TOKYO (AP) — One by one, students, lawyers and others filed into a classroom at a central Tokyo university for a lecture by a Chinese journalist on Taiwan and democracy — taboo subjects that cannot be discussed publicly in China itself.
“Taiwan’s modern democracy has been a struggle and a bloodbath, there’s no doubt about that,” said Jia Jia, a columnist and visiting professor at the University of Tokyo. Eight years ago, he was briefly detained in China on suspicion of writing a call for China’s supreme leader to step down.
He is one of tens of thousands of intellectuals, investors and other Chinese who have moved to Japan in recent years, part of a larger exodus of people from China.
Their backgrounds vary widely and they leave for a variety of reasons. Some are very poor, some are very rich. Some leave for economic reasons, as opportunities dry up with the end of the Chinese boom. Some flee for personal reasons, as even limited freedoms are eroded.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of China’s New Migrants, The Associated Press’s look at the lives of the latest wave of Chinese emigrants settling abroad.
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Chinese migrants are flocking to all corners of the world, from workers hoping to start their own businesses in Mexico to burned-out students heading to Thailand. Those who choose Japan tend to be well-off or highly educated, drawn by the country’s ease of life, rich culture and immigration policies that favor highly educated professionals, with less of the sharp anti-immigrant backlash sometimes seen in Western countries.
Jia initially wanted to move to the US, not Japan. But after experiencing the coronavirus outbreak in China, he was eager to leave and his US visa application got stuck in processing. So he chose Japan instead.
“In the United States, illegal immigration is very controversial. When I went to Japan, I was a little surprised. I found out that their immigration policy is actually more lenient than I thought,” Jia told The Associated Press. “I found that Japan is better than the U.S.”
It’s tough to get into the U.S. these days. Tens of thousands of Chinese have been arrested at the U.S.-Mexico border in the past year, and Chinese students have been grilled by customs officials as trade tensions fuel suspicions of possible industrial espionage. Some U.S. states have passed legislation banning Chinese citizens from owning property.
“The US is excluding the Chinese who are the friendliest to it and who share most of its values,” said Li Jinxing, a Christian human rights lawyer who moved to Japan in 2022.
Li sees parallels with about a century ago, when Chinese intellectuals such as Sun Yat-sen, the founder of modern China, moved to Japan to investigate how the country could modernize so quickly.
“On the one hand, we hope to find inspiration and direction in history,” Li said of herself and like-minded Chinese in Japan. “On the other hand, we also want to observe what a democratic country with the rule of law looks like. We study Japan. How does the economy work, how does the government work?”
In the past decade, Tokyo has relaxed its once-rigid stance against immigration, driven by low birth rates and an aging population. Foreigners now make up about 2% of the country’s population of 125 million. That is expected to rise to 12% by 2070, according to the Tokyo-based National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.
Chinese are the most numerous newcomers, with 822,000 arriving last year of the more than 3 million foreigners living in Japan, according to government data, up from 762,000 a year ago and 649,000 a decade ago.
In 2022, lockdowns under China’s “zero COVID” policy have sent many of the country’s younger or most affluent citizens running for the exit. There’s even a buzzword for it: “runxue,” using the English word “run” to connote “running away” to places perceived as safer and more prosperous.
For intellectuals like Li and Jia, Japan offers greater freedoms than under the increasingly repressive rule of Chinese leader Xi Jinping. But for others, such as wealthy investors and businessmen, Japan offers something different: protection of property.
A report from investment migration firm Henley & Partners said nearly 14,000 millionaires left China last year, the most of any country in the world, with Japan a popular destination. A major reason is concern about the safety of their wealth in China or Hong Kong, said Q. Edward Wang, a professor of Asian studies at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey.
“The protection of private property, the cornerstone of a capitalist society, is lacking in China,” Wang said.
The weaker yen makes buying real estate and other local assets in Japan a bargain.
While the Japanese economy is stagnating, the once-booming Chinese economy is also in a rut. The real estate sector is in crisis and stock prices are still at the level of the late 2000s.
“If you go to Japan just to save your money,” Wang said, “you will definitely enjoy your time in Japan.”
Among the entrepreneurs leaving China after the Communist Party’s crackdown on the tech sector are dotcom entrepreneurs. One of them is billionaire Jack Ma, founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba, who became a professor at Tokyo College, part of the prestigious University of Tokyo.
So many wealthy Chinese have bought apartments in Tokyo’s luxury skyscrapers that some areas have been nicknamed “Chinatowns” or “Digital Chinatowns” – a nod to the work of many of the owners in the high-tech industry.
“Life in Japan is good,” said Guo Yu, an engineer who retired early after working at ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company.
Guo is not involved in politics. He loves Japan’s powdery snow in winter and is a “superfan” of its beautiful hot springs. He owns homes in Tokyo, and also near a ski resort and a hot spring. He owns several cars, including a Porsche, a Mercedes, a Tesla and a Toyota.
Guo is busy with a new social media startup in Tokyo and a travel agency specializing in “onsen,” Japan’s hot springs. Most of his employees are Chinese, he said.
Like Guo, many Chinese who move to Japan are wealthy and educated. And for good reason: Japan remains unwelcoming to refugees and many other types of foreigners. The government has been strategic about who it allows to stay, generally targeting people to fill labor shortages in factories, construction, and elderly care.
“It is crucial that Japan becomes an attractive country for foreign talent so that they choose to work here,” Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said earlier this year when he announced efforts to ease Japan’s strict immigration restrictions.
That kind of opportunity is exactly what Chinese ballet dancer Du Hai says he has found. Du led a class of a dozen Japanese students at a studio in a Tokyo suburb on a recent weekend, demonstrating positions and spins to the women dressed in leotards and toe shoes.
Du was drawn to Japan’s vast ballet world, full of professional companies and talented dancers, but he was concerned about warnings he received about unfriendly Japanese.
That turned out not to be true, he said with a laugh. Now Du is considering applying for Japanese citizenship.
“Of course I really enjoy living in Japan now,” he said.
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Kang reported from Beijing.
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Yuri Kageyama is on X: https://twitter.com/yurikageyama