They come with backpacks carrying a few spare changes of clothes and whatever money and phones they weren’t robbed of by criminals or cartels along the way, arriving at the United States-Mexico border exhausted from the stress of the journey north.
Like the hundreds of thousands of people around them who have also trekked weeks to reach the US, they’re driven by a desperation to escape and make a new life, despite the uncertainty of what’s on the other side.
But these migrants are fleeing the world’s second largest economy and an emerging superpower.
On a recent winter day, dozens of Chinese nationals waited in different makeshift camps scattered outside San Diego, California, just north of the Mexican border.
Bundled in hoodies and jackets, they huddled around fires as they, and others there, counted the time before US border control agents would take them away for processing – and what they hoped would be the start to their lives in America.
These arrivals are part of a staggering new trend. In the first 11 months of 2023, more than 31,000 Chinese citizens were picked up by law enforcement crossing illegally into the US from Mexico, government data shows – compared with an average of roughly 1,500 per year over the preceding decade.
Their numbers are still dwarfed by those from regional neighbors like Mexico, Venezuela, and Guatemala, and they are not alone in coming from other parts of the world. But the influx of people from China making that crossing spotlights the urgency many now feel to leave their native country, even in the midst of what leader Xi Jinping has claimed is a “national rejuvenation.”
Many who left point to a struggle to survive.
Three years of Covid-19 lockdowns and restrictions left people across China out of work – and disillusioned with the ruling Communist Party’s increasingly tight grip on all aspects of life under Xi. Now, hope that business would fully rebound once restrictions ended a year ago has vanished, with China’s once envious economic growth stuttering.
Others nod to restrictions on personal life in China, where Xi has overseen a sweeping crackdown on free speech, civil society and religion in the country of 1.4 billion.
“We are Christians,” one neatly dressed middle-aged man said simply when asked what had led him there – a bare encampment thousands of miles from home.
These Chinese nationals join migrants from around the world whose numbers have overwhelmed the southwestern US border with illegal crossings in recent months. Most are seeking asylum after they cross – a pathway that may narrow in the coming weeks as Congress is expected to move to stem that flow amid a fierce debate over immigration.
For now, people from China are on track to be the fastest growing group making those crossings, according to a CNN analysis of the latest law enforcement data on border encounters.
And as the numbers making their escape have grown, so too has a network of businesses and social media accounts catering to Chinese migrants, who must often take a circuitous route across continents, before beginning the arduous, overland journey north.
The gateway
For many, that overland route begins in Quito, Ecuador – a city of roughly 2.5 million high in the Andean foothills that has become a gateway for those escaping China.
In 2022, Ecuador documented around 13,000 Chinese nationals entering. In the first 11 months of 2023, that number rose to more than 45,000. The country doesn’t require visas for Chinese passport holders.
A cottage industry of businesses caters to the border-bound, starting with airport pickups to arranging stays at Chinese-run hostels and organizing the journey north – often for a hefty fee, CNN reporting has found.
Evidence of the growing trend appears across Quito, if one knows where to look.
At one bus station, a ticket agent has a sign for “the Colombian border” printed in Chinese, ready to flash to potential customers. At a local hospital offering vaccinations – recommended for a treacherous jungle crossing – the Spanish-speaking nurse keeps a Chinese translation of the intake form on her desk.
Along the fringes of the city’s central business district are a growing number of businesses linked to the trend, travel agent Long Quanwei, who immigrated to Quito from China five years ago, told CNN last month.
There, convenience and department stores sell gear and goods needed for the trek north, while Chinese-run establishments offer housing, food and a place to link up with others headed north and decide about onward routes, Long says.
At one of these hostels, where a night’s stay with meals costs about $20, printed Chinese-language maps and instructions pasted to a wall detail each leg of the trip. The owner, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of online backlash, estimates there are 100 such small businesses like hers that cater to Chinese travelers, including those preparing to head north.
“Many people come here and don’t speak English or Spanish, so they look for me,” she said.
Among those passing through was Zheng Shiqing, who arrived in early December after first traveling by plane though Thailand, Morocco and Spain.
A slim 28-year-old with a serious expression, he had already met with setbacks.
