Introduction

Eastern Europe emerged as a new international migration space in the 1990s and quickly became an important sending, transit, and receiving region. Chinese migration to Hungary started, on a large scale, in 1989-90 and reached its peak in 1991. The Chinese are one of the biggest groups participating in new migration patterns. Since 1993, when the grounding of one of the ships carrying clandestine Chinese migrants, the Golden Venture, created an upstir in American media, scholars in the United States have also produced analyses of brokered migration, and specifically its criminal aspects. Starting as shuttle traders, restaurant workers, students, or even exchange scholars and becoming semi-settled entrepreneurs, new Chinese migrants are present in increasing numbers and influence in established overseas Chinese communities such as those in Western Europe. Jean-Luc Porcquet wrote an ethnography of clandestine migrants from Wenzhou in Paris. Overall assessments of new trends Chinese migration provided so far have been by demographers.