Chinese people in the Czech Republic

[6] They consisted not of poor rural migrants, as was the common image in the popular imagination, but rather of former civil servants and workers in state-owned enterprise, who were giving up their "iron rice bowls" to go abroad and try to get rich as traders.

[7] In the mid-1990s, the Czech Republic briefly came to prominence as a transit point for Chinese migrants being smuggled into Western Europe, but Hungary regained its popularity by the end of the 1990s.

[11] However, December 2007 official figures from the Czech Statistical Office showed a total of just 4,986; this made Chinese the 10th-largest group of non-European Union foreigners.

The first chairwoman, Ms. Weng, was an interpreter, language teacher, and author of Chinese cookery books, who had lived in the Czech Republic for over 40 years.

As a direct result of the problems with Shanghui, they required recommendations from existing members and strictly screened new applicants in order to exclude problematic elements.