People from abroad in China, and China's people abroad

Where they come from

Industries

Where the names come from (estimate)

Where the names in China's company register come from, estimated by a name-origin model and adjusted to China's own mix. These are expected counts, not people with a documented move, and no individual is labelled by them.

Based on 26,130 names whose origin the model can place; 14,988,694 names common to many countries are counted but not assigned.

Read with care. In China, about 69% of the estimated name origins point to other countries. Where a population was built by immigration, much of that is simply what its names' ancestry is: it is not a count of migrants. The estimate is also adjusted toward the nationalities China's register records, and registers that record nationality mainly for foreigners pull it further abroad.

China's people abroad

Abroad, 1,192,091 people from China are documented in 228 other countries.

China's company register lists 90,708,191 officer rows, 17,282 with a stated nationality (self-stamp rate 0.63; above 0.98 the field is ignored as it only repeats the register's own country).

Counts are people with a documented cross-border move: an official register's nationality or birthplace, ORCID/VIAF/Wikidata records, or a dated study-then-work transition. Name-based estimates and heritage (ancestral) readings are not included in these counts. Groups under 5 people are folded into "Other".

Aggregate statistics from official company registers, ORCID, VIAF and Wikidata, compiled by compatriots.net · data build v3_20261030. No individual is named on this page. See methodology & privacy.