Category: China

Lower-Middle-Class Chinese Risk the Darién Gap to Seek Opportunity and Freedom in the U.S.

(p. B1) Mr. Gao said he felt he had no choice but to leave China.

“I think we will only be safe by coming to the U.S.,” he said, adding that he believed that Xi Jinping, China’s leader, could lead the country to famine and (p. B4) possibly war. “It’s a rare opportunity to protect me and my family,” he said.

A growing number of Chinese have entered the United States this year through the Darién Gap, exceeded only by Venezuelans, Ecuadoreans and Haitians, according to Panamanian immigration authorities.

. . .

Their flight is a referendum on the rule of Mr. Xi, now in his third five-year term. Boasting that “the East is rising while the West is declining,” he said in 2021 that China’s governance model had proved superior to Western democratic systems and that the center of gravity of the world economy was shifting “from West to East.”

Every immigrant I interviewed this year who passed through the Darién Gap — a journey known as zouxian, or walking the line, in Chinese — came from a lower middle-class background. They said that they feared falling into poverty if the Chinese economy worsened, and that they could no longer see a future for themselves or their children in their home country.

In Mr. Xi’s China, anyone could become a target of the state. You could get in trouble for being a Christian, Muslim, Uyghur, Tibetan or Mongolian. Or a worker who petitions for back pay, a homeowner who protests the delayed completion of an unfinished apartment, a student who uses a virtual private network for access to Instagram or a Communist Party cadre who is found with a copy of a banned book.

. . .

Another migrant I spoke with who crossed the Darién Gap, Mr. Zhong, who wanted to use only his family name for fear of retribution, has a background similar to Mr. Gao’s.

. . .

The trouble for Mr. Zhong, now in his early 30s, started last December [2022] when police officers stopped his car for a routine alcohol test and saw a copy of a Bible on the passenger seat. They told Mr. Zhong that he believed in an evil religion and tossed the Bible on the ground and stomped on it. The officers then took his phone and installed an app on it that turned out to have software that would track his movements.

On Christmas Day, four police officers broke into a home where Mr. Zhong and three fellow Christians were holding a prayer service. They were taken to the police station, beaten and interrogated.

Like Mr. Gao, Mr. Zhong came across social media posts about the Darién Gap. He borrowed about $10,000 and left home on Feb. 22 [2023].

. . .

Mr. Zhong soon moved to a town of 30,000 people in Alabama. He had grown up near Chengdu, a city of 20 (p. B5) million. Now he felt truly alone. He works at a Chinese restaurant 11 hours a day, he said, and is unwilling to take a day off. He has learned to cook General Tso’s chicken and other Chinese American dishes. The pay is much better than in China, and he can send more money home. Every Sunday, he joins an online religious service, hosted by a church in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, another community with a large population of Chinese immigrants.

He told me a joke over the phone: “Why did you go to the United States?” someone asks a Chinese immigrant. “Aren’t you satisfied with your pay, your benefits and your life?” The immigrant responds: “Yes, I’m satisfied. But in the U.S., I will be allowed to say that I’m not satisfied.”

“I can live like a real human being in the U.S.,” he said.

. . .

. . . Mr. Gao got his work permit, bought a car and started delivering packages for an e-commerce company. He makes $2 per package. The more he delivers, the more he makes.

. . .

On one Wednesday in November [2023], Mr. Gao said, he woke at 4 a.m., delivered more than 100 packages and didn’t get home until after 9 p.m.

He took the next day off. When the motorcade of Mr. Xi, who was in San Francisco for a meeting with President Biden, drove by, Mr. Gao joined other protesters on the sidewalk, chanting in Chinese, “Xi Jinping, step down!”

For the full commentary, see:

Li Yuan. “THE NEW NEW WORLD; Why More Chinese Are Risking Danger in Southern Border Crossings to U.S.” The New York Times (Monday, December 4, 2023): B1 & B4-B5.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed years, added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Dec. 3, 2023, and has the same title as the print version.)

Rich Chinese “Moved Hundreds of Billions of Dollars Out of” China in 2023

(p. B1) Affluent Chinese have moved hundreds of billions of dollars out of the country this year [2023], seizing on the end of Covid precautions that had almost completely sealed China’s borders for nearly three years.

They are using their savings to buy overseas apartments, stocks and insurance policies. Able to fly again to Tokyo, London and New York, Chinese travelers have bought apartments in Japan and poured money into accounts in the United States or Europe that pay higher interest than in China, where rates are low and falling.

