Regeneration efforts often claim to be inclusive-but in practice, they risk leaving the most marginalised behind. In Liverpool Chinatown, where the BAME community makes up a significant portion of the population, the Liverpool Chinatown CIC is working to ensure that renewal doesn’t replicate historic erasure.

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Who’s Being Left Out?

Within the Chinese community itself, marginalisation persists:

• Elders with limited English, tech access, or transport
• Undocumented workers unable to access formal services
• Young LGBTQ+ Chinese people seeking visibility and belonging
• Interracial families who feel invisible in monocultural narratives

Add to that the wider local BAME community-Somali, Vietnamese, Malay, Black Caribbean-and you begin to understand the complexity of exclusion.

Root Causes

• A lack of accessible and translated information
• Underrepresentation in civic, cultural, and political spaces
• Cultural stigma or silence around race, class, gender and disability

Many people in Chinatown live at the intersection of multiple forms of marginalisation. Addressing one without the others is not enough.

What Inclusion Actually Looks Like

The CIC is committed to practical, not performative inclusion. That means:

• Paying BAME residents to co-design events and programmes
• Actively recruiting from overlooked groups to join the leadership board
• Offering trauma-informed and multilingual outreach
• Embedding accessibility into every physical and digital intervention

Stories That Shift Power

Inclusion isn’t only about services-it’s also about storytelling:

• Publishing oral histories in Chinese and English
• Creating space for Afro-Asian solidarity through arts programmes
• Hosting interfaith events that centre BAME women’s experiences

When stories shift, power shifts.

Real inclusion is messy, intersectional, and slow-but it’s also essential. Liverpool Chinatown isn’t perfect. But it is learning, listening, and leading.

And that’s a regeneration model worth replicating.

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