Xue Yuhe is passing through Istanbul on his way back to China after several years studying in Europe. The young graduate savours a dish of Uyghur noodles with relish in one of the many Chinese restaurants that have popped up in the city centre in recent years. He is already looking for a way to leave China again, perhaps by pursuing a postgraduate degree in Europe.

“Haven’t you heard of the ‘run’ movement?” Xue (who prefers not to use his real name) asks Equal Times. Since 2021, the ideogram rùn (润), which originally translates as ‘profit,’ has taken on the additional meaning of ‘emigrate’ due to its resemblance to the English word ‘run’. For a generation of educated youth in China, ‘run’ has come to express an urgent desire to flee the country.

Xue says that at least 10 per cent of the people he knows want to leave China and that everyone knows at least one young person who has emigrated or wishes to do so. Many of his schoolmates are unemployed and currently preparing for postgraduate studies or civil servant exams. Days after returning home, Xue cut off communication. The police in his city had “invited him over for tea,” a euphemism for being interrogated.

Why are so many young people running away from the world’s second largest economy?

Political repression, coupled with the lack of economic and career prospects – which have been aggravated by China’s ‘zero-Covid’ policy – are the main reasons that Xue and other interviewees gave Equal Times for wanting to leave their country.

Turkey has become a transit hub for this new wave of young professional migrants who dream of reaching the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand or Europe, and even other Asian countries, such as Japan.

The last thing that Winston Huang (not his real name) did before saying goodbye to his home country was to immerse himself in the biblical Book of Exodus. The 28-year-old from Shenzhen had become restless living under China’s political system. The recent pandemic only gave him more reasons to seek a way out.

His political awakening came as an adolescent after he saw a documentary on the ‘June Fourth Incident’ (the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre) and read Frank Dikötter’s People’s Trilogy. He learned about corruption in China by surfing virtual private networks (VPNs) and accessing foreign news sites. Years spent observing his home country have led him to describe it as “breaking down, collapsing”.

In 2016, Huang decided to emigrate to Japan, despite his family’s opposition. He saw it as his only chance of regaining a meaningful life. He spent five years saving up to enrol in a Japanese language school. The day before his departure in 2022, Huang received an unexpected visit from the Chinese police. “They dropped by to offer me their ‘friendly advice’. They warned me to study diligently, to be on the lookout for scams, to be cautious when it came to the pandemic and which country I would be going to,” he tells Equal Times. This encounter did not come as a complete surprise to Huang, who had previously faced scrutiny from the public security department for using VPNs to access foreign websites, the only way to obtain uncensored information in China.

Huang is one of the pioneers of the recent wave of Chinese emigrants. He left in April 2022 during the lockdown of Shanghai, which spurred many Chinese citizens to consider leaving the country.

According to public WeChat data, on 15 March 2022 there were 16 million searches related to ‘yimin,’ the Chinese character for ‘emigrate’. Just one month later, these searches rose to 72 million (Shanghai did not reopen until the end of 2022). By October 2023, they had soared to 510 million.

As debates on emigration have intensified, so has sensitivity surrounding the issue. WeChat quietly removed the term from its statistical database, while Chinese networks such as Baidu and Weibo stopped providing keyword analysis after the Shanghai shutdown.

Escaping zero-Covid

Most of those who began considering emigration during this period had not previously done so. People like Joe Cheng of Wuhan, a candidate to study in the US, had never given it any thought until recently. “Who would have imagined that that kind of lockdown strategy could happen in the 21st century?” he asks. More than ten of his Gen Z friends have moved to Japan, Europe, Australia, the United States, Canada and even Vanuatu. Cheng insists on the urgency of seizing any opportunity to escape, regardless of the destination.

The nearly three years of zero-Covid policy imposed by President Xi Jinping have generated both resentment and economic pressure, which affects young people in particular. China’s once powerful economy has stopped growing at a rapid pace, according to the International Monetary Fund.

In December 2023, China’s National Bureau of Statistics reported that the unemployment rates for those aged 16-24, 25-29 and 30-59 (excluding students) stood at 14.9 per cent, 6.1 per cent and 3.9 per cent, respectively. The first two age groups registered rates higher than the global average of 5.1 per cent. Before the statistical method was revised in August of last year, the unemployment figures among 16–24-year-olds painted a bleaker picture, moving from 17 per cent to 21 per cent during the first six months of the year.

Although the Chinese authorities no longer restrict citizens from leaving the country, scrutiny has intensified. Cheng witnessed one family being questioned by Chinese customs agents for more than ten minutes during his first trip out of China, following the lifting of the travel ban in December 2022. In the past, families were considered low-risk targets for customs inspections.