The outbound shift of money in part indicates unease inside China about the sputtering recovery after the pandemic as well as deeper problems, like an alarming slowdown in real estate, the main storehouse of wealth for families. For some people, it is also a reaction to fears about the direction of the economy under China’s leader, Xi Jinping, who has cracked down on business and strengthened the government’s hand in many aspects of society.

In some cases, Chinese are improvising to get around China’s strict government controls on transferring money overseas. They have bought gold bars small enough to be scattered unobtrusively through carry-on luggage, as well as large stacks of foreign currency.

Real estate is an option, too. Chinese have emerged as the main buyers of Tokyo apartments costing $3 million or more, and they often pay with suitcases of cash, said Zhao Jie, the chief executive of Shenjumiaosuan, an online real estate listing service in Tokyo. “It’s really hard work to count this kind of cash.”

Before the pandemic, he said, (p. B5) Chinese buyers typically bought Tokyo studio apartments for $330,000 or less to rent out. Now they are buying much larger units and obtaining investment visas to relocate their families.

All told, an estimated $50 billion a month has been taken out of China this year, mainly by Chinese households and private-sector companies.

For the full story, see:

Keith Bradsher and Joy Dong. “Suitcases of Cash: How China’s Money Flows Out.” The New York Times (Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2023): B1 & B5.

(Note: bracketed year added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the same date as the print version, and has the title “Gold Bars and Tokyo Apartments: How Money Is Flowing Out of China.”)

As Freedom Left Hong Kong, So Did Hundreds of Billions of Dollars and 100,000 Citizens

(p. B1) This summer, when Hong Kong’s stock market rout seemed to have no end in sight, the city’s financial chief, Paul Chan, jumped into action, creating a task force to inject confidence into a market that was being pummeled by global investors wary of China.

Hong Kong cut taxes on trading, and Mr. Chan went on a roadshow to Europe and the United States, promising measures to “let investors feel optimistic about the outlook.” Investors were anything but sanguine, however, and the city’s stock exchange is among the world’s worst-performing stock markets this year.

. . .

Hundreds of billions of dollars flowed out this year as money managers and pension funds reduced their holdings in Hong Kong, which has long been a gateway for foreign investors wanting to put money into mainland China. The outflows were largely driven by an economic downturn in China and mounting pressure on American investors to sell their (p. B3) exposure to Chinese companies.

. . .

A former British colony, Hong Kong was handed back to China in 1997 with a pledge that it would maintain a high degree of self-governance under a policy called “one country, two systems.” For two decades, this allowed Hong Kong to define itself as unique and distinct from the rest of China, while offering financial access to the world’s second largest economy.

But after citywide protests in 2019, Beijing imposed the national security law, which has silenced political debate and stifled civic activity.

More than 100,000 residents have left Hong Kong over the last few years, in part because of the security law and tough pandemic restrictions. Many young Hong Kong professionals who are still there have expressed a desire to leave, making it a challenge to recruit the talent that has helped the city function as a financial center.

Once a major hub for Wall Street banks, Hong Kong had a drought of initial public offerings this year. Companies raised the lowest amount of money since 2001, resulting in layoffs at financial institutions citywide.

Many international companies have stopped hiring for new positions in Hong Kong. With less money coming into the exchange and fewer transactions, dozens of brokerages have also closed.

For the full story, see:

Alexandra Stevenson. “Hong Kong Stock Market Ends in Loss For 4th Year.” The New York Times (Saturday, December 30, 2023): B1 & B3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Dec. 29, 2023, and has the title “Hong Kong Stocks Plunge to Losses for 4th Straight Year.”)

“Bow Only to the Truth”

(p. A19) Jiang Ping, a legal scholar who helped lay the foundation for China’s civil code, and whose experiences with political persecution shaped his relentless advocacy for individual rights in the face of state power, died on Dec. 19 [2023] in Beijing.

. . .

Often called “the conscience of China’s legal world,” Mr. Jiang established himself in the 1980s as a highly regarded teacher and a leading scholar, one of four professors who helped oversee the drafting of China’s first civil rights framework. His reputation was cemented during the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, when as university president he publicly supported the student protesters.

After the government quashed the protests and massacred the protesters, Mr. Jiang was removed from the university presidency. But he remained wildly popular on campus. Even after his removal, law students wore T-shirts printed with one of his best-known refrains: “Bow only to the truth.”

. . .

His moral authority was augmented by his own story. In the 1950s, as a young teacher, he was denounced as anti-Communist after criticizing excessive top-down bureaucracy and ordered to be “reformed,” as the government called it, through labor. He was not allowed to teach law for two decades. And, while working, he was hit by a train, leaving him with a prosthetic leg.

