Chinese South Africans

Chinese South Africans (traditional Chinese: 華裔南非人; simplified Chinese: 华裔南非人) are Overseas Chinese who reside in South Africa, including those whose ancestors came to South Africa in the early 20th century until Chinese immigration was banned under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1904. Chinese industrialists from the Republic of China (Taiwan) who arrived in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, and post-apartheid immigrants to South Africa (predominantly from mainland China) now outnumber locally-born Chinese South Africans.

South Africa has the largest population of Chinese in Africa, and most of them live in Johannesburg, an economic hub in southern Africa.

The first Chinese to settle in South Africa were prisoners, usually debtors, exiled from Batavia by the Dutch to their then newly founded colony at Cape Town in 1660. Originally the Dutch wanted to recruit Chinese settlers to settle in the colony as farmers, thereby helping establish the colony and create a tax base so the colony would be less of a drain on Dutch coffers. However the Dutch failed to find anyone in the Chinese community in Batavia who was prepared to volunteer to go to such a far off place. There were also some free Chinese in the Dutch Cape Colony. They made a living through fishing and farming and traded their produce for other required goods. From 1660 until the late 19th century the number of Chinese people in the Cape Colony never exceeded 100.

Chinese people began arriving in large numbers in South Africa in the 1870s through to the early 20th century initially in hopes of making their fortune on the diamond and gold mines in Kimberley and the Witwatersrand respectively. Most were independent immigrants mostly coming from Guangdong Province then known as Canton. Due to anti-Chinese feeling and racial discrimination at the time they were prevented from obtaining mining contracts and so became entrepreneurs and small business owners instead.

The Chinese community in South Africa grew steadily throughout the remainder of the 19th century, bolstered by new arrivals from China. The Anglo-Boer War, fought between 1898 and 1902, pushed some Chinese South Africans out of the Witwatersrand and into areas such as Port Elizabeth and East London in the Eastern Cape. Areas recorded to have Chinese populations moving in to settle at the time include Pageview in Johannesburg that was declared a non-white area in the late 1800s and known as the "Malay Location" Large-scale immigration into South Africa during this time was prohibited by the Transvaal Immigration Restriction Act of 1902 and the Cape Chinese Exclusion Act of 1904. A host of discriminatory laws similar to the anti-Chinese laws that sought to restrict trade, land ownership and citizenship were also enacted during this time. These laws, similar to the earlier Chinese Exclusion Act in the United States, were largely made popular by a general anti-Chinese feeling across the western world during the early 1900s and the arrival of over 60,000 indentured Chinese miners after the second Anglo-Boer War.

These early immigrants arriving between the 1870s and early 1900s are the ancestors of most of South Africa's first Chinese community and number some 10,000 individuals today.

In 1903, the Transvaal Chinese Association was formed to represent the interests of the 900 or so Chinese people who lived in the Transvaal province.

There were many reasons why the British chose to import Chinese labour to use on the mines. After the Anglo-Boer War, production on the gold mines of the Witwatersrand was very low due to a lack of labour. The British government was eager to get these mines back online as quickly as possible as part of their overall effort to rebuild the war-torn country.