Should you target mainland China or the Chinese diaspora?

“Chinese customers” sounds like one audience. It isn’t, and the choice between the mainland and the diaspora decides your language, your platforms and your legal exposure.

This guide helps you choose where to start. It’s part of our guide on how to find Chinese customers.

No source we read measures which audience pays back better. The answer below is a reasoned rule, not a benchmark.

Who are you actually choosing between?

There are four groups, not two. The line that matters is where someone is when they find you and decide, not where their family comes from.

Group	Where they decide	Size indicator	How they reach you
Mainland buyers	The mainland	1.125 billion internet users, end of 2025 1	Chinese engines and apps
Mainland residents buying abroad	The mainland, before leaving	167.92 million outbound trips in 2025 6	Chinese apps, then your site
First-generation migrants and students abroad	Your country	1,076,015 higher-education students abroad in 2023, per UNESCO 7	Mixed, in Chinese and locally
Settled and later generations	Your country	Census data, next section	Mostly as any local client

The second group is the easiest to miss. A family planning a university place or a treatment abroad lives in China, searches from China and pays for something delivered in your country.

Read the travel figure with care. It counts trips, not people, and 112.71 million of those trips went to Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. That leaves about 55.2 million to everywhere else.⁶

How big is the diaspora in your country?

Smaller than the headline, and often much smaller. Published world totals run from 51.06 million, OCAC’s estimate with descendants included,² to more than 100 million, an agency figure with no source.³ None of them is a count.

Geography matters more than the total. OCAC puts 68.5% in Asia, 20.6% in the Americas and 5.0% in Europe.²

Its largest figures are for Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia, so a world total tells a European company very little.

France shows why. Insee counts 116,000 immigrants born in China,⁵ and OCAC estimates 750,000, descendants included.² Both can be correct.

The audience that reads Chinese could sit anywhere between them, and we found no statistic that settles it.

Our guide to reaching Chinese people living abroad compares national counts for five countries.

What changes when your buyer is in the mainland?

Nearly everything around the page. A buyer abroad can open your site and pay you like any local client. A buyer in the mainland sits behind different networks, engines, rules and payment systems.

	Buyer in the mainland	Buyer already abroad
Your site	Must load through China’s network. Test it from there	Loads as usual
Google	http://www.google.com failed all 10 GreatFire tests in the 90 days to October 2026 10	Available
Search engines	Baidu 49.00%, Bing 21.69%, October 2026, per StatCounter 9. See market share	Not measured (see below)
Privacy law	PIPL can reach you if you serve people in China 11	Your own law applies. PIPL’s text refers to people in China 11
Advertising law	Covers advertising inside China 12	Your local rules
Payment	Foreign exchange quota, plus wallets such as Alipay or WeChat Pay 1315	Usually local card or transfer
Language	Simplified Chinese	Simplified, Traditional or English

Three of those rows deserve a closer look.

Privacy. China’s privacy law covers processing abroad when the aim is to provide products or services to people in China.¹¹ See PIPL and your website for lead forms.

Payment. Individuals in the mainland can buy USD 50,000 of foreign exchange a year on their ID alone, a quota set in 2007.¹³²⁷ Above that, genuine current-account purchases need documents showing their use.²⁷

The law firm AllBright gave tuition and medical costs as examples in September 2026.²⁸ Property abroad, securities, life insurance and return-paying insurance are barred, per a 2021 guide from a SAFE branch and a form used since 2017.¹⁴²⁷

Wallets. Access depends on your country and provider. Airwallex says only businesses registered in Hong Kong or Singapore can take payments from the CN and HK versions of WeChat through its service.¹⁵

See accepting Alipay and WeChat Pay.

Which audience fits your business?

Ask two questions: where does the buyer decide, and where do you deliver? The table is our reasoning from the differences above, not measured results.

Your business	Decides from	Delivered in	Start with
Local service: clinic, accountant, restaurant, tutor	Your country	Your country	Chinese speakers near you
Big decision abroad: university, property, treatment, long trip	Often the mainland	Your country	Mainland visibility, then local community
Sales to Chinese companies	The mainland	China or remotely	Mainland
Consumer goods shipped to China	The mainland	China	Mainland, often through a cross-border platform 16
Online service open to anyone	Anywhere	Online	Your own data

1. 1Does the customer come to you?
2. 2Yes, and they already live in your countryLocal diaspora
3. 3Yes, but they decide from ChinaMainland visibility
4. 4No, you deliver in ChinaMainland China
5. 5UnknownCheck the enquiries you receive

The mainland wins on scale, and it isn’t close. 782.06 million people used search engines there at the end of 2025.¹ Compare that with the roughly 5 million Chinese Americans Pew counts.⁴

The diaspora wins on friction. Local buyers can already reach you, pay you and visit you, so a first test costs a Chinese page rather than a market entry.

