She hardly speaks any English or Tagalog but that does not stop the white-haired grandmother from China’s southern Fujian province from running her clothes store in Divisoria, Manila’s bargain shopping centre. She has three Filipina assistants and she haggles with customers via a calculator.

Like many of the shop- owners in the “168” mall – which, in Cantonese, sounds like “prosperity all the way” – the grandmother is a recent arrival from China and part of a new wave of immigrants who have arrived in the Philippines.