This Is Not Chinatown is a documentary exploring the experience of six Chinese students living in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Meet Jinming, Yuyang, Patrick, Xinyu, Yuyue and Lixiang while they are sharing their personal stories with us. How do they think, feel and go about their daily lives in the international student city of Amsterdam, where nationalism is on the rise and Chinatown does not seem Chinatown?

The number of international students at Dutch universities has been growing rapidly in the past ten years. By the early 2020s, more than 120.000 students from abroad were enrolled in universities across the Netherlands, making up about 15 percent of the country’s total student population.The city of Amsterdam, home to two universities, hosts the largest number of international students, about 20.000. While the majority of these students hail from other European countries, particularly Germany, Italy and Romania, an increasing number comes from China.   

Chinese students have become one of the largest groups of international students in the Netherlands, and the largest group from outside Europe. Currently, over 6.000 Chinese are studying in various Dutch cities, many of them in Amsterdam. How do these students experience the city? What challenges do they encounter while adapting to life in Amsterdam? How do they navigate living, studying, working and socialising in the city? How do they maintain their cultural identity far away from home? And do they feel at home in Amsterdam?

The film project This Is Not Chinatown is supported by the Centre for Urban Studies (CUS), Amsterdam Research Centre for Migration (ARC-M), Expertise Centre Humanitarian Communication (HUCOM) and Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). The production has been largely funded by UvA’s Urban Studies Seed Grant XL (Dec. 2021), which resulted in a collaborative research and documentary project developed by migration scholars Maggi Leung and Özge Bilgili, film scholar-practitioner Emiel Martens, filmmaker Philip du Plessis, and the (then) student assistants Aly Amer, Yanbo Hao and Yiwen Wang.