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.
Han Chinese
Of about 40 million "overseas Chinese" worldwide, nearly 30 million live in Southeast Asia. They are collectively called Nanyang Chinese. According to a population genetic study, Singapore is "the country with the biggest proportion of Hans" in Southeast Asia. Up until the past few decades, overseas Han communities originated predominantly from areas in southern China (especially the Guangdong, Fujian, and Zhejiang areas). Christmas Island has 21.2% Chinese population and 12% Malay; large Chinese populations also live in Malaysia (25%) and Thailand (14%). Prior to the 1965 split, Malaysia and Singapore used to have the largest overseas Chinese population in the world, in terms of absolute numbers. This position has since been taken by Thailand.