Many young and educated Chinese no longer see a future in China. But the government absolutely wants to prevent an exodus – with more than questionable methods.
The strict social Covid controls are wearing down many Chinese who have become accustomed to extensive personal freedoms in recent decades. Since the pandemic, freedom of travel has been severely restricted – within the country itself, but especially for trips abroad. The authorities no longer issue passports, even cancel valid passports or confiscate them.
Ya Dong* first traveled to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand three years ago. He wanted to find out about the schools on offer in the city. “Back then, there were one or two Chinese students in most classes,” says Ya Dong in a video call, “now there are eight to ten children per class on average.” Thailand is currently trending among Chinese families.
Ya Dong, born and raised in Nanjing in eastern China, moved to Chiang Mai with his wife and two daughters in March. The girls are five and ten years old and attend an international school there. Lessons are held in English, and the children now find their way around the language quite well.
The main reason for the family’s decision to leave China was the education system. “Too many exams, too much homework and too much pressure,” says Ya Dong. In Thailand, everyday school life is significantly less stressful, but the children don’t learn less.
More and more Chinese want to start anew abroad
More and more Chinese are doing what Ya Dong and his family are doing. Dissatisfied with the conditions in China, they look for ways to leave home and start anew abroad. The reasons range from the rapidly increasing cost of living to the poorer job and career prospects and the pressure in the education system to the ever-narrowing freedom of movement since state and party leader Xi Jinping has been at the helm. When the omicron variant of the corona virus also arrived in China at the end of last year and the authorities increasingly imposed large-scale lockdowns, the movement received an additional boost.
On April 3, the central government in Beijing emphasized once again that the zero Covid strategy would be adhered to under all circumstances. On that day, the number of searches on the Chinese Internet for the term “emigration” rose by 440 percent. Technology company Tencent reported that searches for the phrase “conditions for moving to Canada” rose 2,846 percent in the week of March 28-April 3. Canada is a popular Chinese emigration destination. In the meantime, the Baidu Internet portal has deactivated the function with which users can display the number of search queries relating to emigration.
Almost at the same time as the surge in searches, local authorities put Shanghai’s 26 million residents under lockdown. Ya Dong and his family watched the developments from Chiang Mai. “We were very worried about our friends in Shanghai,” he says, “because we saw that the food supply wasn’t working.” Now the family is happy not to be in China anymore. Ya Dong says: “We have around 1,000 new infections here every day, but we live with the virus.” Only a few Thais still wear masks.
Leave China at all costs – running away as a philosophy
Many young, cosmopolitan Chinese think like Ya Dong. Some say they are “followers of the run philosophy.” The name is based on the English “run” meaning “to run away”. In Chinese, however, it is written with an identical-sounding character that means “moist” or “slippery.” In this way, Run followers try to escape the strict censorship in China.
Also to escape censorship, followers of the Run philosophy created a directory on the American developer platform Github. The portal is actually used by programmers to work together on open source projects. However, Run supporters use it as a forum, with 17,800 users following the site. The questions to be discussed are: Why run away? Where? And how can running away be made the “core belief of the new Chinese”?
The Run directory was launched in mid-April as criticism of the lockdown in Shanghai was at its peak. In China’s richest city, people were starving, tens of thousands were sent to inhumane quarantine camps, and some died because hospitals refused them access because they didn’t have green “QR health codes”. Criticism of this was quickly deleted in China’s social networks, and discussions continued in the Run forum.
On other subpages, Run supporters exchange the latest information on emigration. How to get a residence permit in Luxembourg? Which are the cheapest universities there? And what is the cost of living in Switzerland?
Some were at odds with their country even before the pandemic
These are questions that also concern Jasmine*. Even before the pandemic, she was at odds with her country. For example – similar to Ya Dong – with the education system, which has only one goal: to bring children to good universities. “People don’t learn what they’re passionate about.” They only learned by heart. Values such as respect, humanity and morality played no role. Instead: “Good memory, rich parents, problem solved,” says the woman in her mid-thirties.
She believed that southern China’s Shenzhen, where Jasmine lives, was different. Thanks to a certain liberality, the metropolis became the country’s most successful special economic zone right next to Hong Kong. That also attracted foreigners – Americans and Serbs, Brazilians and Russians. “I met a lot of people from all over the world without traveling,” says Jasmine, who works for a foreign tech company. “I enjoyed my life in Shenzhen – before.”