. . .

He lamented the lost decades, but he was never bitter. “Adversity gave me the ability to meditate and look back, and see things calmly,” he said at a celebration of his 70th birthday. “There was nothing to believe in blindly anymore.”

Mr. Jiang rose quickly after his political rehabilitation. He oversaw the drafting not only of civil and commercial laws, but also of China’s first administrative litigation law, which gave citizens a limited right to sue official agencies for misconduct.

In 1988, he was named president of the university. The next spring, protests broke out on Tiananmen Square. Mr. Jiang, fearing bloodshed, sat on the ground at the campus gate despite his bad leg and pleaded with students not to go.

When the students went, Mr. Jiang lent his support. Along with nine other university presidents, he signed an open letter urging the government to open a dialogue with the students.

After his ouster in 1990, Mr. Jiang stayed on as a professor.

For the full obituary, see:

Vivian Wang and Joy Dong. “Jiang Ping, 92, Called ‘Conscience’ Of China’s Legal World, Is Dead.” The New York Times (Saturday, December 30, 2023): A19.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated Dec. 29, 2023, and has the title “Jiang Ping, the ‘Conscience of China’s Legal World,’ Dies at 92.”)

Communists Extinguish Hong Kong’s “Brash Flash”

(p. 8) It was never just about the neon, that Cubist, consumerist razzle-dazzle cantilevered over Hong Kong’s streets announcing pawnbrokers and mooncake bakers, saunas and shark’s fin soup shops.

. . .

Because while the government’s crackdown on the neon signs stems from safety and environmental concerns, the campaign evokes the fading of Hong Kong itself: the mournful allegory for an electric city’s decline, the literal extinguishing of its brash flash.

Nights in Hong Kong these days feel as if still in the pall of a plague, or a deep political malaise.

Many of the tourists and resident foreigners are gone, the old party spots unsullied by their beer-guzzling excess.

Hong Kongers have left, too. More than 110,000 permanent residents departed last year, and the city’s population of those worth more than $30 million shrank by 23 percent, according to government and wealth survey data.

Their departure, a quarter-century after the territory reverted from British to Chinese rule, has been spurred by the territory’s economic decline and by an acute diminishment of political rights.

. . .

A national security law, imposed in 2020, criminalizes acts considered threatening to the state. Students, former legislators and a former media mogul sit in prison because of it.

. . .

The Hong Kong filmmaker Anastasia Tsang’s directorial debut, “A Light Never Goes Out,” is about a family coping with the death of a neon sign maker. The film, Hong Kong’s submission for next year’s Oscars, is an elegy for a disappearing craft that could also be a requiem for something larger.

“Hong Kong people have a very strong feeling of loss,” Ms. Tsang said. “Every day you’ve got a friend or relative who’s going to emigrate. Every day you feel like some part of your flesh is being taken from your skeleton.”

For the full story, see:

Hannah Beech. “A City Where a Lot More Than Neon Is Fading Out.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, December 10, 2023): 8.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Dec. 9, 2023, and has the title “Where Did All the Hong Kong Neon Go?”)

Communist China’s Restriction of Citizens’ Freedom Shows Its “Fragility”

(p. A8) HONG KONG—Prominent Pro-democracy activist Agnes Chow said she was exiling herself in Canada after getting her passport back from police in return for taking a patriotic trip to China, an exchange that sheds light on Hong Kong’s efforts to re-educate political opponents.

. . .

When Chow returned to Hong Kong, she said, she was instructed to write a letter thanking the police for the trip and enabling her to understand the great development of the motherland.

. . .

“I have never denied China’s economic development,” Chow wrote on Instagram. “But how can such a powerful country send people who fight for democracy to prison, restrict their freedom of movement, and even require them to go to mainland China and visit patriotic exhibitions in exchange for their passports? Is this not a kind of fragility.”

For the full story, see:

Elaine Yu. “Activist Flees Hong Kong After China Trip.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, December 5, 2023): A8.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Dec. 4, 2023, and has the title “Activist Flees Hong Kong After Re-Education Trip to China.”)

Four Entities Succeeded in Sending a Capsule to Orbit and Returning It to Earth: “the United States, Russia, China and Elon Musk”

(p. A14) “In the history of space flight,” Scott Pelley intones in a “60 Minutes” segment, “only four entities have launched a space capsule into orbit and successfully brought it back to the Earth—the United States, Russia, China and Elon Musk.”

