Key Findings

• Over the past two years, growing evidence suggests that increasing numbers of Chinese people are not buying Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” and are seeking brighter futures elsewhere.
• The number of people emigrating or seeking asylum overseas has spiked under Xi, as has the amount of private capital leaving China.
• Concerns about a lack of opportunities in a time of economic decline, restrictions on political expression, the party’s more aggressive attempts at coercion, erosion of trust in the party, and pessimism about the future have contributed to the exodus of people and capital.
• More Chinese people now feel that the country is moving in the wrong direction and the potential for a course change is slim and are “voting with their feet.”

When Xi Jinping first assumed leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) a decade ago, he tried selling the “China Dream” — a vision of the country reclaiming its rightful place in history as the world’s greatest power — but today, an increasing number of Chinese people no longer buy it. Since the end of strict zero-COVID policies in late 2022, the number of Chinese people leaving the country has rapidly climbed, as has the amount of private capital exiting through both legal and illegal means. A new social discourse is now in vogue: “runxue” — which is code for “to run away.”

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the number of Chinese citizens seeking political asylum overseas climbed to 120,000 in 2023, a more than twelvefold increase since the time of Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao. In 2023, the U.S. Border Patrol registered 24,314 Chinese citizens illegally entering through southern California and Texas, a number that climbed to 35,399 in the first seven months of 2024. These illegal immigrants took the “walking route”: first entering Ecuador visa-free (until the privilege was recently rescinded), then navigating treacherous paths, including the notorious Darien Gap, through half a dozen Central American countries before entering the United States through Mexico. These numbers represent a substantial increase from the meager 1,500 illegal entries during the Hu era.

Likewise, studies suggest that since the pandemic, the amount of private capital leaving China through legal and illegal means has risen significantly, to a staggering $738 billion in the third quarter of 2022. Despite strict capital controls, Chinese money has purchased luxury properties in Singapore, Vancouver, and London. Some of these financial outflows are facilitated by Chinese underground bankers and intermediated through criminal syndicates in the United States that control large sums of cash.

What explains the exodus of people and capital from China? What does it mean for Xi Jinping’s regime? In general, citizens of autocratic countries, such as Iran and Russia, have little faith in their government’s ability to protect their personal safety or private property. China has proven an exception to this rule since the economic reforms of the late 1970s. But things are changing.

Despite growing income inequality, many Chinese citizens have experienced rising prosperity since the early 1980s. The transformative changes in the post-Mao era enabled them to enjoy personal freedoms and economic opportunities unimaginable a generation prior. Growth-minded local officials became complicit in rule evasions that allowed private businesses to flourish in spite of the lack of protection for private property rights. Deng Xiaoping’s dictum “to get rich is glorious” removed the stigma associated with private wealth accumulation. CCP cadres were incentivized to prioritize GDP growth above all else. Party officials and government bureaucrats were given a stake in economic growth and benefited professionally — and often personally — from rising prosperity. Corruption was rife, and distribution could be unequal, but everyone, from rural migrants to the urban middle class to privileged elites, got a slice of the growing economic pie.

Prior to Xi’s reign, Chinese citizens may not have enjoyed political liberty, but the system allowed them to express their economic grievances, even if they were not always satisfactorily addressed. Protests about livelihood issues — wage arrears, land grabs, housing demolitions, and homeowners’ complaints — were commonplace and largely tolerated as long as they were small in scale and geographically isolated. Until Xi tightened online censorship, netizens enjoyed a measure of freedom to roam within the Great Firewall and express their views on a wide range of social issues.

However, much has changed since Xi’s ascent to power in 2013, and especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. As I argue in the concluding chapter of my 2022 book, Outsourcing Repression, the government regularly engaged, since Mao’s era, nonstate actors such as trusted local community members to enforce compliance and mobilize citizens for state objectives. This has now given way to direct coercion under Xi. The past decade has seen widespread crackdowns on civil society organizations, activists apprehended, and tighter security measures introduced not only in Hong Kong and Xinjiang but broadly across Chinese society. Accordingly, the social compliance to everyday repression exercised by trusted nonstate actors has been replaced by various forms of resistance.

These dynamics played out during the two-year zero-COVID lockdown and its aftermath. As I wrote in Foreign Affairs in January 2023, though stringent, the lockdown policies executed by trusted community leaders and neighborhood committees yielded widespread compliance and societal acceptance in the first eighteen months. When the virus mutated to the rapidly transmissible Delta variant, the grassroots community could no longer cope with delivering essential items to residents, and food shortages occurred in Shanghai and elsewhere. In summer 2022, some people began to vent their anger online. The resistance spread to retail owners whose incomes were affected by the lockdown. The Urumqi fire that killed scores of people further ignited the “White Paper” protests on elite campuses and in major cities. These protests, together with the erosion of government income from lockdown measures, quickly led to the abrupt abandonment of the zero-COVID policy.

After the pandemic, economic decline and diminishing political space resulted in changes to the social contract. The implicit pact between the party-state and its people has long demanded political acquiescence and tolerance of income inequality in exchange for economic prosperity. As long as family incomes grew, demands for political rights were circumscribed, and tolerance for inequality remained high. However, once income growth stagnated, people began to question the system and, in particular, why certain groups were getting ahead and claiming a disproportionately larger share of the pie. In a system where people cannot effectively voice their grievances without inviting trouble, those who have the means have decided to “vote with their feet.” Post-pandemic, those who lack the means to leave have opted to “lie flat” (tangping). Urbanites quit stressful jobs to move to the countryside, and increasing numbers of young people seek secure government posts and an “iron rice bowl” — a term indicating a career with guaranteed job security.

Critically, more people in China are pessimistic about the future. The current economic decline does not appear cyclical, and altering the Chinese economy’s trajectory will require fundamental changes that better allocate resources and reward effort. The abolition of presidential term limits in 2018 signaled to many Chinese people that the country was moving in the wrong direction. Worse still, the protracted zero-COVID lockdown, as well as the excess and preventable deaths from the policy’s abrupt abandonment, convinced many that they could no longer trust the CCP to protect their lives and private property. Consequently, more people have given up on the China Dream, and many of them are heading for the exits.