Wary of Future, Professionals Leave China in Record Numbers
Lee Yangang and his wife, Wang Lu, emigrated to Sydney, Australia, from Beijing last year, saying they felt insecure in China.
By IAN JOHNSON
Published: October 31, 2012
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.
Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times
Chen Kuo, 30, in Beijing just before she left for Australia.
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 by official 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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