For the full film review, see:

Joe Morgenstern. “‘Return to Space’: A Double Booster.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, April 8, 2022): A14.

(Note: the online version of the film review was updated April 7, 2022, and has the title “FILM REVIEW; ‘Return to Space’ Review: A Double Booster.”)

“I Wish That All Chinese People Can Have Freedom and Peace”

(p. A19) Bao Tong, who was the highest-ranking Chinese official imprisoned over the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square that ended in mass carnage in 1989, and who later became an acerbic outsider-critic of the Communist Party, died on Nov. 9 [2022] in Beijing. He was 90.

The cause was acute leukemia, said his son, Bao Pu.

For a decade, Mr. Bao was a top aide to Zhao Ziyang, the liberalizing party leader who was ousted shortly before the Tiananmen crackdown. After his release from prison, Mr. Bao — who spent the rest of his life under surveillance — used essays, interviews and Twitter to denounce China’s autocratic turn.

In the mid-1980s, he was central to devising Mr. Zhao’s political reform proposals to rein in the party’s power and expand public oversight of officials. In his later years, he saw little near-term hope that the party would reopen the way for democratic changes, yet he stayed optimistic that China would eventually take that path. And that shift, Mr. Bao said, would demand confronting the traumas of June 1989, when troops shot protesters in Beijing and other Chinese cities, with estimates of the death toll ranging from the hundreds to the thousands.

“The ‘June 4’ student democracy movement of 1989 was the great event, the one most worthy of the Chinese people’s pride, that I experienced in my life,” Mr. Bao wrote this year in an article for Radio Free Asia. But the bloodshed, he added, had “brazenly opened up a new era where state power has no constraints and civic rights have lost their safeguards.”

. . .

In 1987, Deng abruptly demoted Hu Yaobang, the party’s liberal-minded general secretary. After Mr. Zhao replaced Mr. Hu as party leader, he and Mr. Bao scored a major victory when Deng approved — and a party congress endorsed — their proposals for measured political change. Mr. Bao’s role in helping to draft the main report for that congress, a high-water mark for liberalizing hopes in China, was one of his proudest moments, his son said.

. . .

“In the past I believed in Communism; now I don’t think it’s worth believing in,” he told a foreign reporter in 2012 as security officers looked on. “Now I just think that Marx had some nice ideas. He said the poor are worth helping.”

. . .

Mr. Bao was never allowed to meet with Mr. Zhao after 1989. But in 2019, the authorities let him visit the grave of Mr. Zhao and Mr. Zhao’s wife.

“They’re finally free and at peace,” Mr. Bao wrote at the time. “I wish that all Chinese people can have freedom and peace in this world.”

For the full obituary, see:

Chris Buckley and Vivian Wang. “Bao Tong, Reformist Official Imprisoned After Tiananmen, Is Dead at 90.” The New York Times, First Section (Wednesday, November 23, 2022): A19.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Nov. 21, 2022, and has the title “Bao Tong, 90, Dies; Top Chinese Official Imprisoned After Tiananmen.”)

For Quick Spread of EVs, U.S. Regulators Need to Quickly Approve More Domestic Mines for Critical Minerals

(p. A6) For decades, a group of the world’s biggest oil producers has held huge sway over the American economy and the popularity of U.S. presidents through its control of the global oil supply, with decisions by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries determining what U.S. consumers pay at the pump.

As the world shifts to cleaner sources of energy, control over the materials needed to power that transition is still up for grabs.

China currently dominates global processing of the critical minerals that are now in high demand to make batteries for electric vehicles and renewable energy storage. In an attempt to gain more power over that supply chain, U.S. officials have begun negotiating a series of agreements with other countries to expand America’s access to important minerals like lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite.

But it remains unclear which of these partnerships will succeed, or if they will be able to generate anything close to the supply of minerals the United States is projected to need for a wide array of products, including electric cars and batteries for storing solar power.

Leaders of Japan, Europe and other advanced nations, who are meeting in Hiroshima, agree that the world’s reliance on China for more than 80 percent of processing of minerals leaves their nations vulnerable to political pressure from Beijing, which has a history of weaponizing supply chains in times of conflict.

. . .

. . ., some U.S. officials argue that the supply of critical minerals in wealthy countries with high labor and environmental standards will be insufficient to meet demand, . . .

. . .

Jennifer Harris, a former Biden White House official who worked on critical mineral strategy, argued that the country should move more quickly to develop and permit domestic mines, . . .

. . .

