The Communist Party is trying to tighten its grip on the Chinese diaspora
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Ms Song is typical of many Chinese who have moved to the West in recent years: well-educated and wealthy, unlike the labourers who dominated earlier emigrant communities. The number of Chinese abroad has doubled since 1990. It has risen particularly fast since 2000. The pandemic heightened the desire of many members of the elite to leave, as their resentment grew of covid-related controls and the party’s ever-tightening restrictions on freedom of expression. China ended its battle against covid late in 2022, but its faltering economy and high youth unemployment are fuelling people’s anxieties. Many young Chinese now use the term runxue, “the art of running”, to convey their desire to flee.
There are about 10.5m people living outside mainland China who were born on the mainland. Only the Indian, Russian and Mexican diasporas are larger. Some of these Chinese are among the country’s richest people. In many countries, they have long dominated wealth-related visa schemes. More than 70% of the 81,000 investor visas issued by the American government to dollar-millionaires between 2010 and 2019 were given to Chinese citizens. Since 2012 some 85% of people who have received Australia’s “golden visas” for investing over A$5m ($3.3m) in the country have been from China. All but 41 of the 1,300 people who applied for the equivalent Irish scheme in 2022 were Chinese.
I’m in my own bubble community so it’s hard to say whether it’s true, what makes me question that is my own experience.
Here in NZ we don’t really have a China Town, there are higher asian concentrations in certain neighborhoods but you tend to get those with various cultures.
My friends (and myself) that are east/south east asian do keep an Asian identity but we don’t hold as strong of a nationality attachment to our original country. I was raised in NZ, our ways of life are better than probably most other nations out there.
This is not the same as our parents who did grew up in Asia but I think that’s understandable.
My personal barrier to be considered as from NZ is not internal, it’s external. When people see me, the first guess at nationality is not NZ/kiwi but Chinese. The first question is where am I from (country of origin). This is a major concern for me in the US because of appearances.
I’m not sure I can really square that with belonging to a nation truly, so what am I left to work with here?
Well I actually have an answer to that but that’s a wider opinion about nationality in general.
The question really is how many people like you would betray your country for China? Vs how many people with parents from somewhere in Europe betray nz for a European country.
Is that really the question? Framing it us vs them doesn’t help either group. This is not a zero sum situation where you defect or don’t.
But I don’t think this question is worth considering because considering loyalty to country is like considering faithfulness to a religion. It doesn’t put you on the right side of morality. People like me don’t draw that line based on place of origin.
I would hope NZ would not take the same route that so many countries around the world are taking and take on identity politics. So far we seem to be doing on average better than that.