Five fascinating facts about Spain's Chinese community

They’re the seventh largest foreign population group in Spain

Chinese nationals are the seventh largest foreign population in Spain, trailing Moroccans, Romanians, Brits, Colombians, Italians and Venezuelans. 

As of the 2021 data, there are 223,999 Chinese people officially resident in Spain, according to figures from INE, Spain's national statistics body. 

Since 1998, the number of citizens born in China living in Spain has increased exponentially, from 1,036 to the current figure.

Yet despite that, the number of people born with at least one Chinese parent in Spain has been falling from the peak of 4,862 in 2009 to just 1,865 in 2021.

The majority of the Chinese population in Spain are concentrated in bigger urban areas, namely the regions of Madrid (63,694), Catalonia (63,753), Valencia (26,003) and Andalusia (22,348).

There have been waves of Chinese migration to Spain 

The first large groups of Chinese migrants arrived in Spain at the end of the 19th century, but it was after the First World War that they began to settle in Xībānyá or 西班牙 (how Spain is pronounced and written in Chinese) to sell goods from town to town. 

A large group arrived in the 1920s from France, where they had fought in the First World War, and according to Gladys Nieto, professor of Anthropology of China at the Autonomous University of Madrid, some even played a role in the Spanish Civil War.

"During the Civil War an important group of these emigrants returned to China due to the harsh conditions," she says, "while others participated in the defence of the Republican government." 

A larger influx of Chinese migrants arrived in Spain in the 1970s - the decade during which Spain first established diplomatic relations with China - and the population grew steadily until the 1990s, when it began to take off.

The more lenient migratory policies of former Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Zapatero in the mid 2000s led Spain’s Chinese population to surpass the 200,000 mark. 

Chinese International Brigades fought alongside the Republicans against Franco in the Spanish Civil War.

 

They're expanding their business model 

The Chinese community in Spain prefer to work for themselves, with 59,000 out of the 104,000 Chinese citizens registered with Spanish social security being self-employed - 57 percent.

Traditionally they’ve run corner shops and in recent years bazaars - huge shops that seemingly had everything you could ever want. Need a new curtain rail? A toaster? Some paint? Fake flowers? Your local bazaar (or el chino as Spaniards call it) will probably have it.  

But with the closure of local businesses during the pandemic, many Chinese residents have been keen to expand their traditional business base and branch out into bakeries, pharmacies, nail salons, among others. 

The Chinese have also been taking over bars and restaurants from the children of Spanish owners who don't want or can't continue the family business, cooking up Spanish recipes rather than Chinese food for Spaniards all day, all week. 

This is particularly true in Valencia, where the Chinese community has a very strong presence in the hospitality sector.

According to Joaquín Beltrán Antolín, a professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, "there has always been a great mobility of opening and closing businesses" among the Chinese in Spain. 

"They are on standby," he says, "waiting to see a new sector gives them an opportunity to invest, which is how it has always happened: first they were restaurants, then bazaars, hairdressers, bars."

There has been growing interest for children to be taught Mandarin at schools in Spain over the past decade. (Photo by GERARD JULIEN / AFP)

 

They tend to come from one Chinese province

The majority of the Chinese that come to Spain (and Italy) largely come from the same part of China. 

Most come from the cities of Wenzhou and Qingtian, both in Zhejiang province in the southeast of the country. 

However, according to professor Joaquín Beltrán Antolin,, this trend is changing. "Qingtian is still the main city of origin of those who are here, but fewer and fewer are coming from there because basically all those who wanted to leave have already left," he says.

Members of the Chinese "Xiquets de Hangzhou" human tower team celebrate after forming a "castell" during the Catalan celebration in the city of Tarragona in 2016. (Photo by LLUIS GENE / AFP)

 

They face discrimination in Spain 

"Urban legends have associated them with illegal activities, strange cultural practices, the exercise of unfair competition, as well as the display of economic power," Chinese Anthropology professor Gladys Nieto told National Geographic in 2021.

This sinophobia, or anti-Chinese sentiment, was heightened during the Covid-19 pandemic in Spain, as elsewhere around the world, due to accusations and rumours over the origins of the virus. 

The truth is that over the past decade there have been some organised Chinese criminal gangs operating in Spain, with far more of an emphasis on money laundering than on violence. When there has been sexual exploitation or human trafficking, the victims have also tended to be Chinese. 

A 2022 investigation also found that the Chinese government operates covert ‘police stations’ in Spain which track their own citizens abroad. 

However, this does not represent Spain’s Chinese population as a whole, nor take away from the fact that there is a second generation of Chinese young people born in Spain (165,000 as of 2018) - known as chinoles - who are fully integrated into Spanish culture and speak native Spanish, while not letting go completely of their heritage.

"Being one of the first (generation of chinoles) has forced us to lead the way and normalise the fact that we do not have Spanish faces," David Wu Xu, a Valencian of Chinese parents, told El País in 2017. 

They’ve expressed how the use of el chino (the Chinaman) to refer to the corner shops or bazaars that Spain’s Chinese community often run only serves to perpetuate racist stereotypes and dehumanise them.