VGAM (version 0.9-0)

chinese.nz: Chinese Population in New Zealand 1867--2001 Data

Description

The Chinese population in New Zealand from 1867 to 2001, along with the whole of the New Zealand population.

Usage

data(chinese.nz)

Details

The NZ total for the years 1867 and 1871 exclude the Maori population. The second value of 4583 looks erroneous, as seen by the plot below.

Historically, there was a large exodus of Chinese from the Guangdong region starting in the mid-1800s to the gold fields of South Island of New Zealand, California, and Southern Australia, etc. Racial discrimination then meant that only men were allowed entry, to hinder permanent settlement. In the case of New Zealand, the government relaxed its immigration laws after WWII to allow wives of Chinese already in NZ to join them because China had been among the Allied powers. Gradual relaxation in the immigration and an influx during the 1980s meant the Chinese population became increasingly demographically normal over time.

References

Page 6 of Aliens At My Table: Asians as New Zealanders See Them by M. Ip and N. Murphy, (2005), Penguin.

Examples

par(mfrow = c(1, 2))
plot(female/(male+female) ~ year, chinese.nz, type = "b",
     ylab = "Proportion", col = "blue", las = 1,
     main = "Proportion of NZ Chinese that are female")
abline(h = 0.5, lty = "dashed", col = "gray")

fit1.cnz = vglm(cbind(female, male) ~ year, binomialff, chinese.nz)
fit2.cnz = vglm(cbind(female, male) ~ poly(year, 2), binomialff, chinese.nz)
fit4.cnz = vglm(cbind(female, male) ~ bs(year, 4), binomialff, chinese.nz)

lines(fitted(fit1.cnz) ~ year, chinese.nz, col = "purple")
lines(fitted(fit2.cnz) ~ year, chinese.nz, col = "green")
lines(fitted(fit4.cnz) ~ year, chinese.nz, col = "orange")
legend("bottomright", col = c("purple", "green", "orange"),
       lty = 1, leg = c("linear", "quadratic", "B-spline"))


plot(100*(male+female)/nz ~ year, chinese.nz, type = "b", ylab = "Percent",
     ylim = c(0, max(100*(male+female)/nz)), col = "blue", las = 1,
     main = "Percent of NZers that are Chinese")
abline(h = 0, lty = "dashed", col = "gray")