Several recent reports and articles highlight the experience of those in China who seek to leave the country in search of better opportunities or greater freedom abroad. On Wednesday, the Pew Research Center published a report detailing why Asian immigrants come to the U.S. and how they view life in the States. According to survey results, 75 percent of Chinese immigrants cited the absence of state censorship as a benefit of life in the U.S. versus China, and 71 percent said that conditions for raising children were better in the U.S. than in China. In a piece published on Tuesday titled “How to escape from China to America,” The Economist described other factors motivating some Chinese migrants to make the perilous journey through the Darién Gap (which includes parts of Colombia and Panama) to the U.S. southern border:
Many of the migrants we met in [the Colombian town of] Necoclí were motivated by economics. Back home they felt like the ladders to a better life were being lifted away. A years-long crisis in China’s property sector has left consumers depressed and threatened deflation. The government’s recent stimulus measures have led to a [stock-market] rally, but pessimism over the economy lingers. Ordinary Chinese once felt that with enough hard work, they could get ahead. But according to new research, they now believe that being well-connected and growing up rich are the keys to success. “In China, for people in the lower-income class, for ordinary migrant workers like us, there’s just no way out,” said Ms Huang [a woman in her 40s, originally from Guizhou province].
[…] There is no evidence that China is sending an army to America, as Mr Trump [falsely] claims. A more valid complaint is that many Chinese asylum seekers are actually economic migrants. But some have genuine worries about persecution. Wang Jun, a 34-year-old dissident, had been imprisoned for more than three years in China for “subverting state power” after joining a pro-democracy group. He was released in 2020 but remained under surveillance. In 2023 he heard about the Darién Gap and decided to attempt the journey. After being blocked at several airports in China, he escaped through a land border in the south. In northern Mexico he was extorted by smugglers, officials and even fellow migrants. He was overjoyed to have reached the United States.
Mr Wang, though, failed his credible-fear interview. He says the asylum officer did not want to see the documents which proved he had spent time in prison for his political views. He was detained for months, but was able to appeal his deportation with the help of activists and NGOs. Mei Zhou, an immigration lawyer in Los Angeles, says she has met many Chinese migrants who fabricate stories of persecution. That hurts genuine asylum seekers. Immigration judges who encounter too many “fake storytellers” become more cynical and reject those who really do need protection, she says. [Source]
Lynette Ong also wrote about the phenomenon in an op-ed in Nikkei Asia last week titled, “Fleeing Xi’s ‘China Dream’: The great exodus of people and capital.” Besides the U.S., many Chinese migrants have chosen to settle in Japan. Chang Che’s dispatch in The New Yorker this summer described how a new community of Chinese expats imagine alternatives to Xi’s China from Japan, where many have opened bookstores and organized lectures, against a backdrop of the CCP’s transnational repression. In a follow-up to that article, Che wrote an essay last week (republished on Wednesday in ChinaTalk) profiling the “cultural emigres of the Xi Jinping era.” Their work, as one emigre described, is “the creation of ‘an overseas public sphere,’ […] where Chinese can discuss matters that are pertinent to them as overseas Chinese, rather than as fully assimilated immigrants or uprooted mainlanders.” Here are other ways in which Che described this generation of Chinese migrants:
One way to refer to these new cultural architects might be the “minjian emigrants,” in the vein of sinologist Sebastian Veg’s term for “grassroots” intellectuals 民间知识分子 [mínjiān zhīshi fènzǐ] who chose to operate outside government institutions in the aftermath of Tiananmen. While the events of the square extinguished the vita activa of Chinese like my parents, it transfigured that of others. For instance, after Liu Suli 刘苏里, a former Tiananmen student leader, was released from prison, he opened All Sages Bookstore 万圣书园 [Wànshèng Shūyuán] in Beijing in 1993. Liu was part of a generation of thwarted idealists who traded their romanticism for humanism, their liberal proclamations for projects and professions. Several other independent bookstores opened across the country after Liu’s. “China is not a liberal society,” Liu once told a journalist, so bookstores “express our longing for freedom.”
[…] The minjian emigrants are neither “silent” nor “dissident.” In central Tokyo, there is a bookstore run by a former human-rights lawyer named Li Jinxing 李金星. On the week I visited him, he had organized a book club comparing Chinese and Japanese paths to modernization (the implication was that China had failed); a documentary screening of Alexei Navalny, the late Russian opposition leader; and a discussion of Liang Qichao 梁启超, a former exile and father of modern China. Is this “dissident” work? I don’t think so. Part of what is appealing about Li’s lectures is that they offer a bridge to the younger generation, who tend to absorb ideas through culture — music, books, films, podcasts — as opposed to, say, rallies and political-activist groups. This is why the Liang Qichao lectures are titled, “Rebuilding China in Tokyo,” not “What we can learn from Liang Qichao so we can change China (again).”
[…] Their approach to politics is as observers, not actors. The mindsets of those like Annie Zhang Jieping and Li Jinxing remind me of the Central European intellectuals during the Cold War. People like Václav Havel and Adam Michnik shared a skepticism toward the binary political categories of left and right. Instead, they advocated for what Geroge Konrád calls “anti-politics” — a focus on civil society and moral integrity over traditional power struggles. They were meliorists, not dogmatists; their work did not involve scheming their surrogates into state power, but the gritty work of altering societal attitudes and beliefs through grassroots associations. In doing so, they offer more practical guidelines for how to imagine a freer life under totalitarian rule. [Source]
Back in China, authorities are making it harder for citizens to emigrate in the first place, notably by forcing some citizens to hand in their passports. The South China Morning Post reported in June that “groups covered by the travel restrictions include almost all of China’s civil servants, most employees in the state-owned finance sector and state-owned enterprises, and the leadership at universities and hospitals,” and “even government contractors at the community level.” The restrictions are not entirely new. Outbound travel was limited during the COVID-19 pandemic. Tibetans and Uyghurs have been systematically denied passports since at least 2013. Other rounds of forced passport recalls occurred in 2015, 2016, and 2017. The recent wave is driven in part by growing national security concerns that aim to prevent corrupt officials from fleeing abroad and high-profile personnel from leaking state secrets. Ryan McMorrow, Nian Liu, Sun Yu, and Gloria Li from The Financial Times reported this week that Chinese schoolteachers are the latest target of these state-imposed travel restrictions:
The passport collection drive, carried out under what is known as “personal travel abroad management”, allows local government officials to control and monitor who can travel abroad, how often and to where.
[…] Interviews with more than a dozen Chinese public sector workers and notices from education bureaus in half a dozen cities show restrictions on international travel have been greatly expanded from last year to include rank-and-file employees of schools, universities, local governments and state-owned groups.
[…] Teachers who refused to hand in their passports or who travelled abroad without permission would be subject to “criticism and education” or referred to China’s anti-corruption authority, depending on the severity of their case, the notice said. Offenders would also be barred from travel for two to five years. [Source]
