Chinese Canadians

Chinese Canadians are Canadians of full or partial Chinese ancestry, which includes both naturalized Chinese immigrants and Canadian-born Chinese. They comprise a subgroup of East Asian Canadians which is a further subgroup of Asian Canadians. Demographic research tends to include immigrants from Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, as well as overseas Chinese who have immigrated from Southeast Asia and South America into the broadly defined Chinese Canadian category.

Canadians who identify themselves as being of Chinese ethnic origin make up about 5.1% of the Canadian population, or about 1.77 million people according to the 2016 census.

While other Asian groups are growing rapidly in the country, the Chinese Canadian community fell slightly to 1.71 million, or 4.63% of the Canadian population, in the 2021 Canadian census.

The Chinese Canadian community is the second largest ethnic group of Asian Canadians after Indians, constituting approximately 30% of the Asian Canadian population. Most Canadians of Chinese descent are concentrated within the provinces of Ontario and British Columbia.

The first record of Chinese in what is known as Canada today can be dated back to 1788. The British fur trader John Meares hired a group of roughly 70 Chinese carpenters from Macau and employed them to build a ship, the North West America, at Nootka Sound, Vancouver Island, British Columbia. This was then an important European outpost on the Pacific coast, disputed between Spain and Britain. The British post was seized by Spain, and thereafter was abandoned by Meares. The later fortunes of the Chinese carpenters is unknown.

Before 1885 and the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), access to British Columbia from other parts of Canada was difficult. The creation of a better transportation system was essential to integration of British Columbia into the new Confederation.

Chinese railway workers made up the labour force for construction of two one-hundred mile sections of the Canadian Pacific Railway from the Pacific to Craigellachie in the Eagle Pass in British Columbia. When British Columbia agreed to join Confederation in 1871, one of the conditions was that the Dominion government build a railway linking B.C. with eastern Canada within 10 years. British Columbian politicians and their electorate agitated for an immigration program from the British Isles to provide this railway labour, but Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald, betrayed the wishes of his constituency (Victoria) by insisting the project cut costs by employing Chinese immigrants to build the railway, and summarized the situation this way to Parliament in 1882: "It is simply a question of alternatives: either you must have this labour or you can't have the railway." (British Columbian politicians had wanted a settlement-immigration plan for workers from the British Isles, but Canadian politicians and investors said it would be too expensive).^{[citation needed]}

Chinese communities in Canada in the 19th and well into the 20th centuries were organized around the traditional kinship systems linking people belonging to the same clans together. As not everyone in the Chinese communities necessarily belonged to the same clans, "voluntary" associations that functioned in many ways like guilds that provided social welfare, community events and a forum for politics became very important in Chinese-Canadian communities. Linking together all of the voluntary associations were Benevolent Associations that in effect ran the various Chinatowns in Canada, mediating disputes within the communities and providing for leaders who negotiated with Canadian politicians.