page_title: Chinese people in the Netherlands
section_title: Integration and community
hierarchical_section_title: Chinese people in the Netherlands / Integration and community
caption_attribution_description: English: The 2015 Chinese New Year celebrations in The Hague were held on Saturday, 21 February at one of the entrances to The Hague's small Chinatown.
context_page_description: Chinese people in the Netherlands form one of the largest overseas Chinese populations in continental Europe. In 2018 official statistics showed 92,644 people originating from the People's Republic of China and Republic of China, or people with at least one such parent. However, these statistics do not capture the whole size of the Chinese community, which since its earliest days has included not just migrants from China, but people of Chinese ethnicity drawn from among overseas Chinese communities as well.
context_section_description: Chinese students themselves, comparing the Netherlands to the United States, state that the Netherlands offers a peaceful and not-particularly-challenging life, but fewer opportunities; one popular saying among them is that excellent students find the Netherlands too small to fulfill their ambitions, and leave of their own volition, while average and below-average students are forced out of the country entirely.
  Chinese in the Netherlands are often perceived to be "snakeheads", participating in smuggling Chinese migrants from Eastern Europe to the United Kingdom. In the 1980s, the Dutch government, considering the poor Dutch language abilities and lack of integration by many members of the Chinese community, began to consider officially recognising them as a disadvantaged minority, similar to Moroccan or Turkish migrants. This proved to be extremely controversial among the Chinese community; the widespread discussions in Dutch media of the problems in the community led to public perception of the Chinese as illegal migrants working for low pay and incapable of solving their own community problems, strongly embarrassing members of older generations who had stressed "invisibility and self-reliance". In the end, the government didn't grant the Chinese official minority status as the Chinese didn't want government subsidies and minority status. However, stereotypical mainstream views only strengthened, especially as a result of several heavily publicised tragedies such as the 2000 Dover incident in which 58 Chinese migrants suffocated in a refrigerated container on their way from the Netherlands to Dover, England.
  There are also some intra-community tensions between recent expatriates, especially students, and the older overseas Chinese. The latter are largely Cantonese-speaking, while the former use Mandarin as their lingua franca. The divide shows up most clearly in the education of children; few international students send their children to the schools established by the old overseas Chinese, deriding them as low-quality schools "for the children of the restaurant families" and employing low-quality teachers. In contrast, the old overseas Chinese describe the students as arrogant, and view themselves as the "real representatives of the Chinese community in the Netherlands".
  The descendants of Indonesian-speaking Chinese tend to stay out of such conflict; having largely entered the liberal professions  they also look down on the "restaurant Chinese", but in return other Chinese often view them as not "really Chinese". They rarely join any of the associations set up by other Chinese migrants or their descendants, instead preferring their own associations.
caption: Chinese New Year celebrations in the Chinatown of The Hague, at the start of the Year of the Goat
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