page_title: Overseas Chinese
section_title: Assimilation
hierarchical_section_title: Overseas Chinese / Chinese emigrant (Overseas Chinese) experience / Assimilation
caption_attribution_description: Photo of a wedding in East Timor, in the town of Liquiçá, in 10th June 2006. The little girls with the rings and baskets on the front row are all Hakka, as well as the mother of the bride on the far right and the witnesses (man and woman on both sides of the just-married couple). The bride is mestiza, Chinese-East Timorese. A lot of East Timorese of Hakka descent have converted to Catholicism, even if they continue attending traditional Chinese ceremonies at Chinese temples.
context_page_description: Overseas Chinese are people of ethnic Chinese birth who reside outside the territories of the People's Republic of China, its special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau, as well as the Republic of China. Although a vast majority are Han Chinese, the group represents virtually all ethnic groups in China.
context_section_description: Chinese diaspora vary widely as to their degree of assimilation, their interactions with the surrounding communities (see Chinatown) and their relationship with China.
  Thailand has the largest overseas Chinese community and is also the most successful case of assimilation, with many claiming Thai identity. For over 400 years, Thai Chinese have largely intermarried and/or assimilated with their compatriots. The present Thai monarch, Chakri Dynasty, is founded by King Rama I who himself is partly Chinese. His predecessor, King Taksin of the Thonburi Kingdom, is the son of a Chinese immigrant from Guangdong Province and was born with a Chinese name. His mother, Lady Nok-iang (Thai: นกเอี้ยง), was Thai (and was later awarded the feudal title of Somdet Krom Phra Phithak Thephamat).
  In the Philippines, Chinese, known as the Sangley, from Fujian and Guangdong were already migrating to the islands, as early as the 9th century in precolonial to Spanish and American colonial times and have largely intermarried with both indigenous Filipinos and Spanish colonisers. Early presence of chinatowns in overseas communities start to appear in Spanish colonial Philippines, around as early as 1583 (or even earlier), in the form of Parians in Manila, where chinese merchants were allowed to reside and flourish as commercial centers, thus Binondo, a historical district of Manila, has become one of the world's oldest chinatowns. Their colonial mixed descendants, known as the Mestizos de Sangley, would eventually form the bulk of the middle-class elite in Spanish colonial Philippines. The emergence of the Mestizo class would later rise to the noble Principalia class, which later carried over and fueled the elite ruling classes of the American era and later sovereign Philippines. Since the 1860s, most Chinese immigrants of the contemporary Chinese Filipinos have come from Fujian and thus form the bulk of the contemporary mixed and unmixed Chinese Filipinos and Filipinos of partial Chinese ancestry. Older generations have retained Chinese traditions and the use of Philippine Hokkien (Min Nan), while the current majority of younger generations largely communicate in English, Filipino and other Philippine languages and have largely layered facets of both Western and Filipino culture onto their Chinese cultural background.
  In Myanmar, the Chinese rarely intermarry (even amongst different Chinese linguistic groups), but have largely adopted the Burmese culture whilst maintaining Chinese cultural affinities. In Cambodia, between 1965 and 1993, people with Chinese names were prevented from finding governmental employment, leading to a large number of people changing their names to a local, Cambodian name. Indonesia and Myanmar were among the countries that do not allow birth names to be registered in foreign languages, including Chinese. But since 2003, the Indonesian government has allowed ethnic Chinese people to use their Chinese name or using their Chinese family name on their birth certificate.
  In Vietnam, all Chinese names can be pronounced by Sino-Vietnamese readings. For example, the name of the previous Chinese president Hú Jǐntāo (胡錦濤) would be spelled as "Hồ Cẩm Đào" in Vietnamese. There are also great similarities between Vietnamese and Chinese traditions such as the use Lunar New Year, philosophy such as Confucianism, Taoism and ancestor worship; leads to some Hoa people adopt easily to Vietnamese culture, however many Hoa still prefer to maintain Chinese cultural background. The official census from 2009 accounted the Hoa population at some 823,000 individuals and ranked 6th in terms of its population size. 70% of the Hoa live in cities and towns, mostly in Ho Chi Minh city while the rests live in the southern provinces.
  On the other hand, in Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei, the ethnic Chinese have maintained a distinct communal identity.
  In East Timor, a large fraction of Chinese are of Hakka descent.
  In Western countries, the overseas Chinese generally use romanised versions of their Chinese names, and the use of local first names is als
caption: Hakka people in a wedding in East Timor, 2006
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