The Great Chinese
Exodus
Many Chinese are leaving for cleaner air,
better schools and more opportunity. But Beijing is keeping its eye on them.
By Andrew Browne in
the Wall Street Journal
A recent report showed
that 64% of China's rich are either migrating overseas or have plans to leave
the country. Political scientist James To, who has written a book on the
subject, tells the WSJ's Deborah Kan how the Chinese government is using
propaganda campaigns abroad to ensure loyalty from overseas Chinese.
Even when the emperors
did their utmost to keep them at home, the Chinese ventured overseas in search
of knowledge, fortune and adventure. Manchu Qing rulers thought those who left
must be criminals or conspirators and once forced the entire coastal population
of southern China to move at least 10 miles inland.
But even that didn't
put an end to wanderlust. Sailing junks ferried merchants to Manila on monsoon
winds to trade silk and porcelain for silver. And in the 19th century,
steamships carried armies of "coolies" (as they were then called) to
the mines and plantations of the European empires.
Today, China's borders
are wide open. Almost anybody who wants a passport can get one. And Chinese
nationals are leaving in vast waves: Last year, more than 100 million outbound
travelers crossed the frontiers.
Most are tourists who
come home. But rapidly growing numbers are college students and the wealthy,
and many of them stay away for good. A survey by the Shanghai research firm
Hurun Report shows that 64% of China's rich—defined as those with assets of
more than $1.6 million—are either emigrating or planning to.
To be sure, the
departure of China's brightest and best for study and work isn't a fresh
phenomenon. China's communist revolution was led, after all, by intellectuals
schooled in Europe. What's new is that they are planning to leave the country
in its ascendancy. More and more talented Chinese are looking at the upward
trajectory of this emerging superpower and deciding, nevertheless, that they're
better off elsewhere.
The decision to go is
often a mix of push and pull. The elite are discovering that they can buy a
comfortable lifestyle at surprisingly affordable prices in places such as
California and the Australian Gold Coast, while no amount of money can purchase
an escape in China from the immense problems afflicting its urban society:
pollution, food safety, a broken education system. The new political era of
President Xi Jinping, meanwhile, has created as much anxiety as hope.
Another aspect of this
massive population outflow hasn't yet drawn much attention. Whatever their
motives and wherever they go, those who depart will be shadowed by the organs
of the Leninist state they've left behind. A sprawling bureaucracy—the Overseas
Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council—exists to ensure that distance from
the motherland doesn't dull their patriotism. Its goal is to safeguard loyalty
to the Communist Party.
This often sets up an
awkward dynamic between Chinese arrivals and the societies that take them in.
While the newcomers try to fit in, Beijing makes every effort to use them in
its campaign to project its political values, enhance its global image, harass
its opponents and promote the use of standard Mandarin Chinese over the
dialects spoken in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Politics, though,
isn't the most important issue on the mind of Ms. Sun, a 34-year-old Beijing
resident who's bailing out. (She requested anonymity because she doesn't want
publicity to spoil her plans.) The main reason she's planning to pack up: Her
6-year-old daughter is asthmatic, and Beijing's chronic pollution irritates the
girl's lungs. "Breathing freely is a basic requirement," she says.
The girl also has a talent for music, art and storytelling that Ms. Sun fears
China's test-driven schools won't nurture.
Recently, Ms. Sun flew
to San Francisco to shop for a school for her daughter, browse for property and
handle the paperwork for permanent U.S. residency. She insists that she's not
leaving China forever—a sentiment expressed by many on their way out who see a
foreign passport as an insurance policy in case things go badly wrong in China.
"I'm just giving
my family another option," she says.
A college professor,
who insisted on anonymity altogether ("Just call me an intellectual,"
he says), takes a darker view of China's prospects as he prepares to emigrate
to the U.S., joining his two children, who both have postgraduate degrees from
U.S. colleges.
Like many Chinese
academics, the professor has a business or two on the side, although he hardly
looks the part of an executive, unshaven and with crumpled pants riding 6
inches above his open sandals. In China, he pronounces, "Once you get
rich, they arrest you."
That is an
exaggeration, of course, but there is a propensity for entrepreneurs who appear
on lists of the richest Chinese to end up in jail.
His real concern is
that to get ahead, he's had to make compromises with his principles (he doesn't
say bribes, but that is what he means). "I've been forced to prostitute
myself," he says, and now he worries that it could all be snatched away.
