Vancouver Has Been Transformed By Chinese Immigrants

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When you cross over the Granville Street Bridge that winds into downtown Vancouver, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re in Hong Kong. The skyline has the same ribbon of gleaming apartment towers hugging the waterfront, and similar mountains in the distance.

There is also an unabashed display of wealth, readily apparent in the city’s Kitsilano neighborhood. Within a few short blocks, you can find dealerships for some of the world’s most expensive cars: Lamborghini, Ferrari, Rolls-Royce and Aston Martin, among others.

At the front of the McLaren showroom are four sleek, high-performance sports cars, known as supercars. Wilson Ng, an account manager with McLaren Automotive, gently runs his hand over one of the 570GT models. “They’re starting around $200,000 to up to $250,000 to $300,000,” he says, up to about $222,000 in U.S. dollars.

That’s for one of the cheaper models in this showroom. The most expensive runs about CA$1 million ($740,587) — the Vancouver showroom sold six last year. Ng says there’s a big market in Vancouver. Most customers are foreign.

“There is a large amount of Asian [supercar buyers], including mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, East India, Singapore … so a lot of foreign money,” he says.

Ng says the supercar market in Vancouver started to really take off around 2010, when China’s economy was red-hot. Wealthy Asian immigrants and investors also started buying up businesses and property in the city. The result has been a real estate market now out of reach for many residents, something that is straining the city’s reputation for welcoming newcomers.

A magnet for immigrants

Marianne Wu first came from China to Vancouver as a student seven years ago and now works in marketing and translating. The 27-year-old says she loves the city, just received her permanent residency card and bought a two-bedroom condo downtown.

“You know, people really want to own something because that’s where their security comes from,” she says. Owning property is deeply rooted in Chinese culture, she says, but the government in Beijing doesn’t allow people to own the land their homes are built on.

Wu says her family back in China helped her buy a home in Vancouver. “They push me to buy a property here,” she says. “They want me to have a stable life, which everybody wants.”

Vancouver has long been a magnet for immigrants from all over the world. It is one of Canada’s most diverse cities and prides itself on its multiculturalism. Immigrants began arriving from China in the late 1800s, when laborers came to help build the trans-Canada railway. Shortly after its completion, Canada began cracking down on Chinese immigrants, and banned most of them in the early 1920s.

Half a century later, those policies changed and Canada began encouraging Chinese professionals and entrepreneurs to come. About 20% of Vancouver’s population now identifies as ethnic Chinese.

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The Chinese community has made a positive contribution to Vancouver, says Henry Yu, a historian at the University of British Columbia.

“You’ll see hospital wings, you’ll see at UBC, the Chan Centre for [the] Performing Arts. There are Chinese names on all of the institutions of arts and culture,” he says.

Yu says there was a surge of Chinese immigrants and investment in the Vancouver region in the 1990s, when there was concern over what would happen in 1997, the year Britain handed sovereignty of Hong Kong back to China.

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