had been driven out of Mauritius by increasing competition from Hakka-speakers. Upon arrival, the Cantonese speakers colluded to prevent any Hakka migration to Madagascar. As a result, the Chinese population remained largely homogenous; 98% traced their origins not just to Guangdong, but specifically to the Shunde district. Intermarriage between Chinese men and native Malagasy women was not uncommon. Post-World War II and independence 1957 official statistics showed 7,349 Chinese living in Madagascar, in forty-eight of the country's fifty-eight districts. By 2006, that number had grown to roughly forty thousand, composed of thirty thousand of the original migrants and their descendants, as well as ten thousand new expatriates from mainland China, and another hundred from Taiwan. The recent migrants trace their origins to a more diverse set of provinces, including Fujian and Zhejiang. Half lived in either Toamasina or Antananarivo, with a further one-eighth in the Diana Region; the remainder were distributed among the other provinces. Society Chinese-language education in Madagascar began in the late 1920s; with the 1937 onset of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Chinese parents could no longer send their children back to China for their schooling, which fueled the expansion of local Chinese education. Two of the most well-known schools, the Kuomintang-run École Franco-Chinoise () in Fenerive, and the co-educational École Chinoise Mixte () in Toamasina, were both established the following year. The École Chinoise Mixte at Toamasina was founded by parents who had withdrawn their children from the KMT school; they were alleged to be communist. By 1946, the island boasted eleven Chinese schools. However, after the end of World War II, and especially in the 1980s, parents began shifting their children towards French-language education instead. As a result, the number of schools decreased, and the ones which remained decreased the number of class hours devoted to Chinese-language teaching. Of eight schools in 1972, three disappeared by the mid-1980s; the École Franco-Chinoise, which at its peak had enrolled 629 students, was forced to merge with the École Chinoise Mixte to form the Collège de la Congrégation Chinoise (). By 1995, only two schools remained, in Fianarantsoa and Toamasina. The one in Toamasina, the Collège de la Congrégation Chinoise, enrolled 398 students at the kindergarten through lower secondary levels ; it continues teaching both Cantonese and Mandarin. The school in Fianarantsoa had about 100 students, including mixed-race children of Chinese and Malagasy descent, as well as non-Chinese children.