“It’s like an alarm bell has gone off,” says Miranda Wang, a young Chinese video-producer who moved to Shanghai after studying in Britain. The Chinese metropolis used to feel like a global city, similar to London, she says. But after more than 50 days of lockdown, Ms Wang has begun researching ways to leave. “Now we realise, Shanghai is still China’s Shanghai,” she says. “No matter how much money, education or international access you have, you cannot escape the authorities.”
Chinese internet users have crowdsourced a repository of run-philosophy readings on GitHub, a platform for open-source coding and rare refuge from censorship in China. There they discuss why to run, where to run and how to run, archiving stories of successful emigration to various countries. To run is not to seek pleasure or profit, one essay states, but to escape a country that is speeding in the wrong direction. “Surely a sheep that has been hurt by beating can try to flee?” it asks. “Therein lies the truth of run.”
But to run is easier said than done. Flights out of China are few and expensive. America has tightened visa restrictions on Chinese students over exaggerated fears of spying. In the name of pandemic prevention, China is also making it harder for citizens to move around. Since 2020 the National Immigration Administration has stopped issuing travel documents for “non-essential reasons”. The agency handed out 335,000 passports in the first half of 2021, only 2% of the number issued over the same period in 2019. The authorities in one city, Leiyang, have been confiscating citizens’ passports to prevent travel. “We’ll return them after the pandemic is over,” says a public-security official.
Would-be emigrants know that they are in the minority. A young finance worker in Beijing says her peers “see no future” in China. But most Chinese, especially older generations, are “numb”, she says. Ms Wang fears that leaving would mean losing touch with her parents. “Calm your heart,” her mother scolds her on WeChat. “Fill it with home, parents and motherland, find a steady job and you’ll be fine.”