The overseas migration of millions of Chinese reached its peak in

the 1920s when thousands of farmers and fishermen from the

southeastern coastal provinces settled in other countries of South-
east Asia. Chinese constitute a majority in Singapore, are an
important ethnic group in Malaysia, and make up a significant
minority in the Americas. In 1949, after the Communist victory,
some two million civilians and 700,000 military personnel were
evacuated to Taiwan.

Since in many places abroad the Chinese population has been

growing at a rate faster than that of the local non-Chinese
population, most countries have been trying to curtail the entrance
of new Chinese immigrants. Emigration from China under the PRC
government was once limited to refugees who reached Hong Kong,
but is now denied only to a few political dissidents, if the state is
reimbursed for postsecondary education costs. Immigration is for
the most part limited to the return of overseas Chinese. At the end
of 1999, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR) reported 285,000 Vietnamese refugees in China, 91% of
whom are of Chinese ancestry.

During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, more than
60 million students, officials, peasant migrants, and unemployed
were sent "down to the countryside" in a gigantic rustication
movement. The goals of this program were to relocate industries
and population away from vulnerable coastal areas, to provide
human resources for agricultural production, to reclaim land in
remote areas, to settle borderlands for economic and defense
reasons, and, as has been the policy since the 1940s, to increase
the proportion of Han Chinese in ethnic minority areas. Another
purpose of this migration policy was to relieve urban shortages of
food, housing, and services, and to reduce future urban population
growth by removing large numbers of those 1630 years of age.
However, most relocated youths eventually returned to the cities.

Efforts to stimulate "decentralized urbanization" have characterized

government policy since the late 1970s. Decentralized urbanization
and the related relocation of industries away from established
centers has also been promoted as a way for China to absorb the
increasing surplus labor of rural areas, estimated at 100 million in
2000. However, China's economic boom of the 2000s led to rapid
growth of coastal provinces attracting inland rural males for
construction and females to work in factories. This contrast extends
to how children are perceived. Urban parents call their only child
"little sun" (as in "center of the universe"), compared with rural
parents, who call their child or children "left behind," (with their
grandparents, as parents travel distances for work). For rural areas
another split has developed: migrant work for the young and farming
for the old.

On 1 July 1997, the sovereignty of Hong Kong reverted back to

China. As of 1999, some 1,562 refugees and screened-out
nonrefugees still remained in the Hong Kong Special Administrative
Region (SAR). In 2004, there were 299,305 refugees living in China,
all but 135 in camps. In addition, 44 people sought asylum in China.
The main countries to which Chinese emigrated in 2004 were the
United States, Canada, South Africa, France, and the United
Kingdom. Chinese sought asylum in India, the United
States, Germany and Canada. In 2005, the net migration rate for
China was estimated as -0.4 migrants per 1,000 population. The
government views the migration levels as satisfactory.