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BEIJING — At 30, Chen Kuo had
what many Chinese dream of: her own apartment and a well-paying job at a
multinational corporation. But in mid-October, Ms. Chen boarded a midnight flight
for Australia to begin a new life with no sure prospects.
Like hundreds of thousands of
Chinese who leave each year, she was driven by an overriding sense that she
could do better outside China. Despite China’s tremendous economic successes in recent years, she was
lured by Australia’s healthier environment, robust social services and the
freedom to start a family in a country that guarantees religious freedoms.
“It’s very stressful in China
— sometimes I was working 128 hours a week for my auditing company,” Ms. Chen
said in her Beijing apartment a few hours before leaving. “And it will be
easier raising my children as Christians abroad. It is more free in Australia.”
As China’s Communist Party
prepares a momentous leadership change in early November, it is losing skilled
professionals like Ms. Chen in record numbers. In 2010, the last year for which
complete statistics are available, 508,000 Chinese left for the 34 developed
countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That is a 45 percent
increase over 2000.
Individual countries report
the trend continuing. In 2011, the United States received 87,000 permanent
residents from China, up from 70,000 the year before. Chinese immigrants are
driving real estate booms in places as varied as Midtown Manhattan, where some
enterprising agents are learning Mandarin, to the Mediterranean island of
Cyprus, which offers a route to a European Union passport.
Few emigrants from China cite
politics, but it underlies many of their concerns. They talk about a
development-at-all-costs strategy that has ruined the environment, as well as a
deteriorating social and moral fabric that makes China feel like a chillier
place than when they were growing up. Over all, there is a sense that despite
all the gains in recent decades, China’s political and social trajectory is
still highly uncertain.
“People who are middle class
in China don’t feel secure for their future and especially for their children’s
future,” said Cao Cong, an associate professor at the University of Nottingham
who has studied Chinese migration. “They don’t think the political situation is
stable.”
Most migrants seem to see a
foreign passport as insurance against the worst-case scenario rather than as a
complete abandonment of China.
A manager based in Shanghai at
an engineering company, who asked not to be named, said he invested earlier
this year in a New York City real estate project in hopes of eventually
securing a green card. A sharp-tongued blogger on current events as well, he
said he has been visited by local public security officials, hastening his
desire for a United States passport.
“A green card is a feeling of
safety,” the manager said. “The system here isn’t stable and you don’t know
what’s going to happen next. I want to see how things turn out here over the
next few years.”
Political turmoil has
reinforced this feeling. Since early this year, the country has been shocked by
revelations that Bo Xilai, one of the Communist Party’s most senior leaders,
ran a fief that byofficial accounts engaged in murder,
torture and corruption.
“There continues to be a lot
of uncertainty and risk, even at the highest level — even at the Bo Xilai
level,” said Liang Zai, a migration expert at the University at Albany. “People
wonder what’s going to happen two, three years down the road.”
The sense of uncertainty
affects poorer Chinese, too. According to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce,
800,000 Chinese were working abroad at the end of last year, versus 60,000 in
1990. Many are in small-scale businesses — taxi driving, fishing or farming —
and worried that their class has missed out on China’s 30-year boom. Even
though hundreds of millions of Chinese have been lifted from poverty during
this period, the rich-poor gap in China is among the world’s widest and the
economy is increasingly dominated by large corporations, many of them
state-run.
“It’s driven by a fear of
losing out in China,” said Biao Xiang, a demographer at Oxford University.
“Going abroad has become a kind of gambling that may bring you some
opportunities.”
Zhang Ling, the owner of a restaurant
in the coastal city of Wenzhou, is one such worrier. His extended family of
farmers and tradesmen pooled its money to send his son to high school in
Vancouver, Canada. The family hopes he will get into a Canadian university and
one day gain permanent residency, perhaps allowing them all to move overseas.
“It’s like a chair with different legs,” Mr. Zhang said. “We want one leg in
Canada just in case a leg breaks here.”
Emigration today is different
from in past decades. In the 1980s, students began going abroad, many of them
staying when Western countries offered them residency after the 1989 Tiananmen
Square uprising. In the 1990s, poor Chinese migrants captured international
attention by paying “snakeheads” to take them to the West, sometimes on cargo
ships like the Golden Venture that ran aground off New York City in 1993.
Now, years of prosperity mean
that millions of people have the means to emigrate legally, either through
investment programs or by sending an offspring abroad to study in hopes of
securing a long-term foothold.
Wang Ruijin, a secretary at a
Beijing media company, said she and her husband were pushing their 23-year-old
daughter to apply for graduate school in New Zealand, hoping she can stay and
open the door for the family. They do not think she will get a scholarship, Ms.
Wang said, so the family is borrowing money as a kind of long-term investment.
“We don’t feel that China is
suitable for people like us,” Ms. Wang said. “To get ahead here you have to be
corrupt or have connections; we prefer a stable life.”
Perhaps signaling that the
government is concerned, the topic has been extensively debated in the official
media. Fang Zhulan, a professor at Renmin University in Beijing, wrote in the
semiofficial magazine People’s Forum that many people were “voting with their
feet,” calling the exodus “a negative comment by entrepreneurs upon the
protection and realization of their rights in the current system.”
The movement is not all one
way. With economies stagnant in the West and job opportunities limited, the
number of students returning to China was up 40 percent in 2011 compared with
the previous year. The government has also established high-profile programs to
lure back Chinese scientists and academics by temporarily offering various
perks and privileges. Professor Cao from Nottingham, however, says these
programs have achieved less than advertised.
“Returnees can see that they
will become ordinary Chinese after five years and be in the same bad situation
as their colleagues” already in China, he said. “That means that few are
attracted to stay for the long run.”
Many experts on migration say
the numbers are in line with other countries’ experiences in the past. Taiwan
and South Korea experienced huge outflows of people to the United States and
other countries in the 1960s and ’70s, even as their economies were taking off.
Wealth and better education created more opportunities to go abroad and many
did — then, as now in China, in part because of concerns about political
oppression.
While those countries
eventually prospered and embraced open societies, the question for many Chinese
is whether the faction-ridden incoming leadership team of Xi Jinping, chosen
behind closed doors, can take China to the next stage of political and economic
advancement.
“I’m excited to be here but
I’m puzzled about the development path,” said Bruce Peng, who earned a master’s
degree last year at Harvard and now runs a consulting company, Ivy Magna, in
Beijing. Mr. Peng is staying in China for now, but he says many of his 100
clients have a foreign passport or would like one. Most own or manage small-
and medium-size businesses, which have been squeezed by the policies favoring
state enterprises.
“Sometimes your own property
and company situation can be very complicated,” Mr. Peng said. “Some people
might want to live in a more transparent and democratic society.”
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