Although the Chinese migration to Brazil started since 1809, in the whole 19th century, the Chinese population in Brazil was very small. The number increased significantly from the second half of the 20th century. Up to now (2024), the total population of Chinese immigrants and their descendants is estimated around 250,000 to 280,000 heads. 

Since the 1970s, Chinese immigrants in Brazil, their history, their collective culture, their livelihood and more importantly, their internal social structures have attracted scholarly attention from Brazil, mainland China, Taiwan and the United States. Myriad original data, bibliographic references and meaningful research results have been made available. Based on these data and literature, Prof. Chang-sheng Shu published his book Chinese Migration to Brazil: History, Mobility and Identities (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023), which is a synthesis of the existing researches about the Chinese migration to Brazil with the objective of creating basic references for the future studies on this new and promising field.

As Prof. Shu demonstrated throughout his book, the Chinese communities in Brazil are heterogeneous in terms of their hometown origins, their migratory patterns and the multiplicity of the waves of their migration. As a matter of fact, there is no single and unified Chinese community, rather, there are many communities formed by Chinese immigrants. Nevertheless, living in a foreign land, they often forge a sense of single Chinese collectivity for they belong to the same Chinese cultural heritage. At the aggregated level, despite individual differences in upbringing, in training and in life experiences before and after their migration, they have identified themselves, and are always identified by the non-Chinese, by their shared Chinese background. To ensure a better future in their host country, the Chinese immigrants have created their own voluntary associations, built their own temples and churches, establishing their language schools, publishing their newspapers and periodicals, sporadically (or consistently) engaging in literary activities, to express their sentiments, emotions and to write down their ethos and pathos out of their post-migration life experiences.

To help future students and researchers of Chinese migration to Brazil, Prof. Shu created the Virtual Library to preserve and to exhibit the source materials, bibliographies and official data. We hope that our colleagues and friends in the whole world may also share with us their research results. Our email contacts are: shu@usp.br; luisafjudice@usp.br.