Overseas Chinese

An Overseas Chinese person is a person of Chinese ancestry or is a person of full or partial Chinese origin who traces his or her ancestry back to the Greater China but are living and working outside of Greater China (mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan). This term generally applies to both people of Chinese ancestry and citizens abroad.

As of 2026, approximately 40 million ethnic Chinese live abroad. As of 2023, there were 10.5 million people living outside mainland China who were born in mainland China, corresponding to 0.7 percent of China's population. Overall, China has a low percent of its population living overseas.