in the Taiwanese partner moving to Singapore and obtaining citizenship. Peranakan The Peranakan or Baba-Nyonya are early mixed Chinese-Malay immigrants from Malacca and Penang who later migrated to Singapore. The Peranakans are descendants of mixed-race Chinese subgroups such as the lower class Tankas who have for generations extensively intermarried with the indigenous Malays, Bugis, Balinese, Javanese or Europeans and assimilating their adopted slave children. A few notable Peranakans have classified themselves as a separate ethnic group and have a distinct identity from either separate group while the vast majority have self-classified as Chinese Singaporeans after re-assimilation. The men are known as Baba while the women are known as Bibiks or Nyonyas. Peranakans in Singapore were once concentrated around the Malay settlement at Geylang and the Chinese enclave at Katong because they often served as intermediaries for businesses and social groups in colonial Singapore owing to multilingual fluency in English, Malay, and Hokkien (post-independence and after the 1980s, standard Mandarin as well mastered as a third supplementary language). Many Peranakans and Hokkien Chinese moved out of the congested town of Singaporetoday's Central Business Districtand built seaside mansions and villas along the East Coast in Tanjong Katong for their families. After Singapore's independence, Peranankans moved throughout the island. Many Peranakans converted to Roman Catholicism during the 17th and 18th century Dutch, Portuguese, British and Spanish colonisation of Southeast Asia, which saw missionaries set up posts in Batavia (today's Jakarta) and along the Malay peninsula. New Chinese immigrants Before 1990, Mandarin speakers from Beijing and northern China and Wu speakers from Shanghai and the central Pacific coast of China constituted less than 2% of the Chinese Singaporean population. Most of the current population of native Mandarin speakers immigrated to Singapore much later than the other groups, after the Singaporean government relaxed immigration laws in 1989. Many of them were working in blue-collared jobs during Singapore's rapid industrialisation which began in the 1970s. Because of this, the members of this third wave are called the "New Immigrants" (, p Xīnyímín). They usually speak Standard Mandarin, the lingua franca among mainland Chinese groups today, and many speak other varieties as well. Since the 1990s, the number of mainland Chinese who come to Singapore to study or work has steadily increased every year. Many stayed only for a short time and then returned to China, but eventually many settled down permanently and became permanent residents or