds of school. A cram school poster aimed at Chinese students features former students who have gained admission to top universities, including the University of Tokyo. Photo taken in Takadanobaba March 21, 2025. (© Academically inclined students set their sights on elite national universities like the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University, as well as prestigious private institutions that are well known in China, such as Waseda University. But art colleges have also seen a sudden boom in popularity among Chinese students. This is likely because anime like Dragon Ball, Saint Seiya, One Piece, and Slam Dunk have been hugely popular in China since the late 1990s. Many who grew up watching these series and who admire the works of Studio Ghibli's Miyazaki Hayao and Suzume and Your Name. director Shinkai Makoto now come to study animation, filmmaking, and art in Japan. Contemporary visual artists like Nara Yoshitomo and Murakami Takashi also have a huge following in China. In the past, the parents of these students might have encouraged them to study economics, law, science, technology, or other subjects more conducive to a successful business career, but now that they are financially secure, they are more willing to support their children's personal aspirations. A February 8 article in the Nikkei Shimbun detailed the ongoing rise in Chinese students at Japanese art colleges; at institutions like Kyoto Seika University and Kyoto University of the Arts, they account for around 70% of all international students. While China has famous art colleges like the Central Academy of Fine Arts, their numbers are limited compared with the country's population, making admission intensely competitive. This makes the idea of studying in Japan—the home of many celebrated creators—more attractive to many young Chinese. According to cram school teachers, these students receive generous allowances from wealthy parents in China and do not need to work part-time. During my reporting, I have encountered students who receive more than ¥500,000 each month. 'Running' from Uncertainty Apart from students, there has been a huge recent increase in middle-class and wealthy Chinese people of all ages moving to Japan. This is not due to an interest in Japan's economy or society but rather a desire to escape China's restrictive policies seen during the Zero-COVID campaign in 2021 and 2022, which tightened state control over movement and information. A feeling of being trapped amid an economic slowdown prompted many to leave the country, either as a hedge against risk or out of concern about their children's future. During the Shanghai lockdown from the end of March to the end of May 2022, the word 润 (run) became popular in China. This has the meaning 'profitable' or 'to moisten,' while its romanization evokes the English word 'run,' and it has been used as a form of slang meaning to flee for a better life. Many chose destinations like Singapore and Western countries, while others opted for Japan, where they could rely on established Chinese communities. Other reasons to choose Japan included similarities in the language through its use of Chinese characters, a sense of security from being in East Asia, relative affordability, and social stability. An added incentive was the Japanese government's easing of visa requirements. A high-rise condominium in Toyosu, Tokyo. Such residences are popular with wealthy Chinese living in Japan. Photo taken February 2023. (© Nakajima Kei) Those in the affluent class sell their property in China or use part of their financial assets to buy luxury high-rises in central Tokyo. Many of them are well-educated corporate executives, and not a few have a negative view of China's current political leadership. These 'new newcomers' have high social standing in a country with a bigger economy than Japan. Those who own companies or maintain personal connections in China regularly shuttle between the two countries. Although they live in Japan, they do not necessarily intend to settle here for life. The latest group of arrivals is smaller in number than earlier generations of overseas Chinese, but they have economic clout and are attuned to the latest events in China, so they have a large voice in the community. If China's political system does not change, migration to Japan and other countries is likely to continue accelerating. (Originally published in Japanese on April 1, 2025. Banner photo: Cram school ads for Chinese students in Takadanobaba, Tokyo. Photo taken March 21, 2025. ©
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Chinatown businesses from coast to coast sound alarm over Trump's China tariff
[Source] President Donald Trump's tariff on Chinese imports continues to impact small businesses in Chinatowns across major cities, threatening their survival and the cultural fabric of communities that have persevered for generations. Catch up: Trump has slapped sweeping tariffs on all Chinese imports since 'Liberation Day' on April 2, with the latest levy at 145%. The effects have been palpable: in New York City's Chinatown, a 40-pound bag of rice that once cost $25 now sells for over $60, while restaurants in San Francisco's Chinatown report supply cost increases of up to 20%. For its part, Beijing responded with 125% retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods, escalating tensions before this weekend's talks between U.S. and Chinese economic officials in Switzerland. Just two weeks after saying his China tariff would 'come down substantially,' Trump rejected the idea on Wednesday, telling reporters 'no.' Higher costs, fewer customers: Cory Ng, who owns Phoenix Palace in New York City, explained the Chinese tariff's impact to CBS News: 'The rice, the soy sauce, our entire menu is built off that! We're not importing fresh ingredients like vegetables, but everything else around it — spices, seasonings, even our beers. Now it's double.' Trending on NextShark: In Austin's Chinatown, shoppers report both panic buying and 'putting things back.' 'We've seen a significant surge of Asian companies keen to invest here due to the tariffs, and we've also heard from small local companies planning to shut down,' Mark Duval, president of the Greater Austin Asian Chamber of Commerce, told KXAN. In San Francisco, Lucas Li, whose family runs spirituality supply store Lion Trading, told KALW that they paused all imports 'because we wouldn't know how to make those profits come back.' Meanwhile, San Francisco Chinese Chamber of Commerce President Donald Luu said restaurants are seeing about 20% less customers while merchants face 30% less sales since the tariff was enacted. Trending on NextShark: This story is part of The Rebel Yellow Newsletter — a bold weekly newsletter from the creators of NextShark, reclaiming our stories and celebrating Asian American voices. Subscribe free to join the movement. If you love what we're building, consider becoming a paid member — your support helps us grow our team, investigate impactful stories, and uplift our community. Subscribe here now! Trending on NextShark: Download the NextShark App: Want to keep up to date on Asian American News? Download the NextShark App today!
