Han Chinese, Mandarin

About 12,000 Chinese live in Algeria, nearly all of them Han Chinese from the mainland, down from more than 90,000 in 2016, when Algeria was the largest market in Africa for Chinese construction firms. Most are engineers and labourers posted for a few years by Chinese state builders, which raised the Great Mosque of Algiers, the East-West Highway and thousands of housing blocks, and in two years laid 575 kilometres of the new iron-ore railway from Béchar to Tindouf and Gara Djebilet in the far southwest. A smaller settled community of traders sells clothes, phones and household goods around the Boushaki estate in Bab Ezzouar, known as the capital's Chinatown, and Chinese medical teams have served in Algerian hospitals without a break since 1963. Most live in company camps without their families and are not religious; a handful of men have become Muslims and married Algerian women.

About 13,000 Han Chinese live in Egypt, most of them brought in the last decade by China's building and investment drive. Engineers and labourers raise the towers of the New Administrative Capital in the desert east of Cairo, managers and technicians run the more than 200 Chinese factories of the TEDA industrial zone at Ain Sokhna on the Gulf of Suez, and traders from Zhejiang and Fujian sell clothes, phones and household goods. In Cairo they live in Maadi and Nasr City and around Ahmed Saeed Street in Abbasiya, where noodle shops and Chinese groceries serve both Chinese and Egyptian customers. Most hold no religion, with Buddhist, folk-religion and Christian minorities, and many stay only for a contract of a few years before going home.

Jordan's Han Chinese are a small, mostly temporary community of mainland Chinese citizens: company staff, engineers and contract workers on Chinese-built energy and infrastructure projects, plus a few hundred long-term residents who run restaurants, shops, farms and Chinese-medicine clinics. The largest Chinese project is the Attarat oil-shale power plant in the desert east of Qatrana, built by a Guangdong state company between 2017 and 2023. In Aqaba, a China Town wholesale market founded in 2006 sells Chinese clothing, toys and household goods to Jordanian traders. Most Chinese in Jordan are non-religious and speak little Arabic, living apart from Jordanian society in company compounds and rotating home after a few years.

A few thousand Chinese live in Kuwait, most of them engineers, managers and skilled workers of the roughly 70 Chinese companies that build its towers, housing cities and ports. China has been Kuwait's largest trading partner for over a decade, and Chinese contractors built the Central Bank of Kuwait's headquarters and Sabah Al-Salem University City; in late 2025 China Communications Construction Company won a four-billion-dollar contract for the first phase of the Mubarak Al-Kabeer Port on Bubiyan Island. Most are religiously unaffiliated, living in company compounds on fixed postings, and they gather for Chinese New Year at the embassy and the China Cultural Center that opened in Kuwait in 2025, the first in the Gulf. In July 2026 an Iranian missile struck a Chinese company's building in northern Kuwait, killing a Nepali driver; no Chinese were hurt.

About 1,500 Chinese live in Morocco, nearly all Mandarin-speaking Han from the mainland, and more than half of them in Casablanca. The best known are the wholesale traders of Derb Omar, the city's old market district, where Chinese shops selling clothes, toys and household goods gave one street the nickname "rue des Chinois". Others are engineers and managers of Chinese companies in Rabat and in the industrial zones of Tangier and Kenitra, where Chinese firms make car parts, tyres, cables and, since 2025-2026, electric-vehicle battery materials and cells. China has also sent medical teams to Moroccan hospitals since 1975, today 78 doctors and nurses in towns from Taza to Errachidia. Most came in the last twenty years for business or work, and few practise any religion.

About 14,000 Chinese citizens live in Saudi Arabia, nearly nine in ten of them men, most of them engineers, technicians and managers posted by Chinese firms building the kingdom's new power plants, solar parks, railways, tunnels and housing. More than 1,900 Chinese companies now work in the country, and since 2024 several hundred teachers from China have come to teach Mandarin in Saudi secondary schools. Most live in company compounds on fixed contracts without their families, and keep Chinese New Year and the Mid-Autumn Festival among themselves, with Chinese restaurants and WeChat groups as their meeting places. Most are not religious; the few Christians among them can only meet in private.

Some fifteen thousand Han Chinese live in Türkiye, most of them in Istanbul, where Chinese restaurants, Asian supermarkets and Chinese-owned hotels have grown up around Dolapdere and Beyoğlu. They are staff of the more than a thousand Chinese companies that have invested in Turkish ports, energy, telecoms and banking, traders and restaurateurs, students at Turkish universities and families who bought homes for residence. Their numbers are set to grow: the carmaker BYD is building an electric-car plant in Manisa with thousands of Chinese employees, and Chinese tourists, over 400,000 in 2024, have entered visa-free since 2026. Most are not religious and keep Spring Festival and family customs, and they live alongside, but apart from, the much larger Uyghur community of Chinese origin, whose plight in China colours Turkish views of Beijing.

About 370,000 Chinese live in the Emirates, nearly all of them Han, up from a few thousand in the 1990s, and most of them live in Dubai. Their hub is Dragon Mart, a 1.2-kilometre dragon-shaped market opened in 2004 that is the largest Chinese trading centre outside China, and the neighbouring China cluster of International City, where Chinese-language shop signs, restaurants and supermarkets line the streets. Many of the early traders came from Wenzhou and sell Chinese goods on to buyers from Africa, the Gulf and South Asia; others work for Chinese banks, port, construction and technology companies, or have come as professionals and families on long-term visas. Most are not religious but keep Spring Festival and ancestor customs, while the Chinese Muslims among them, most of them Hui, have their own mosque in International City.