From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Chinese/Peter S. Li
The concepts of “group maintenance” and “ethnic commitment” are used by some scholars to describe the degree to which an immigrant group maintains an ethnically based boundary in the receiving society. Accordingly, the strength of group maintenance is reflected in what Raymond Breton called “institutional completeness,” that is, the extent to which an ethnic group has developed separate institutions that provide services to its members. In reality, the precise level of institutional completeness is hard to measure. Ethnic services in a community often reflect the size of the population and the interest of businesses in capturing the specialized market or of organizations in expanding their political constituency, and they do not necessarily represent a commitment to group maintenance.
The growth of Chinese immigration to Canada after 1967 has greatly increased the population base of the community in major urban centres. In turn, it has enabled residential and commercial enclaves in the large cities to expand. New immigrants are often attracted to neighbourhoods with some Chinese concentration in order to ensure convenient access to ethnic services. As the population in Chinese enclaves rises, it encourages ethnic businesses and services to increase and diversify. But it is highly debatable whether the growth of residential and commercial districts and the expansion of ethnic services are indications of greater ethnic commitment among the Chinese. As the community in cities such as Toronto and Vancouver continues to expand because of the arrival of new immigrants, there has been a proliferation of businesses and services geared to the newcomers. Since many of these are located in neighbourhoods that tend to attract a high concentration of immigrants, their presence expands the boundaries of the Chinese enclaves. Examples of new residential and commercial areas are found in Scarborough, Markham, and Mississauga around Toronto and in Richmond south of Vancouver.
A case study of Richmond shows how a large Chinese residential and commercial community emerged in recent decades as the volume of Chinese immigration surged upward. The 1961 census listed only 298 Chinese in the municipality; they made up less than 1 percent of its population. Twenty years later the Chinese community had increased to over 6,000, or 7 percent of the total. By 1986 it had further grown to about 9,000 and now constituted more than 8 percent of the population of Richmond. Among municipalities within the Vancouver census metropolitan area in 1986, Richmond had the second largest percentage of Chinese population (8.3 percent), next only to Vancouver proper (16.6 percent). In terms of the actual size of the Chinese population, the city ranked third (8,965) in the province, after Vancouver (70,455) and Burnaby (9,825). It tends to attract affluent Chinese immigrants from Hong Kong as well as professionals. These newcomers differ from the superrich immigrants from Hong Kong, who are more inclined to settle in the exclusive Vancouver districts of Shaughnessy, Kerrisdale, and Oakridge. Many middle-class Chinese immigrants are attracted to Richmond because new homes there cost less than similar houses in Vancouver’s choice west-side locations. Over time, Richmond has developed a reputation both locally and among prospective emigrants in Hong Kong as an ideal residential neighbourhood where Chinese restaurants and other services are readily available.
With the growth of the community in Richmond, there has been a corresponding development in Chinese businesses. Between 1981 and 1990, the number of Chinese establishments increased from 68 to 182. Much of the expansion was in professional services and food retailing. At the same time, there was a high rate of closure among retailing firms. Many small family-operated businesses were gradually replaced by those backed by Chinese corporate investment, and with the entry of more affluent Chinese immigrants, the capitalization of commercial and residential construction has intensified. Chinese enclaves, such as the one in Richmond, enable new immigrants to obtain services in the Chinese language, and in turn, the growth of the Chinese clientele provides new opportunities for businesses to develop. A rise in the circulation of Chinese newspapers and magazines demonstrates how specialized ethnic services have grown as a result of the expansion of the immigrant population. In 1980 the circulation of Chinese daily newspapers in Canada was 6,000; ten years later it had increased to 35,000.
As more Chinese immigrants in professional and technical occupations enter the country, many are choosing the suburbs, not Chinatown, as the place to live. Chinatown has remained a label for the older section of a city where the Chinese once lived and where Chinese businesses continue to be concentrated. It still carries an exotic connotation for tourists, but many Chinatowns today are primarily commercial districts. At the same time, the growth of the Chinese population in many cities provides a large ethnic clientele for the businesses in traditional Chinatowns and more recent Chinese business enclaves. Hence, there has been both an expansion of such districts in Toronto and Vancouver, for example, and a proliferation of Chinese residential neighbourhoods. A study of twenty-one ethnic groups in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, and Vancouver in 1980, based on census data, indicates that the Chinese were among the five with the highest degree of residential segregation. The findings of this study suggest that although the majority of Chinese do not reside in Chinatowns per se, they tend to live in areas with a relatively high concentration of members of their own ethnic group. On the basis of first language, data from the 1981 census indicate that the ten census tracts in Vancouver with the highest concentration of Chinese accounted for 28 percent of the population in the city, and the area known as Chinatown was not among these tracts. Thus, despite the public image of Chinatowns as centres of ethnic communities, in fact only a small percentage of the population now resides in such areas.
