It's actually pretty fascinating if you spend time in SE Asia. Chinese have been immigrating to all the countries for centuries. There are super old communities of Chinese in Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, everywhere in fact.

And they are often a distinct community, with their own language (a dialect from where they came from in China). They were often economic migrants, so tend to be seen as a "merchant class" in these countries and hold quite a lot of political power.

The Peranakan in Malaysia are a good example. And there is continued strife in those countries as these Chinese-Malaysian often have much more political power than their numbers alone would suggest.