More of the middle classes are leaving, in search of a cleaner, slower life Apr 26th 2014 | SHANGHAI
FOR years Lin Chen resisted his wife’s entreaties to move abroad. Then, when their daughter was born in 2012, he started thinking about her schooling. He realised he wanted a less stressful education than the one he and his wife endured in their climb to the middle classes, and he wanted to leave space for fun. “My wife and I suffered a lot,” he says. “I don’t want my daughter to suffer through all that.”
And so the Lin family will soon be off to Adelaide, Australia, part of the greatest and most consequential wave of emigration in modern Chinese history: middle-class Chinese seeking not better opportunities or political freedoms but a better quality of life. Chinese emigrants are leaving good jobs, cashing out their high-priced homes (or investment properties) and leaving China’s rat race behind. They are unlikely to find better jobs anywhere else, but the air and water are less polluted where they are going, the social safety-net less frayed and the food safer to eat. And there is no one-child policy.
Not everyone who obtains a green card abroad wants to leave China. Some are global travellers who want a more convenient passport for border crossings. Some want an emergency-exit hatch should the Chinese economy get into trouble or the police come knocking. But many others are going for good, and unlike past waves of Chinese emigrants, they include accomplished mid-career professionals who have little to gain financially by leaving.
I’m outta here
The raw numbers, though impressive, are small as a percentage of the Chinese population. But they are big enough to make a splash on arrival abroad (see article). In the past decade 1m Chinese have obtained permanent-resident status in Canada or America, placing Chinese migrants first in Canada and second in America behind Mexicans. And the pace has quickened (see chart). About 80,000 Chinese every year are gaining permanent residency in America, almost five times the rate of the 1980s. Chinese also made up the largest group of immigrants in Australia with 80,000 arriving in the three years to 2012, just ahead of Britons and Indians (though Indians have surged ahead of late).
Most of the new emigrants leave China on either a skilled-worker visa (as Mr Lin will), an employer-sponsored visa or a family-related visa (joining a family member who is already abroad). Chinese make up almost two-thirds of the holders of an elite type of business-skills visa for Australia. The number of Chinese long-term residents in Italy almost doubled in two years, to nearly 120,000 by the end of 2012. Chinese migrants also ranked first in new residencies in New Zealand last year, at about 6,000. Another 2m Chinese live abroad as students or labourers—both potential paths to citizenship. In 2013 a total of 9.3m people born in China lived abroad, an increase of almost 4m since 2000.
The queue to get into some countries is growing longer as they raise barriers in response to Chinese migration, while lowering them for many businessmen and tourists (97m Chinese travelled abroad in 2013). Canada recently suspended its investor-visa programme with an estimated 45,000 Chinese nationals on the waiting list, 70% of the entire backlog. Officials may feel that they set the bar too low. A qualifying property investment is C$800,000 ($725,000)—a two-bedroom flat in Beijing sells for that much.
Meanwhile, the economically beleaguered governments of southern Europe are easing their rules to get their hands on Chinese cash. For a bit less money than Canada’s cancelled programme, you can buy residency in Portugal or residency for two in Italy or Greece—and you don’t even need to live there. In America the number of investment projects that can accept immigration-investor cash has doubled in two years on the strength of Chinese demand—to 440 as of February 1st. (One such project, a New York Wheel on Staten Island, modelled on the London Eye, was presented recently at Beijing’s Ritz-Carlton hotel for interested applicants.) More than 6,000 Chinese emigrated to America by investing in such programmes in the year to September 30th 2012—accounting for 80% of the total. And it is the property-rich middle class as well as the super-wealthy who are taking advantage of such schemes.
Mena Chung, a 40-year-old editor of a fashion magazine, left her job last year and moved to a townhouse in Marina del Rey, California, after getting a green card under EB-5, an American programme that requires an outlay of $500,000. The cost of living can now be much cheaper abroad, and Ms Chung and her husband are currently living off the savings from selling their flats in Beijing while they take English lessons. When she gets back to work, Ms Chung knows it will not be as high-powered a job as she had in China, but that doesn’t bother her. “In China I feel life is just work,” she says. “It’s not life.”
Still, emigration can be a slog, especially if you are working-class and do not own property. Your choice of destinations can be limited by which programmes best fit your skills. Some provinces or states have specific job needs, which is how Mr Lin, a manager at an industrial company in Shanghai, found his way to Adelaide. Even then it can be difficult to find a decent job when you land, but in Australia, America or Canada you must generally stay in-country to qualify for citizenship—“immigration jail”, Chinese émigrés call it.
Slow boat from China
Others are keeping one foot, or one half of their marriage, back in China, unsure they want the slower-paced life abroad. Windson Song, a 35-year-old marketing manager in Beijing, and his wife and baby boy, are close to getting approval for permanent residence in the Canadian province of Quebec, where they meet the requirements for skilled-worker emigration (his wife’s ability to speak French helped). She and the child will go first, and will perhaps fulfil the requirement of living in Canada for three out of four years. Mr Song prefers to stay behind in Beijing, where career opportunities in marketing are much better. He often thinks, though, about his first day in Australia as a student a decade ago. It was a “fairytale world”, he says, with “green trees, colourful flowers”, few people and almost no cars. He wants the option of escaping Beijing’s grim cityscape. But his émigré friends remind him that although (or perhaps because) it is safer, cleaner and less corrupt, life is “really boring” abroad.
Many of China’s most wealthy have no plans to leave but, like Mr Song, want to have the option. In a recent survey by the Hurun Research Institute, which tracks China’s richest people, 64% of respondents with a net worth of at least $16m said they would like a green card or already have one—though not necessarily to emigrate permanently. The reasons vary. Claire Gao, a stylish 26-year-old who works for an investment firm in Shanghai, just bought a flat in suburban Milan for €200,000 ($276,000), the minimum for an investor-visa there, after her second brief visit to Italy in January. Having Italian permanent residence would ease her travels in Europe, where she intends to make more business deals in future. Ms Gao picked Italy solely because of its visa criteria; she is more familiar with Paris, where she bought her Hermès scarf, and Hong Kong, where she purchased her Burberry coat.
Some of the other monied types with foreign passports and foreign bank accounts are the family members of corrupt officials—called “naked” officials because they have no ties left in China to hold them down. Their children may be at posh English boarding schools or at Oxford or Harvard (or all three in the case of Bo Guagua, son of Bo Xilai, an ousted Politburo member convicted last year of corruption). The corrupt themselves are trying to leave too, and experts reckon they are doing so in greater numbers because of President Xi Jinping’s sustained anti-corruption drive, now in its second year.
The broad wave of middle-class emigration flows on beneath that flashy surface, distinct from it though very much aware of it. Mr Lin, the Adelaide-bound father, says he saw the many stories of government scandals on Sina Weibo, a microblog. He saw the tweets about toxic soil, food safety and air pollution, too, and about the systemic corruption that makes these problems difficult to fix. If the wealthy were getting out, thought Mr Lin, then his family, on less than $80,000 a year after taxes, would find a way out too. “If you want to be a millionaire, then yes, probably you have to stay in China,” he says. “But if you only want a happy life, then why not?”
No comments:
Post a Comment