On his first attempt to pass through Colombia, Zheng and a travel partner were robbed at gunpoint. With his phone and money gone, he turned back to Quito to regroup. Still, he remained determined that the only way is forward to the US – to break a cycle he sees in China.
“For ordinary people, survival is really difficult. It is really hard to live. Don’t even think about making money because you are being exploited by those (upper class) people,” Zheng said from the hostel as he prepared to set off for Colombia a second time with borrowed cash.
Zheng, a high-school graduate from rural Yunnan province whose parents are migrant workers in China, recounted how life had become increasingly difficult for people like him, despite decades of rapid economic growth lifting large parts of the population out of poverty.
I wish I was never born … living feels so exhausting.”
Zheng Shiqing, migrant from China
He started factory work mixing glue for shoe boxes in his late teens, and later switched between jobs, including at an assembly line making smartphone parts for Apple. During the pandemic, he was locked down in another factory fabricating internet routers, unable to leave. After the lockdown ended, Zheng switched to another job, where he says his wages were never paid, even after he filed a formal complaint.
“There is no way out … unless your parents are officials or businesspeople. But if you are from the lower-class, even if you get married and have children, you will still follow the old path … it’s painful just thinking about it,” he said. “I wish I was never born … living feels so exhausting.”
Earlier this year, like thousands of other Chinese, Zheng decided to try “zou xian” or taking the “walking route” to America.
The phrase has become a euphemism for the perilous journey, as has “global travels” – one of the search terms people can key in to find online tutorials in Chinese for how to prepare, what to do at each leg and even what to say to immigration officials.
‘Dire straits’
China’s Covid-19 controls, relaxed only a year ago, hit blue collar workers in cities and residents in rural areas hard.
And now the economy continues to struggle under a property market crisis, high local government debt and the effects of a government crack-down on the once-booming private sector, all of which has cost jobs.
After urban youth unemployment hit record levels last year, the government stopped publishing data for the metric altogether. The Communist Party pledged to do more to bolster the economy — and quash bad news about it.
“It’s striking that so many are making this perilous journey to South America and up to the US when politically the country is very stable,” said Victor Shih, director of the 21st Century China Center at the University of California San Diego, pointing to a contrast with periods of emigration from China amid political turmoil.
“It suggests that a significant segment of the population is in economic dire straits.”
Hundreds of thousands fled the mainland for Hong Kong in the mid-20th Century amid civil war and, later, political turmoil and famine under the policies of Communist China’s founder Mao Zedong.
AP
Chinese emigration to the US took off after the opening of China’s economy in the early 1980s, a little more than a decade after restrictive US immigration policies were dropped. Then, the number of people from China gaining permanent residency – a pathway often linked to family ties, employment, and political asylum – started to climb significantly, US data shows.
As China’s economy boomed in the early 2000s, dynamics shifted: there were more opportunity for workers there, while wealthier Chinese had greater resources to immigrate or study in the US.
But the country has also seen an intensified crackdown on civil society – and any form of dissent – during the past decade under Xi, its most authoritarian leader in decades.
In that period, China also has increased its control over religion and has been accused by the United Nations’ highest human rights body of perpetuating serious abuses that could amount to crimes against humanity for the way it treats Muslim minorities, a charge Beijing denies.
UN data shows the number of people from China seeking political asylum in the US and elsewhere around the world has sharply risen during Xi’s rule – climbing from nearly 25,000 in 2013 to more than 120,000 globally in the first six months of 2023.
Those who cross at the southern US border, who include not just single adults but families, are also typically seeking asylum, an immigration category for people escaping persecution. Previously, asylum seekers from China might apply after entering the US on a tourist visa, or via a different route that may not involve being detained at a border, immigration experts say.
Now, the southern border has emerged as a better-known route amid a broader increase in the number of people from around the world crossing there since the pandemic ended.
Those who’ve entered illegally on that route must typically pass an initial screening in order to stay in the US and apply for asylum, though different migrants may face different circumstances amid an overwhelmed system.
Congress is expected to act to update immigration rules for the border in the coming days, which could change and narrow existing rules, experts say.
Within the overall increase in such crossings, the rising number of Chinese nationals who are willing to take the treacherous route – even at a time of sharp political tensions between the US and China – appears as a new and telling trend.
