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Many of these changes occurred as a result of the fundamental restructuring of the political and economic environments in both sending and receiving countries. In China, emigration is a political consequence of the government’s shift towards more liberal emigration policies. With China’s progressive integration into the world’s economy, emigration is increasingly seen as a political and as an individual right. In Hong Kong and many of the Southeast Asian countries, emigration is a response to perceived political and social instability. In Britain, Chinese immigration is seen as an economic consideration subject to the cyclical fluctuations in demand for labour. Immigrants were admitted when they were useful and excluded when they were perceived as no longer useful. In this respect, the Chinese experience is similar to that of the Caribbeans and South Asians: They were admitted as a replacement labour force in response to the postwar economic recovery but subsequently excluded by restrictive immigrant laws (Peach, 1966). The closed labour market was, however, reopened in the 1990s to the highly skilled Chinese immigrants to meet skill shortages and to increase the competitiveness of the British economy.
Notwithstanding this immigration history, there is an implicit and often explicit tendency to view Chinese immigrants in a negative light. The media has unfailingly recycled the myth of the “un-British” nature of the Chinese, who entered without changing their way of life to suit British social expectations. As early as 1977, Watson argued that the Chinese are the least assimilated among the various ethnic minorities in Britain. An extension of this same myth is the view that Chinese immigrants are “somewhat isolated and certainly unobtrusive, and yet anything but “invisible” (Freeberne, 1981, p. 707). This voluntaristic separateness from members of the host society has been documented in the literature (e.g., see Tam, 1998).