Infographic: Breaking down China's expat population

By Erik Crouch

China has no shortage of foreign nationals seeking to come and see the sights, work at international firms, clog tourist spots and give every major city "that street" of fratty bars. The folks over at China Briefing have churned out a helpful set of diagrams explaining the country's booming expat population, from the small clusters in Liaoning to the booming laowai locales of Guangdong and Shanghai.

There's one slight (ok, major) caveat to these illustrations, and that's that the most recent National Census was carried out in 2010. The proportions of foreigners per province and city should still be representative, but the numbers themselves are not: five "China years" is a long time when dealing with a group like expatriates, who frequently have limited life-spans within the country.
Guangdong, with megalopolises like Shenzhen and Guangzhou, leads the group, but Shanghai is a close second. While Beijing is far from a foreigner desert, it's still a very distant third.

Towards the south of China, a la Yunnan and Guangxi provinces, a significant number of Vietnamese and Burmese (Myanmar) residents have made their marks. And there's always some love for Jiangsu province, home to Nanjing, Suzhou and the Shanghai-commuting crowd, as well as a staggering 97,000 foreigners living in "other" provinces.

These charts do not include the sizable foreign population living in Hong Kong, nor do they include Hong Kongers, Taiwanese or Macao residents living in the Mainland.

It's also worth remembering that, while 3% of the 2010 numbers means that 18,000 Germans are living in the country - nothing to scoff at - that means that Germans represent .0013% of the population of China. In other words, if more than a few of your friends are Germans, you are likely in a very small social circle.

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