Many foreigners are leaving Shenzhen
In the third year of the pandemic, a lot has changed in Shenzhen too. It is estimated that half of the foreigners have definitely left China or will not be given a new visa to re-enter. Many pubs and western restaurants had to close. And Shenzhen residents are obviously not as liberal as Jasmine used to think.
Her aha experience was two lockdowns in spring. First, Jasmine’s quarters closed because of a handful of corona cases. The lockdown was supposed to last four days, but was extended by four days at the last moment. “There were no new cases, but we had to stay inside.”
After the lockdown, Jasmine’s neighbors who were outside of Shenzhen wanted to return to their homes. The neighborhood administration refused, she says. Although the neighbors had tested negative for four days in a row as required and had green QR codes in the mandatory Covid apps.
The affected neighbors described their situation in the chat group of the residents of their apartment building and hoped for help, as Jasmine says. But many residents would only have answered: “Don’t come back.” They feared that the returnees could become infected on their way through the city. At the time, the 20 million metropolis reported around a dozen new infections a day. Jasmine could hardly believe it.
When the entire city went into lockdown shortly after, it definitely got to be too much for Jasmine. “The majority of people just blindly follow the rules without thinking: Is there a better way?” For example, Jasmine angers that many more resources go into compulsory testing for the entire city population than into Covid vaccinations.
China is experiencing a mental health crisis
Jasmine suffered multiple nervous breakdowns. After all, she asked herself very basic questions about what her life in Shenzhen and China would be like if she one day had children with her partner. For example: what happens if in the future everyone just blindly follows the rules, but she and her family disagree? How can you raise your children to be curious people in such an environment?
Jasmine has therefore decided with her foreign partner to leave China in a year. She sees three possible destinations: Singapore, if she finds work there. Cyprus, which also has some tech companies and a friend says she could easily emigrate to. Or Hong Kong first, for postgraduate studies, to then get a Hong Kong passport. As a Hong Kong resident, Jasmine could travel visa-free to almost as many countries as the Swiss or Germans.
One company that benefits from Chinese people like Jasmine willing to emigrate is the law firm Ying Zhong Law Office in Beijing. She specializes in advice on all aspects of emigration. One of the consultants said on the phone that the inquiries had really exploded in the past few months. Although it is now much more difficult to emigrate than it was a few years ago, there are still opportunities.
The dream of free life in America
Many Chinese are still drawn to the USA. Those who first try a student visa and then look for a job in the USA have the best chance of success. If successful, the visa can then be converted into a residence permit with a work permit, reports the advisor. Anyone who is classified by the American authorities as a so-called foreign expert also has a chance of getting a visa.
But if you want to apply for a visa, you first need a passport, and recently hardly any Chinese can get one. The Chinese authorities only issue new travel documents in exceptional cases; expired passports are rarely renewed. In May, the government also issued new regulations according to which travel abroad is only permitted in important cases, such as when a family member is seriously ill abroad.
The government justifies the measures with the protection against possible imported corona infections. In fact, the new guidelines fit into a general trend in which China is becoming more isolated from the rest of the world and the government is increasingly trying to cut off the people from contacts with foreigners. The Chinese would like to look inwards, at their own culture and history, party and state leader Xi Jinping regularly demands.
Chinese authorities invalidate valid passports
But in their efforts to isolate their own people from abroad, the authorities sometimes go even further. In recent weeks, it has happened more frequently that Chinese people returning home have had their passports stamped invalid upon entry.
This has serious consequences for a Chinese businesswoman who has lived in Switzerland for several years and is married to a Swiss man. The woman has a medium-sized company in China. She normally flies to Shanghai or Beijing four times a year for several weeks and runs the business there. But that’s over now, because she fears that she won’t be able to leave China. Now she gets up almost every night to manage the business via video link.
Ya Dong and his family will also not return to China for the foreseeable future. Flights are rare and expensive, and there is also a quarantine of at least two weeks upon entry. The family prefers to stay in Chiang Mai, where, according to Ya Dong, the cost of living is only half as high as in Shanghai or Beijing.
“If you open the window, sunshine and fresh wind come into the house, but also flies,” Deng Xiaoping countered in the early years of the reform and opening policy to his opponents, who feared “mental pollution” by foreign ideas.
Xi, it seems, has decided to close the window. Fewer flies should come into the country, but probably also less fresh wind and sunshine.
* Name changed by editors.