Chinese Australians
As a whole, Australian residents identifying themselves as having Chinese ancestry made up 5.6% of those nominating their ancestry at the 2016 census and numbered 1,213,903. At the 2016 census, 509,555 people declared that they were born in Mainland China, 86,886 declared that they were born in Hong Kong, while 46,882 declared that they were born in Taiwan. There are also a large number of persons of Chinese ancestry among those born in Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines and Vietnam.
Federation for a Democratic China
In 2005 Chen Yonglin, then Chinese consulate-general working in Sydney, defected to the Australian government by a formal claim for political asylum. Chen claimed that a network of 1,000 Chinese government spies were operating in Australia, leading the chairman of the Australian branch of the FDC to comment that such claims could "lead to [an] atmosphere of distrust and even antagonism towards the Chinese community."