In China, a weak, corrupt legal system may sometimes work in favor of
entrepreneurs while they're clawing their way up, cutting corners along the
way, but it is almost always a liability once they've made it.
First-generation
businessmen—the ones who powered China's economic rise—now dream of a secure
retirement. That means legal safety in places like the U.S. and Canada.
The professor is also
a fan of U.S. technology. One of his companies sells environmental equipment,
and he's hoping that by living in America, he'll find ways to enhance his
products and develop new ones—which he hopes to continue to sell in China, the
biggest market. He holds up his Apple iPhone. "How many shirts do you think we
Chinese have to export to buy one of these phones?" he asks.
China, he concludes,
is still "a very backward country."
The flight of the rich
recalls similar outflows from Hong Kong before the 1997 handover of the
then-British colony to China and from Taiwan in an earlier period when its own
future seemed imperiled. In those cases, businesspeople parked their families
in places like Vancouver and Seattle and shuttled back and forth to Asia for
business.
That is often the
strategy in today's China, which has entered an uncertain transition. The
economy is off the boil; property prices are sliding. Mr. Xi has amassed more
power than any Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping and is using it to crack down
on corrupt officials while going after human rights lawyers, bloggers and civil
society activists. That is ridding China of the kind of individual its
government doesn't want but is also scaring away the creative types it needs.
Last year, the U.S.
issued 6,895 visas to Chinese nationals under the EB-5 program, which allows
foreigners to live in America if they invest a minimum of $500,000. South
Koreans, the next largest group, got only 364 such visas. Canada this year
closed down a similar program that had been swamped by Chinese demand.
Some of the wealth
sluicing out of China is undoubtedly ill-gotten gains. The Chinese central bank
estimates that corrupt officials may have siphoned off as much as $123 billion
since the mid-1990s.
In his book
"Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750," the historian Odd
Arne Westad writes that overseas Chinese "were, and are, the glue that
holds China's relations with the world together, in good times and bad."
That explains why
Beijing takes an intense pastoral interest in the Chinese diaspora. It has some
48 million members—about double the number of Indians living outside their
country—and wherever they alight, they tend to rise to the top, be it Silicon
Valley or the high-tech corridors of Southeast Asia.
Beijing makes a
crucial distinction between ethnic Chinese who have acquired foreign
nationality and those who remain Chinese citizens. The latter category is
officially called huaqiao—sojourners. Together, they are viewed as an
immensely valuable asset: the students as ambassadors for China, the
scientists, engineers, researchers and others as conduits for technology and
industrial know-how from the West to propel China's economic modernization.
In 1989, when the
Tiananmen Square massacre triggered an outflow of traumatized students and
shattered the Party's image among overseas Chinese communities, the Overseas
Chinese Affairs Office kicked into high gear with a propaganda campaign to
repair the damage. It proved highly successful.
The political
scientist James Jiann Hua To, the author of "Qiaowu: Extra-Territorial
Policies for the Overseas Chinese," says that the campaign "turned
around the way most overseas Chinese look at China." (Read a Q&A with James Jiann Hua To.)
The effort continues.
It is subtle—a hearts-and-minds campaign that works through overseas Chinese
newspapers, websites (digital "New Chinatowns," in propaganda-speak),
schools, youth groups and church organizations.
The results show up in
"patriotic" street activities. In 2008, for instance, well-organized
Chinese students guarded the Olympic torch as it went around the world ahead of
the Beijing Games, attracting raucous protests from Tibetan independence
activists and other hostile groups. The following year, Chinese students
disrupted the Melbourne Film Festival when it screened a movie about the life
of exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer, whom Beijing accuses of stirring up
separatist agitation in its Xinjiang region. Similar protesters dog the
footsteps around the world of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader,
whom Beijing also accuses of "splittist" activities.
Foreigners sometimes
have a hard time understanding why Beijing expends so much effort countering
threats, real or imagined, from Chinese opponents overseas, including the banned
Falun Gong spiritual movement. But China's leaders are haunted by history. To
an extraordinary degree, the destiny of modern China has been shaped by the
Chinese who left. The overseas Chinese of Southeast Asia provided critical
support for Sun Yat-sen's 1911 revolution, which toppled the Qing.
The dynamic works the
other way too. When Deng needed money and expertise to unlock the
entrepreneurial energies of China in the early 1980s, he first tapped the
mega-rich Chinese tycoons in Hong Kong, Thailand and Malaysia, whose factories
populated his Special Economic Zones.