“There’s so much that needs doing that this is very much a ‘both/and’ world,” she said. “The challenge is that we need to responsibly pull up a whole lot more rocks out of the ground yesterday.”

For the full story, see:

Ana Swanson. “The U.S. Needs Minerals for Electric Cars. So Does Everyone Else.” The New York Times (Monday, May 22, 2023): A6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated May 23, 2023, and has the title “The U.S. Needs Minerals for Electric Cars. Everyone Else Wants Them Too.”)

Bridge Man’s Courageous Protest Against Xi Kept Hope Alive

(p. B1) A protester unfurled two banners on a highway overpass in central Beijing on Oct. 13, [2022] denouncing Xi Jinping as a “despotic traitor.” China’s censors went to great lengths to scrub the internet of any reference to the act of dissent, prohibiting all discussion and shutting down many offending social media accounts.

The slogans didn’t go away. Instead, they caught on inside and outside China, online and offline.

Encouraged by the Beijing protester’s extremely rare display of courage, young Chinese are using creative ways to spread the banners’ anti-Xi messages. They graffitied the slogans in public toilets in China. They used Apple’s AirDrop feature to send photos of the messages to fellow passengers’ iPhones in subway cars. They posted the slogans on university campuses all over the world. They organized chat groups to bond and shouted “Remove Xi Jinping” in front of Chinese embassies. This all happened while the Communist Party was convening an all-important congress in Beijing and putting forth an image of a country singularly united behind a great leader.

The aftermath of the Beijing protest “made me feel, for the first time, hopeful,” said an organizer of an Instagram account known as Citizens Daily CN, which posts photo submissions of sightings of anti-Xi messages.

. . .

(p. B4) For Kathy, a Chinese student in London, political apathy . . . is what upsets her the most.

. . .

When she saw photos of the protest in Beijing, she was awed by the “Bridge Man’s” courage, too. Then she started seeing people posting sightings of anti-Xi slogans in many parts of the world.

She started to cry and couldn’t stop for hours, she said.

As the photos of the protest posters kept coming in, she felt she saw a little light in the darkness. She’s not alone anymore.

“I thought to myself that there are many Chinese who also want freedom and democracy,” she said. “But where are you? Where can I find you? If we meet on the street, how can we recognize each other?”

For the full commentary, see:

Li Yuan. “A Brash, Lonely Protest in Beijing Surfaces an Undercurrent of Dissent.” The New York Times (Tuesday, October 25, 2022): B1 & B4.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Oct. 24, 2022, and has the title “A Lonely Protest in Beijing Inspires Young Chinese to Find Their Voice.”)

Communists Renege on “Implicit Bargain” to Give Chinese “Stability and Comfort” in Exchange for Lost Freedom

(p. 1) After violently crushing pro-democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in 1989, Beijing struck an implicit bargain: In exchange for limitations on political freedoms, the (p. 9) people would get stability and comfort.

But now the stability and comfort have dwindled, even as the limitations have grown.

. . .

Atop a hill in Shenzhen’s Lianhuashan Park stands a 20-foot bronze statue of Deng Xiaoping. Mr. Deng, the leader who pioneered China’s embrace of market forces after Mao’s death, watches over the city that is a living reminder of the country’s ability to change direction. Mr. Deng is shown in midstride, to honor his credo that opening should only accelerate.

Chen Chengzhi, 80, a retired government cadre who hikes to that statue every day for exercise, credits Mr. Deng with changing his life. Mr. Chen moved to Shenzhen in the 1980s, soon after Mr. Deng allowed economic experimentation here. The city then had just a few hundred thousand people, but Mr. Chen, who had endured famine and the Cultural Revolution, believed in Mr. Deng’s vision.

“At the end of the day, all good things in China are related to Shenzhen,” Mr. Chen said on one of his daily walks, adding that he cheered when China’s premier, Li Keqiang, visited the statue in August and pledged that China would continue opening to the world.

If it doesn’t do so, Mr. Chen said, “China will hit a dead end.”

But Mr. Li is retiring, even as the Xi Jinping era of rising state control stretches on.

For now, Mr. Chen continues climbing the hill — looking over the city that he helped build, that he believes in still.

For the full story, see:

Vivian Wang. “Covid Crackdowns Shake Chinese People’s Faith in Progress.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, December 4, 2022): 1 & 9.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story also has the date December 4, 2022, and has the title “The Chinese Dream, Denied.” The online version says that the title of the print version was “Beijing’s Bargain With Its People Is Shaken” but my National Edition of the print version had the title “Covid Crackdowns Shake Chinese People’s Faith in Progress.”)