Flushing's Chinatown is home to more than 30,000 people born in China alone, the largest Chinatown by this metric outside of Asia and one of the largest and fastest-growing Chinatowns in the world. Flushing, Queens, is home to nearly 100,000 Chinese Americans. Many first-generation immigrants began moving to the neighborhood in the 1970s and established a satellite version of Manhattan's Chinatown, as Mandarin-speaking members of the Chinese community faced cultural and communication barriers with the Cantonese-speaking population of Manhattan's Chinatown. The diversity of the Mandarin-speaking population helped Flushing to become famous for its variety in regional cuisines, political and religious organizations, as well as languages.
As one of the largest and fastest-growing Chinese enclaves in the world, Flushing has also been named as the Chinese cultural center outside of Asia. Large numbers of Fuzhou speakers have quickly moved from Manhattan's Chinatown and a large number of them have moved to Brooklyn's Chinatown in Sunset Park, which has now become the largest Fuzhou community in New York City. A significant difference between the two separate Chinese provincial communities in Manhattan's Chinatown is that the Cantonese part of Chinatown not only serves Chinese customers, but is also a tourist attraction. The New York Times says that Flushing's Chinatown now competes with Manhattan's Chinatown in terms of being a cultural center for politics and commerce for Chinese-speaking New Yorkers.
The Chinese-American experience has been documented at the China Museum in the United States, in Manhattan's Chinatown, since 1980. Not only did the influx of immigrants from Fuzhou establish a new part of Manhattan's Chinatown, but it also contributed significantly to keeping the Chinese population in the neighborhood. In the past, Chinatown had Chinese movie theaters that offered entertainment to the Chinese population. From the late 1980s to the 1990s, when a large influx of immigrants from Fuzhou, who mostly also spoke Mandarin along with their native Fuzhou dialect, began moving to New York City, they were the only exceptional group of non-Cantonese Chinese who settled largely in Manhattan's Chinatown.
While a New York Business Improvement District has been identified for support, Chinatown has no officially defined boundaries. The early days of Chinatown were dominated by Chinese pliers (now sometimes neutrally translated as associations), which were a mix of clan associations, landowner associations, political alliances (the Kuomintang (nationalists) against the Communist Party of China) and, more secretly, crime syndicates. Unlike the Chinese enclaves of Queens, which have a wide diversity of Chinese immigrants from various regions of mainland China and Taiwan, Brooklyn's Chinatowns are highly segregated in Cantonese-dominated enclaves in Bensonhurst and Sheepshead Bay and in the Fuzhou-dominated enclave in Sunset Park, albeit with a significantly limited population of long-time Cantonese residents. Many cities have Chinatown, but New York City, home to the largest Chinese population in the United States, has more than you can count on one hand.
In addition, Mandarin began to eclipse Cantonese as the predominant Chinese dialect in New York's Chinatown during that period. New York City's newest Chinatowns have recently emerged in Elmhurst and Corona, Queens (which border each other and are part of the same Chinatown), on U Avenue in the Homecrest section of Brooklyn, as well as in Bensonhurst, also in Brooklyn. However, the neighborhoods of Flushing (54,200 Asian residents) and Elmhurst (55,800 Asian residents) in Queens are still home to the largest Asian populations in all of New York City. The absenteeism rate for elementary school students in Chinatown and the Lower East Side is lower than in the rest of New York City.
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