  Many countries today have "country-centric mobile apps" which are mobile apps
that are primarily used by residents of a specific country. Many of these
country-centric apps also include a location-based service which takes
advantage of the smartphone's API access to the smartphone's current GPS
location. In this paper, we investigate how such country-centric apps with
location-based services can be employed to study the diaspora associated with
ethnic and cultural groups. Our methodology combines GPS hacking, automated
task tools for mobile phones, and OCR to generate migration statistics for
diaspora. As a case study, we apply our methodology to WeChat, an enormously
popular app within China and among ethnic Chinese worldwide. Using WeChat, we
collect data about the Chinese diaspora in 32 cities. The combined data
provides interesting insights to the modern Chinese diaspora and how it has
changed in recent years.
