Chinatown: The Spread of Eastern Culture in a Western Society

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In the past few decades of history, the span of globalization and mixing of world cultures has been particularly prevalent. Through the spread of technology and communications across national boundaries, the various superpowers of the world have begun immersing themselves into foreign cultures and have introduced their own cultures to nations that are not their own as well as have accepted certain parts of foreign culture in their own homes. One of the greatest examples of this exchange of culture is the prevalence of Chinese culture in the West through the establishment of various “Chinatowns” throughout popular cities in Europe and the Americas. Globalization itself, which is described as the “objective trend of economic development in the world today, featured by free flow and optimized allocation of capital, technology, information and service in the global context” by H.E. Ambassador Zha Peixin, has been a constant flow in the worlds history and permeates world cultures daily through the innovation of new technologies and spread of communications between different nations.
Chinatown, as many know it, is a gathering of Chinese immigrants in central locations throughout the world and typically features a community of majority Chinese citizens as well as shops and restaurants. While Chinatown seems to be a significant part of American culture, the actual beginning of Chinatown was in 1594 in the Southeastern country of the Philippines, and soon spread to other Asian nations such as Japan, Vietnam, and Thailand (Chang). Chinatown soon spread to countries such as England as trade between Western nations and the Chinese became more evident. In the United States, which seems to have the largest number of Chinatowns within its borde...

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Works Cited

Chang, Yoonmee. Writing the Ghetto: Class, Authorship, and the Asian American Ethnic
Enclave. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2010. Print.
Faure, Guy, and Tony Fang. "Changing Chinese Values: Keeping up with Paradoxes."
International Business Review 17.2 (2008): 194-207. Print.
Hadley, Barbara. "The Growth of Buddhism in America." Unity Institute's Lyceum, 14 Apr.
2011. Web. 5 Apr. 2014. .
Sachsenmaier, Dominic, PhD. "Session 1: Global History." China and Globalization
(2003): 2-22. Rockefeller Archive Center. Web. 5 Apr. 2014.
Zha, Peixin. "China and Globalization." China and Globalization. Embassy of the
People's Republic of China, 10 Oct. 2003. Web. 04 Apr. 2014.
Zhou, Min. Chinatown: The Socioeconomic Potential of an Urban Enclave. Philadelphia:
Temple UP, 1992. Print.

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