For many investors and intellectuals leaving China, it’s Japan — not the US — that’s the bigger draw

One by one, the students, lawyers and others filed into a classroom in a central Tokyo university for a lecture by a Chinese journalist on Taiwan and democracy — taboo topics that can’t be discussed publicly back home in China.

“Taiwan’s modern-day democracy took struggle and bloodshed, there’s no question about that,” said Jia Jia, a columnist and guest lecturer at the University of Tokyo who was briefly detained in China eight years ago on suspicion of penning a call for China’s top leader to resign.

He is one of tens of thousands of intellectuals, investors and other Chinese who have relocated to Japan in recent years, part of a larger exodus of people from China.

Their backgrounds vary widely, and they’re leaving for all sorts of reasons. Some are very poor, others are very rich. Some leave for economic reasons, as opportunities dry up with the end of China’s boom. Some flee for personal reasons, as even limited freedoms are eroded.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of the China’s New Migrants package, a look by The Associated Press at the lives of the latest wave of Chinese emigrants to settle overseas.

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Chinese migrants are flowing to all corners of the world, from workers seeking to start businesses of their own in Mexico to burned-out students heading to Thailand. Those choosing Japan tend to be well-off or highly educated, drawn to the country’s ease of living, rich culture and immigration policies that favor highly skilled professionals, with less of the sharp anti-immigrant backlash sometimes seen in Western countries.

Jia initially intended to move to the U.S., not Japan. But after experiencing the coronavirus outbreak in China, he was anxious to leave and his American visa application was stuck in processing. So he chose Japan instead.

“In the United States, illegal immigration is particularly controversial. When I went to Japan, I was a little surprised. I found that their immigration policy is actually more relaxed than I thought,” Jia told The Associated Press. “I found that Japan is better than the U.S.”

It’s tough to enter the U.S. these days. Tens of thousands of Chinese were arrested at the U.S.-Mexico border over the past year, and Chinese students have been grilled at customs as trade frictions fan suspicions of possible industrial espionage. Some U.S. states passed legislation that restricts Chinese citizens from owning property.

“The U.S. is shutting out those Chinese that are friendliest to them, that most share its values,” said Li Jinxing, a Christian human rights lawyer who moved to Japan in 2022.

Li sees parallels to about a century ago, when Chinese intellectuals such as Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of modern China, moved to Japan to study how the country modernized so quickly.

“On one hand, we hope to find inspiration and direction in history,” Li said of himself and like-minded Chinese in Japan. “On the other hand, we also want to observe what a democratic country with rule of law is like. We’re studying Japan. How does its economy work, its government work?”

Over the past decade, Tokyo has softened its once-rigid stance against immigration, driven by low birthrates and an aging population. Foreigners now make up about 2% of its population of 125 million. That’s expected to jump to 12% by 2070, according to the Tokyo-based National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.

Chinese are the most numerous newcomers, at 822,000 last year among more than 3 million foreigners living in Japan, according to government data. That’s up from 762,000 a year ago and 649,000 a decade ago.

In 2022, the lockdowns under China’s “zero COVID” policies led many of the country’s youth or most affluent citizens to hit the exits. There’s even a buzzword for that: “runxue,” using the English word “run” to evoke “running away” to places seen as safer and more prosperous.

For intellectuals like Li and Jia, Japan offers greater freedoms than under Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s increasingly repressive rule. But for others, such as wealthy investors and business people, Japan offers something else: property protections.

A report by investment migration firm Henley & Partners says nearly 14,000 millionaires left China last year, the most of any country in the world, with Japan a popular destination. A major driver is worries about the security of their wealth in China or Hong Kong, said Q. Edward Wang, a professor of Asian studies at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey.

“Protection of private property, which is the cornerstone of a capitalist society, that piece is missing in China,” Wang said.

The weakening yen makes buying property and other local assets in Japan a bargain.

And while the Japanese economy has stagnated, China’s once-sizzling economy is also in a rut, with the property sector in crisis and stock prices stuck at the level they were in the late 2000s.

“If you are just going to Japan to preserve your money,” Wang said, “then definitely you will enjoy your time in Japan.”

Dot.com entrepreneurs are among those leaving China after Communist Party crackdowns on the technology industry, including billionaire Jack Ma, a founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba, who took a professorship at Tokyo College, part of the prestigious University of Tokyo.

So many wealthy Chinese have bought apartments in Tokyo’s luxury high-rises that some areas have been dubbed “Chinatowns,” or “Digital Chinatowns” — a nod to the many owners’ work in high-tech industries.

“Life in Japan is good,” said Guo Yu, an engineer who retired early after working at ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok.

Guo doesn’t concern himself with politics. He’s keen on Japan’s powdery snow in the winter and is a “superfan” of its beautiful hot springs. He owns homes in Tokyo, as well as near a ski resort and a hot spring. He owns several cars, including a Porsche, a Mercedes, a Tesla and a Toyota.

Guo keeps 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 moving to Japan are wealthy and educated. That’s 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 focusing on people to fill labor shortages for factories, construction and elder care.

“It is crucial that Japan becomes an attractive country for foreign talent so they will choose to work here,” Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said earlier this year, announcing efforts to relax Japan’s stringent immigration restrictions.

That kind of opportunity is exactly what Chinese ballet dancer Du Hai said he has found. Leading a class of a dozen Japanese students in a suburban Tokyo studio one recent weekend, Du demonstrated positions and spins to the women dressed in leotards and toe shoes.

Du was drawn to Japan’s huge ballet scene, filled with professional troupes and talented dancers, he said, but worried about warnings he got about unfriendly Japanese.

That turned out to be false, he said with a laugh. Now, Du is considering getting Japanese citizenship.

“Of course, I enjoy living in Japan very much now,” he said.

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Kang reported from Beijing.

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Yuri Kageyama is on X: https://twitter.com/yurikageyama