[7] Cantonese-speaking seafarers, employed on German steamships as stokers, coal trimmers, and lubricators, began showing up in ports such as Hamburg and Bremen around 1870.
In the 1890s, many shipping companies began to replace their white crews with much cheaper Chinese (also Indian and African) labour, esp.
[10] The labour unions and the Social Democratic Party strongly disapproved of their presence; their 1898 boycott of Chinese crews, motivated by racial concerns, resulted in the passage of a law by the Reichstag on 30 October 1898 stating that Chinese could not be employed on shipping routes to Australia, and could be employed on routes to China and Japan only in positions that whites would not take because they were detrimental to health.
[11] Since the 1880s, there were debates about employing Chinese "coolies" as farm workers in East Elbia, i.e. Prussia's extensive eastern provinces characterised by large agricultural estates.
Some observers saw a solution in introducing a totally alien ethnic element which would be easier to segregate (e.g. Friedrich Syrup, later director of the Reich Labour Bureau in late Weimar and Nazi times).
After receiving a comprehensive report from Beijing in 1895, the Office concluded on the grounds of transport and wage costs that such plans were not promising success.
In 1904, at the time of Sun Yat-sen's visit to Germany and other Western European countries, more than twenty joined the anti-Qing Chinese United League he organised in Berlin.
Until 1894, about 1,000 "coolies" were recruited for German East Africa but corporal punishment and the tropical climate were so severe the British colonial authorities in Singapore and Hong Kong did not permit further emigration.
The Chinese were never given the same rights as whites, but were treated similar to the natives due to their supposedly "inferior level of culture".
Many became involved with radical politics, especially in Berlin; they joined the Communist Party of Germany, and were responsible for setting up its Chinese-language section, the Zirkel für chinesische Sprache.
[27] In addition to individual migrants, both the PRC and the ROC provided workers with specific skills to Germany under bilateral agreements.
[28] In East Germany, there were slightly fewer than 1,000 Chinese "contract workers" (Vertragsarbeiter) from the People's Republic in the late 1980s.
As this proposal came only days before the collapse of the East German regime however, it was quickly made obsolete by the rapid political changes.
[30] Even students in Germany who earned doctorates in the sciences have ended up starting restaurants or catering services, rather than engaging in any work related to their studies.
[35] Second-generation Chinese students were more likely to attend a Gymnasium (college preparatory school) than their ethnic German counterparts.
[38] In addition, there is a large number of Chinese people who naturalized as German citizens or who are natively born in the country.
Due to network effects, illegal Chinese migrants to Germany largely come from the vicinity of Qingtian, Zhejiang; they are mostly men between twenty and forty years old.
[45] One rare example of the various strands of the community coming together in support of a common cause arose in April 1995, when Berlin daily Bild-Zeitung published a huge feature item alleging that Chinese restaurants in the city served dog meat; the story appears to have been sparked by an off-color quip by a German official during a press conference about a pot of mystery meat he had seen boiling in a Chinese restaurant kitchen.
Chinese caterers and restaurants suffered huge declines in business, as well as personal vilification by their German neighbours.
Most worked in semi-skilled trades, with some privileged ones of a political bent achieving positions in the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.