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That is the worst "research" I think I've ever seen....

Chinese name? Foreigner!!! Despite Vancouver being almost 50% Asian.

Canada does not collect data on foreign ownership, and the citizenship of buyers in Yan’s study is not clear. But Yan established that 66 per cent of all buyers had “non-anglicized” Mainland China names.



From the slide deck:

Our full name analysis methodology follows accepted practices in the fields of epidemiology, demography, and political science. This study wanted to see if any distinct patterns occurring when non-Anglicized Chinese names are isolated from the rest of the data set. It is a primary assumption of this study that a non-Anglicized Chinese names may be an indication that an owner may be an recent immigrant to Canada and that an Anglicized Chinese name is an indication of a long time immigrant or non-immigrant and/or multigenerational Canadian of sole or mixed ethnic Chinese ancestry. As a course of experimentation, there may be names missed for new immigrants who have Anglicized Chinese names and long time immigrants or multi-generational Canadian with non-Anglicized Chinese name to may be in the wrong catagory, but, with external reviews, this risk is minimal.

Within this data set, the name patterns were exceptionally and surprisingly distinct as they lacked ambiguous names like “Scott Low” which could be a Chinese or Scottish name or “John Li” which could be Chinese, Vietnamese, or Korean name. These names did not exist within this data set. Non-Anglicized Chinese names in the study were either in a three or two name sequences that our literature survey suggested were Chinese with no ambiguous names. Without direct measures of immigration or citizenship status and property ownership that are publicly available in Canada, this is an indirect measure of how globalization, non-localized wealth, and immigration, particularly from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan or Chinese global diaspora are entering one portion of the real estate market in Vancouver.

It's not perfect, but it's all we've got.


I guess the question is, have they run this methodology against a known sample?

It's anecdotal, but I know a number of US and Canadian citizens who have non-anglicized Chinese names. I would say most people who immigrate to Canada keep their original name. I also know a number of 1st generation Canadian who have Chinese names, but also English nicknames.


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