|
|
The chapter describes how changes in immigration policy help explain the overall increase of Chinese immigrants, which in turn affects the growth of different types of Chinatown in Britain.
Chapter 4 looks into the spatial distribution of the Chinese population in Britain. It sketches out the broad national patterns and local dimensions of Chinese settlements and posits that the geographies of the Chinese are a hierarchical structure of rank-size residential distributions. The chapter aims to explain variations in the potential size distribution by focusing on the Chinese industrial structure, which determines the relative frequency of small, medium, and large Chinatowns in the spatial hierarchy.
Chapter 5 is concerned with the changing nature of Chinese residential segregation in three British cities: London, Manchester, and Birmingham. The discussion starts by reviewing previous work on the assimilationist and pluralist models of ethnic settlements. This lays out the theoretical foundations of which the major analysis follows. The chapter attempts to answer several important questions associated with Chinese residential segregation: How segregated are the Chinese compared with other minorities? Does residential mobility reduce the tendency toward ethnic segregation? To what extent are decentralisation and suburbanisation of the Chinese associated with lower levels of segregation?
Chapter 6 is mainly devoted to subethnic Chinese geographies in Britain. It attempts to show that social geographies are consequences of structural change in Chinese immigration, which has brought about a heterogeneous Chinese population with diversified origins. The focus is on how different Chinese subgroups are represented by different degrees of adjustment to the marriage, employment, and housing structure, and how they manifest themselves spatially in different ways.