The number of Chinese nationals working in Spain has grown steadily over the last seven years, increasing by around 37,000 despite the economic crisis, according to an article published in the Spanish 'El Mundo' newspaper on Thursday.
El Mundo uses figures from the Spanish Social Security and from the National Institute of Statistics (INE) to show that in 2008 at the start of the economic crisis 66,769 Chinese were working in Spain.
By 2012, at the worst moment of the economic crisis while jobs were being lost in large numbers all over Spain, there were 86,319 Chinese working and now with the crisis appearing to be over, it has risen to 92,902 with a 3.3 percent rise over the past year.
Overall the past seven years have seen a 40 percent rise in the number of Chinese people working in Spain and they are the only group whose growth in employment continued to grow during the crisis.
Roughly half of those (46,451) are self-employed and run their own small businesses, while the other half have a contract of some kind or other.
The majority of these work in sectors such as the textile industry and in retail and what stands out is the high percentage of Chinese who are self-employed with 50 percent having their own businesses, compared with 8 percent of Moroccans, 5 percent of Ecuadorians, 9 percent of Colombians and 18 percent of Argentineans.
The INE calculated there are now 191,341 Chinese people resident in Spain (with around half of those in Madrid and the Catalan Region) and they now make up 6 percent of the 1.7 foreigners working in Spain.
