Enticing the hearts, minds of 40 million overseas Chinese

CHINESE political dictionaries define an overseas Chinese as a Chinese national who resides overseas. That is a narrow, legal definition. But many people, including the Chinese government, use it loosely to mean any person of Chinese ethnicity living outside China, regardless of whether that person is a citizen of Australia, Canada, the United States or any other country.

The number of ethnic Chinese living outside of China is put at something like 40 million and, if they constituted the citizens of one country, that country would be more populous than two-thirds of the member states of the United Nations.

That is not to say that Chinese in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia share the same sense of identity as those in Peru, India or Canada.