abstract
- The power of the People¿s Republic of China (prc) arouses suspicions about the ethnic Chinese po-pulations, known as ¿overseas Chinese¿ when they think that they are helping the mother country. In this study we present a vision of the overseas Chinese in the Latin American countries where they have the greatest presence; we share a description of their communities and notes of their arrival in the region, and we analyze the distinctive themes in each country. We conducted an analysis seeking to find the support that the prc receives from the Chinese communities residing in that region. To do this, we compared two samples: the first inclu-des countries with a strong presence of overseas Chinese, while the second group countries that did not have a large community of Chinese origin, but that could be attractive to Chinese expansion plans. After analyzing the results, we present our conclusions, where we found that mutual support between the prc and the overseas Chinese is weak, especially in what concern to that country.