“For many years past Chinese students had been coming to England for technical education. Those at Cambridge came chiefly from Singapore, and many of them could not speak, still less read, Chinese.” With these few words, Arthur Waley's 1942 essay dismissed the Chinese of the British Commonwealth. This had been true of Ku Hung-ming and Song Ong Siang, partially true of Lim Boon Keng and Wu Lien-teh, and then only too true again of those who went to study in Britain during the 1930s. The Chinese students who came from Hong Kong were better in Chinese, but not those who came from the Dominions or the West Indies. The paradox is that many of the Chinese of that period found themselves after graduation in the service of China, where they would have to learn the Chinese language on the job.

Thus, until the 1950s, when we speak of the Chinese in the Commonwealth, we would find notable traces of their relations with China. That trend was reversed after Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward, and even more decisively after the Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976. Then, during the years 1984–1997, preparations were made for some six million Chinese in Hong Kong to leave the Commonwealth and become part of the PRC on Mainland China. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, about thirteen million people of Chinese descent remain in the Commonwealth, four-fifths of them in Malaysia and Singapore and the rest in the former Dominions.