If you go after the mainland from abroad, read how to sell without being in China.

Travelers sit between the two. In a Dragon Trail survey of 1,015 outbound travelers from spring 2024, 52% used Xiaohongshu for destination information.⁸ Decide on who you can reach before departure.

Which platforms does the diaspora actually use?

In the best data we found, less WeChat than many guides imply, and nobody has measured search habits. The diaspora isn’t behind the Great Firewall, so it can use Chinese and Western platforms side by side.

One agency guide calls WeChat “a key channel” abroad,³ and one ad network says new arrivals spend most of their time on Chinese sites.¹⁹ Both are sales arguments with old data.

Lowy’s polling in Australia, the best independent source we found, points elsewhere: 58% use YouTube at least daily, 49% Facebook and 47% WeChat.¹⁷ It covers one country, so don’t assume it holds elsewhere.

The full table, its limits and the news data are in how to reach Chinese people living abroad.

Language varies as much as platforms do. Pew finds 46% of Chinese immigrants in the US are English proficient, against 92% of the US-born.⁴

In Lowy’s survey, 56.5% answered in Simplified Chinese, 34.9% in English and 8.6% in Traditional.¹⁸

That’s why one “diaspora” plan rarely fits. See Simplified or Traditional Chinese for the script.

If Hong Kong or Taiwan is your real target, see Chinese for Hong Kong and Taiwan.

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Can the diaspora stand in for the mainland?

No. It can be a useful first audience, but it isn’t a small model of the Chinese market. Mark Tanner of the consultancy China Skinny gives three reasons not to treat its feedback as a mainland test:²²

• Tastes shift after years in a new country.
• Home regions may not match the Chinese regions you’re targeting.
• Buying journeys differ from those in the mainland.

Add a practical reason. A success with people abroad proves nothing about whether your site loads in China, whether Baidu indexes it, or whether a mainland buyer can pay you.

Don’t assume attachment to China either. In Pew’s survey of Chinese Americans, fielded from July 2022 to January 2023, 41% viewed China favorably.²³

A message built on the home country can miss part of your audience. Some readers’ roots lie in Hong Kong, Taiwan or Southeast Asia instead.

Tanner does see a benefit in the other direction: success among Chinese abroad can add credibility in the mainland, if you don’t overstate it.²² That’s a practitioner’s view, and he gives no data for it.

How to check your own case

Your own records will tell you more than any market report. You can do the first four steps without spending anything.

1. List your recent Chinese-speaking enquiries. Note where each person lived, what language they wrote in and who was paying. Ask them. Don’t guess.
2. Check your Search Console. Look for queries in Chinese characters, split by country. It only shows Google, so a mainland audience will be undercounted.
3. Check your analytics with care. Google Analytics is unreliable from China, so a low mainland figure doesn’t prove low interest.
4. Pull your local census. Find language at home for your own area, not the national total.
5. Run a small local test. Publish one useful Chinese page. Google Ads lists both Chinese scripts for language targeting,²⁴ and you can pair that with your location. Count enquiries, not clicks.

That test only speaks for buyers who can use Google. It says nothing about the mainland, which needs its own check. Our guide to how Chinese buyers search explains where they start.

What carries over if you start with one

Part of the Chinese content carries over, and the access work doesn’t. Starting with the diaspora won’t waste Simplified pages, but it won’t prepare your site for China either.

Asset	Diaspora	Mainland
Simplified Chinese pages	Useful, if your readers use it	Needed
Page angle and examples	Written for local buyers	Rewrite for buyers in China
Language tags for Google	zh-Hans, or zh-Hans-US by region 25	Not enough on its own
Hosting and speed work	Not needed	Needed
Replacing blocked services	Not needed	Needed
Baidu account and submission	Not needed	Useful, with no guarantee of indexing
Privacy notice and payment	Your usual setup	Review both

If you plan to serve both, decide the site structure early. Our guide to subfolders, subdomains and separate sites covers that choice.

Once the audience is set, Baidu, WeChat or Xiaohongshu: which channel first? is the next decision.

The bottom line

Follow the buyer’s location, not their heritage. If they already live near you, start with them, since a Chinese page is a small bet.

If they decide from China, the diaspora won’t reach them, however strong your local results look.

Check your own enquiries first, and size any local audience from the census.

How Index in China can help

We work on Chinese search engines, so we fit the mainland cases above. We translate your site into Simplified Chinese with a human reviewer, work on getting it indexed there and send a monthly report on Chinese traffic.

If your buyers all live near you, local SEO in Chinese may matter more, and we’ll say so. See what we do or book a 30-minute call.

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