Time Magazine
28-04-2025
- Politics
- Time Magazine
How America Became Afraid of the Other
The United States has always had a tricky relationship with immigrants and refugees, even if part of the American mythology is that we are a land of newcomers. In this mythology, they—migrants—are a part of us. At the same time, the United States has also gone through periodic spasms of intense anti-immigrant feeling. So it is now, with the Trump Administration weaponizing the fear of the other and promoting a moral panic about strangers coming to our shores. When these people, including those who are also Americans, become seen as a threat to the nation, they are no longer a part of us. Instead, they become the other to our collective self as a country. This is not new. In the late 1800s, many Americans believed that Chinese immigrants brought disease, crime, and vice, along with an inhuman work ethic. The result was the burning of Chinatowns, the lynching of Chinese immigrants, and the banning of most Chinese immigration. With his tariffs, President Donald Trump may be targetting the Chinese even more explicitly than when he characterized COVID-19 as the 'kung flu,' but he did campaign on sealing American borders to protect the nation against Mexican 'rapists' in 2015 and alleged Venezuelan gangsters in 2024. His promised deportation campaign recalls the 1920s and 1930s when the government indiscriminately rounded up roughly 1 million Mexicans and Mexican American citizens and dispatched them to Mexico. Punishing this other takes the form of theater and spectacle, meant to entertain and satisfy some while silencing and disciplining the rest. Thus, renditioning alleged Venezuelan gangsters to El Salvador on flights operated by ICE is flaunted before cameras that record them as subhuman, heads shaved bald, anonymous, and humiliated in infantilizing uniforms of white shirts and shorts. Renditioning is a more appropriate word than deportation, since many people are being returned not to their country of origin but to somewhere else, like the migrants of many nationalities who ended up confined in a hotel and jungle camp in Panama. Renditioning also evokes the practice inflicted by the CIA on suspected terrorists vanished into so-called black sites, which suits how Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime authority last used to intern Japanese immigrants and Japanese American citizens in World War II, to describe alleged Venezuelan gangsters as 'terrorists' who are 'infiltrating' the United States. (Though, federal judges in both New York and Texas have challenged this action in the court system.) Presidents and states describing alleged criminals as terrorists should frighten us all because 'terrorist' is a name of infinite flexibility that can be applied to anyone whom the state says is subverting it. What is worse is that a 'War on Terror,' such as the one President George W. Bush declared in the wake of 9/11, can never be won. It is a state of permanent war, inflicted on an unending parade of others while also enforcing domestic conformity in a bipolar world, which Bush signaled when he said, 'You're either with us or against us.' While it may be possible to win a war against a particular set of enemies, how does one defeat terror? The threat of terror continues because terror has existed as long as curiosity and fear, love and hate, light and dark—as long as the human heart has beat. Communism, or any other ideology the administration in power doesn't agree with, might be defeated—but the terrorist never can, since terror is an unending wellspring, embodied by actual threats but also coming from within us and giving birth to ever-new demons. The War on Terror might have resonated with Americans because terror has been a part of American life since the first European settlers came to these shores. Perhaps the first terrifying others for these settlers were the Indigenous peoples, followed by the kidnapped and enslaved Africans whose labor and bodies made the United States possible. Or perhaps the first other for the settlers was the vast land itself, promising bounty and threatening disaster. That is still true today, as those invested in fossil fuels promise that the land can be dominated and rendered profitable, just as the particular others who worked the land, from enslaved people to migrant laborers, could be exploited. Whether it was through other humans or the land, the settlers had encountered what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas called the face of the Other, which Levinas argued could elicit feelings of compassion or terror. These polar opposite reactions continue to define our American political and cultural landscape. As some call for empathy for others, the Trump Administration characterizes these gestures as part of a 'diversity, equity, inclusion' ideology that must be destroyed. Whereas Levinas thought the face-to-face encounter with one's other was a crucial ethical task, Elon Musk believes that the 'fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,' opening it up to be taken over by non-Western and nonwhite people. It is no coincidence that those sent to El Salvador's prison are paraded with their heads forcibly bowed. We are not allowed to see their very human faces. It is not simply gangsters who are terrorists in the imagination that fear the other, it is refugees and immigrants, documented and undocumented, who are said to be seeking to replace white people. To protect themselves from the threat of expulsion, migrants are expected to profess uncompromising loyalty. Their difference from the norms of the nation—white, male, heterosexual, Christian—seemingly precludes them from the right to dissent that is supposed to be a part of Americanism. Thus, all of the international students who have so far been arrested and detained incommunicado for protesting what they argue is Israel's genocidal attack on Gaza are nonwhite, with origins in countries like Syria, Turkey, and South