But China's
cross-border political activities are creating unease. Consider Australia—one
of the most popular destinations for Chinese students, emigrants and tourists,
and a country where Mandarin Chinese is now the second-most widely spoken
language after English.
"Chinese
Australians are being lectured, monitored, organized and policed in Australia
on instruction from Beijing as never before," wrote John Fitzgerald of
Swinburne University of Technology, one of the country's foremost China
experts, in an article published by the Asan Forum, a South Korean think tank.
In the U.S., a
vigorous debate has broken out in academic circles about the role on American
campuses of Confucius Institutes, which are sponsored by the Chinese government
and offer Mandarin-language classes, along with rosy cultural views of China.
Critics say these institutes threaten academic independence; supporters say
they offer valuable language training that would not otherwise be available. In
June, the American Association of University Professors stepped into the
controversy and recommended that universities "cease their
involvement" with the institutes unless they can gain "unilateral
control" over them.
China must be
exceedingly careful not to leave too many fingerprints on its political
activities offshore. For a start, it has an official policy of noninterference
in the internal affairs of other countries. But it also puts established
overseas Chinese communities at risk by raising the issue of their national
loyalties. That is particularly true in Southeast Asia, where the Chinese of a
previous era were often viewed with suspicion as a communist fifth column.
Still, the sheer
volume of China's outbound travel these days, and its massive economic impact,
gives it new leverage. In the global market for high-end real estate, Chinese
buying has become a key driver of prices. According to the U.S. National
Association of Realtors, Chinese buyers snapped up homes worth $22 billion in
the year ending in March.
Australia called a
parliamentary inquiry to find out whether local households were being priced
out of the market by Chinese money. (The conclusion: not yet.)
Without fee-paying
Chinese students, many colleges in the postrecession Western world simply
wouldn't be able to pay the bills. Chinese students are by far the largest
group of foreign students on U.S. campuses, and their numbers jumped 21% last
year from the year before—to 235,597, according to the Institute of
International Education. Their numbers are increasing at a similar pace in
Australia. In England, there are now almost as many Chinese students as British
ones studying full-time for postgraduate master's degrees.
Tourism is booming
again thanks to China. The Chinese have overtaken Americans to become the
world's biggest tourist spenders—and they're rapidly moving upmarket. Mei
Zhang, the founder of Beijing's high-end travel operator WildChina, offers
family holidays to destinations such as Kenya, Patagonia and Alaska at $10,000
per head. Chinese are now the third-largest group of nationals landing in
Antarctica, where tourists zip around the ice floes in Zodiac inflatables to
watch penguins.
The international
hotel industry is increasingly tailoring its service to Chinese tastes. Among
the required extras these days: teapots and toothbrushes. Russell Brice, the
founder of the expedition firm Himalayan Experience, says that he packs duck
and chicken feet—Chinese delicacies—along with the climbing gear for his
Chinese clients. "A few little things like that make it special," he
says.
And the outflow has
only just begun. The Hong Kong-based brokerage firm CLSA forecasts that
departures from China will double to 200 million by 2020.
In education, the next
big wave coming from China is high schoolers. Rich parents are opting out of an
education system that prepares children to take high-stakes tests for college
entrance but neglects the creative side. Besides, once they've been through the
mill, the students have a tendency to kick back when they get to college.
Xie Li, a manager at a
Beijing telecommunications company, says that she tried to push her 16-year-old
son to go to high school overseas, but he couldn't bear to leave home so early.
He's a star pupil at the middle school attached to Beijing Normal University,
which First Lady Michelle Obama visited recently.
Still, the boy is
being groomed for college overseas and an international life. At 13, his
parents packed him off to spend six weeks with an American family in Virginia.
They've taken family breaks in exotic places like Tanzania. And now, to his
mother's delight, he's set a goal for himself to study chemistry at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Ms. Xie recognizes
that he might never come back but says, "His heart will always be with his
family."
The Chinese government
has no desire to slow the flow of students. Its attitude is simple: Why not
have the Americans or Europeans train our brightest minds if they want to?
President Xi's own daughter went to Harvard.
As always with China,
the numbers awe. In his memoirs, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national
security adviser, recalls a meeting between President Jimmy Carter and Deng.
Human rights were on Mr. Carter's agenda, and he started needling the Chinese
leader about Beijing's tight emigration policies. "Fine. We'll let them
go," Deng snapped. "Are you prepared to accept 10 million?"
Not even Deng could
have imagined the human torrent his "open door" reforms would
eventually unleash. Try 100 million—and counting.
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