History | Syracuse | Chinese Communities

Artist Shih-Chiao Li, born in Hsinchuang, Taiwan in 1908, immigrated to Syracuse and lived there until his death in 1995. His work "Happy Farmers" was painted in 1945. Courtesy of the Li family.

By 1960, the Chinese inhabitants of the greater metropolitan area of Syracuse consisted of 184 residents, most of them having come from Taiwan. Over the next ten years, the population would grow to 582 residents of Chinese ethnicity, with 340 of them having been foreign-born.

Due to the strained relations between Communist Mainland China (The People's Republic of China) and the U.S. during the Cold War, many of Syracuse's Chinese residents during this time had immigrated from Taiwan. Most came to the city as students and then decided to stay. It is therefore not surprising that many of the Syracuse Chinese have professional careers such as medical doctors, chemists, lawyers, researchers, etc.

Vocabulary

Ethnicity: Relating to a race or a cultural group.
Cold War: Economic and diplomatic, but nonmilitary, hostilities between countries, as what happened between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. after World War II.

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