Korea. Whether or not one agrees with their speech, they, too, have free-speech rights as permanent legal residents and international students, protected by the U.S. Constitution. But it's worth asking how much separates a citizen, especially a nonwhite one or a naturalized one, from Columbia-graduate Mahmoud Khalil, who is a permanent legal resident—or Tufts graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, an international student, arrested by masked ICE officers who barely deign to show identification or badges. An erosion of those rights can be extended to citizens as well. As the line between arresting and kidnapping, official police and secret police, is blurred, we—citizen or noncitizen—are meant to be intimidated. We are meant to submit to power, to any masked person saying they are the law, just as the Venezuelans dispatched to El Salvador are meant to crouch before menacing, masked, armored guards. Domestically, the mechanisms of deportation or the state punishing its enemies are unlikely to stop with Venezuelans or advocates of a Palestinian state, since the mechanism of power is based on paranoia, with one threat metastasizing and expanding. The Trump Administration's crusade against pro-Palestinian students, for example, is enmeshed with its argument that it is defending Jewish people on and off campuses. But this is a weaponization of antisemitism, turning a very real racism into a tool to advance a political agenda whereby Palestinians become the new others, temporarily replacing Jewish people as perpetual others. Punishing assorted others quells empathy and dissent, for we do not want to be targeted ourselves. Hence the sight of those who might be considered other turning against those already marked as others, as in the case of documented immigrants condoning the deportation of undocumented immigrants. This goes deeper than paranoia precisely because this is a classic divide-and-conquer political strategy, illustrated by the Trump Administration methodically attacking university after university, law firm after law firm, immigrant group after immigrant group, individual after individual. Each hopes to be spared by the figurative firing squad, but predictably, none will be. The lesson to be learned is that we are not safer by sacrificing others. Authoritarian power will not be satisfied with one sacrifice or one enemy or one other but will require more, since that power thrives on the spectacle of punishment—the rendition. Each punishment further diminishes the ability of everyone else to resist that power. Meanwhile, the more power that authoritarianism accrues in its willingness to break any rule or law, the less power there is in those rules and laws to protect us. The solution to such an approach has always been the same but bears repeating: unity is our only hope, solidarity our primary strategy. We must refuse to be divided, even as we are offered the temptation of sacrificing others, or the bargain of giving up one right after another in the hopes of securing safety from unending terror. We are at a moment now where Trump is pursuing the idea of eroding, even ending, birthright citizenship, with the idea of sending 'homegrown' Americans to El Salvador's prisons. His Administration is also seeking an expansion of a for-profit immigrant detention system, with a budget of $45 billion. When do detention camps become concentration camps, which is what Franklin Delano Roosevelt initially called the places where Japanese Americans were interned? At what point will enough of us say enough? What might destroy our society is not immigrants or refugees or Palestinians or women seeking abortions or trans people or any of the other assorted others that have been posited as undermining American society. What might destroy us is our own fear, not just of the other who is a neighbor and a stranger but also of ourselves, of that black hole of abiding mysteries within us that so many of us cannot solve on our own. What might help us overcome that fear and terror is not to banish others but to keep company with them, to speak with them, to meet them face to face.
South China Morning Post
23-04-2025
- General
- South China Morning Post
Of New York's many Chinatowns, 3 stand out. How immigration shaped them over the decades
Chinatowns are often portrayed as gritty underworlds riddled with prostitution, gambling and drug trafficking. Some of this is rooted in truth, but that unfair depiction is largely the result of rampant xenophobia and cultural ignorance, especially in the West. Advertisement In a series of articles , the Post explores the historical and social significance of major Chinatowns around the world and the communities that shape them. New York has such an established Chinese population that the city is home to multiple Chinatowns. The original, in Lower Manhattan, is one of the oldest and biggest Chinese enclaves in the United States. Pell Street in Lower Manhattan Chinatown in 1979. Photo: Keystone/The neighbourhood's population was estimated to be more than 100,000 at its peak in the second half of the 20th century, mostly immigrants from mainland China's Guangdong and Fujian provinces and from Hong Kong. Advertisement In recent years, however, the neighbourhood's population has dwindled to less than 60,000, according to a report published by New York's Department of Small Business Services.
Time of India
21-04-2025
- Business
- Time of India
‘If tariffs keep going up—we'll shut down' — From NY to SF, Chinatowns reel under trade war - The Economic Times Video
Trump's trade war just landed in America's oldest Chinatowns. From New York to San Francisco, gift shop owners, jade sellers, and grocers are staring at empty shelves, rising prices, and dwindling tourist numbers. George Ma's shop in NYC has survived 27 years—but now, with Trump's 145% tariff on Chinese goods, even souvenir sales are the country, merchants are warning: if tariffs rise further, they won't just raise prices—they'll shut down.