If Cheng is not admitted to the United States this year, he will keep trying. At the age of 30, he plans to keep applying for a visa. In addition to the US, he is also considering Japan. He hopes to research possible transitions for the betterment of China from abroad. But unless a more open environment for reform emerges, he has no intention of returning.

Both Huang and Cheng believe that China’s ranking as the second largest economy in the world is nothing more than an illusion. They agree that Chinese citizens have not reaped the expected benefits of Deng Xiaoping’s ‘economic reform,’ the adoption of state capitalism, which began in 1978. Cheng points to a growing inequality in the distribution of wealth. Huang, who lives in Japan on a student visa, is satisfied with his current life. Japan’s system and order have exceeded his expectations. He hopes to find a job and settle down permanently after graduation. On the eve of his departure, Huang told his family: “If I die, I don’t even want my ashes to go back to China.”

Irregular migration routes

Many of those who choose to flee China travel through the major hub of Istanbul. From there, they continue on to one of several African countries and then to Ecuador, which does not require a visa for them to enter. From there they take the route that millions of Latin American migrants take to enter the United States irregularly. According to US Customs, more than 37,400 Chinese immigrants entered the United States irregularly through its southern border in 2023, a 50-fold increase from 2021. A recent expression on the Chinese internet refers to what they are doing as ‘walking the line’ (zouxian).

Cui Yingjie, a 26-year-old programming student, arrived in New York from Malaysia with his wife seeking political asylum in 2023. “I left for political reasons. I was indoctrinated into the falsehoods of the Communist Party of China (CPC) from a very young age. Circumventing censorship and delving into the true history of China and the misdeeds of the CCP made me long for freedom, democracy and the rule of law. Xi Jinping’s amendment of the constitution to perpetuate himself as president, the violation of Hong Kong’s autonomy and the zero-Covid policy were among the many political disasters that made me feel hopeless,” he explains.

“I have noticed an increase in people who want to leave China over the last year. More and more people are asking me about life in the US, expressing frustration about job shortages, business closures and struggling to make ends meet in China,” says Cui.

“Interestingly, some of these people were supporters of the communist regime only a few years ago. There are of course others who are still convinced by CCP propaganda, who believe that China is the safest place in the world and that everywhere else is in chaos,” Cui adds. He attributes China’s economic development to “the hard work of the people” who are exploited by Party leaders. As an example of the lack of political rights, he cites the fact that the regime has taken away the freedom and wealth of nouveau riche figures like Xu Jiayin and Jack Ma. He cites the words of late Premier Li Keqiang, who made public in 2020 that some 600 million Chinese live on less than US$140 a month.

From SMEs to security forces

Alice arrived in New York with her two children in 2023. The 40-year-old designer and practicing Christian says she fled in search of freedom. Worship in China is only allowed through CCP-sanctioned institutions. The draconian prohibitions imposed as part of the zero-Covid policy finally persuaded her. “During three years of the pandemic, we received RNA tests 300 days a year, it was terrifying,” she explains. Economic factors also played a role. “A large number of factories were closed and many people lost their jobs in 2023. Out of ten million graduates, only one in ten finds a job. There is a lot of poverty in the middle class. More and more people want to leave China,” she says.

Jack is a 30-year-old former policeman from Xinjiang who works in a warehouse in Los Angeles. “My superiors were all very corrupt. They embezzled, took bribes and intimidated people, beat them violently,” he tells Equal Times. After the economic downturn, “many Chinese want to leave. People’s incomes are very low”. His friend Sunny, also living in Los Angeles, is a businessman in his 40s and the former owner of a shoe factory in Zhejiang who was ruined by the pandemic. “The controls imposed during the pandemic ruined my business, I suffered heavy losses.” He also sees no future for young people: “Going to university is not enough. People are being suffocated by the costs of housing and medical care,” he says.

This post-Covid wave of migration is ‘peculiar,’ Biao Xiang, director of Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology who has studied China’s migration trends since the 1970s, tells Equal Times.

While the percentage of Chinese migrants is low, given China’s huge population, they accounted for 4 per cent of global migration a decade ago, when China’s population was around 1.4 billion. The economic reforms of 1978 resulted in two types of migrants: skilled and unskilled. The former, comprising wealthy professional elites in search of opportunities, were destined for North America and Europe, and accounted for 85 per cent of the United States’ EB-5 investor visas. The latter, whose numbers have increased during this new wave, are made up of workers in search of better wages and quality of life, who often use irregular networks to migrate.

“What we are witnessing today, as of 2023, is that this middle class, educated, urban, elite, are using irregular methods to cross borders and seek political asylum. There are two causes: the first is Covid, which has dealt a severe blow to the Chinese economy. The second is the zero-Covid policy, the severity of which has left many young people disillusioned. People hoped that the economy would recover and that there would be more social freedoms after Covid, but this has not been the case”. The economy, he concludes, is a structural problem in China that will require radical change.