Living outside China has become more like living inside China
Living outside China has become more like living inside China
The Communist Party is trying to tighten its grip on the Chinese diaspora
The Communist Party is trying to tighten its grip on the Chinese diaspora
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Ms Song is typical of many Chinese who have moved to the West in recent years: well-educated and wealthy, unlike the labourers who dominated earlier emigrant communities. The number of Chinese abroad has doubled since 1990. It has risen particularly fast since 2000. The pandemic heightened the desire of many members of the elite to leave, as their resentment grew of covid-related controls and the party’s ever-tightening restrictions on freedom of expression. China ended its battle against covid late in 2022, but its faltering economy and high youth unemployment are fuelling people’s anxieties. Many young Chinese now use the term runxue, “the art of running”, to convey their desire to flee.
There are about 10.5m people living outside mainland China who were born on the mainland. Only the Indian, Russian and Mexican diasporas are larger. Some of these Chinese are among the country’s richest people. In many countries, they have long dominated wealth-related visa schemes. More than 70% of the 81,000 investor visas issued by the American government to dollar-millionaires between 2010 and 2019 were given to Chinese citizens. Since 2012 some 85% of people who have received Australia’s “golden visas” for investing over A$5m ($3.3m) in the country have been from China. All but 41 of the 1,300 people who applied for the equivalent Irish scheme in 2022 were Chinese.
Chinese-born entrepreneurs founded Zoom, NetScreen and WebEx, but there are far more people of Indian descent running giant firms, including Adobe, Alphabet (Google’s parent) and Microsoft, among others. Silicon Valley companies may recruit directly from India for leadership roles but typically choose not to do so from China, says Frank Pieke of Leiden University in the Netherlands. […]
In politics, people of Indian origin fill some of the highest offices in Britain, Ireland and Portugal, yet there are few elected politicians of Chinese descent anywhere in Europe. The Chinese government is now encouraging such people to get more involved in local and national politics, hoping they will help to nurture more positive attitudes towards China in the countries where they live.
It’s well known that Asian people in general, but East Asian people especially are discriminated against for leadership roles and this is a comparison that’s not really apt. I would be curious as to whether Japanese immigrants and their descendants, who are also largely well educated, represent a similar share per capita of leadership positions as Chinese immigrants and their descendants do.
Very alarming that the Chinese government is encouraging Chinese immigrants to get positions of power in foreign countries.
I wonder how many non-Chinese are in the CCP or running large Chinese firms?
What I've noticed is there wat more of a Chinese identity than there is for other countries. Usually if a white person moves to another country and has children the children grow up identifying with that country.
But go to China Town anywhere in the world and it really does look like China, the newspapers are all Chinese newspapers for example (not that nationality in Chinese actual Chinese).
White people used to have an identity that held. Like Britisher for example. But I doubt any Aussies would say they are a Britisher.
The only exception is Americans than are actually American and 99% German but have 1% Irish so they tell everyone are Irish (but they actually know nothing about Ireland).