No, where are you really from?
From the Herald today:
That last number doesn’t look right. At the 2013 Census, there were just under 90,000 people ordinarily resident in NZ who were born in the People’s Republic of China. Since then, there have been a net 46000 permanent or long-term migrants, according to a Stats NZ app — and recent research from Stats NZ has found that these figures overstate net migration a bit, because they misclassify some people returning home. So, there are maybe 135,000 people living in NZ who were born in the PRC. Not all of these will think of NZ as home — some of them will be just here to study, for example — but it’s a reasonable group to consider. It’s not 290,000, and I don’t see how you can get that number.
On Twitter this morning, Tze Ming Mok speculated that the number might be people of Chinese ethnicity, but as she said, even that is hard to get as high as 290,000. And, very importantly, other people of Chinese ethnicity don’t necessarily have favourable views of the PRC — though they (and other people of East and Southeast Asian ethnicity) do get the spillover from both anti-PRC sentiment and traditional racism.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
I dont know why 6% of population as Chinese nationality would be considered ‘too high’. Even if you said 5% that still 250K out of 5 mill. remember the 2013 census number of 163K is at 4% ( and maybe not all students are counted for various reasons)
Just since 2013 census total population was 4.24 mill, and if we count 6 years to get to 5 mill. Thats a 750,000 increase in that time. Easily 100K of that could be Chinese, maybe more.
5 years ago
I’m not sure what you mean by “nationality” here. 5% being of Chinese *ethnicity* is reasonable, though 290,000 is higher than the StatsNZ projection for this year. The claim that it’s high for everyone of Chinese ethnicity is from Tze Ming, but she shows her working in the Twitter thread.
In any case, 290,000 being *from the People’s Republic of China* is way too high, because a lot of NZ residents of Chinese ethnicity aren’t from the PRC. Some of them were born in NZ and some came from Taiwan or Singapore or Malaysia or (British-era) Hong Kong. And the news story is about relations with the PRC, not about ethnicity.
5 years ago