Chinese migrating to Japan in increasing numbers to escape Xi Jinping’s rule

In 2023, Liu Dong (音译), with a mix of unease and determination, boarded a plane from Shanghai to Osaka, resolved to escape. The previous year, China's most populous city had endured months of lockdown, with 24 million residents living under some of the world's strictest anti-COVID measures.

Eager to start a new life, Ms. Liu described the experience as a past she wanted to forget. "After the Shanghai lockdown, I really yearned for freedom, so I wanted to start over in Japan," she said. However, her family, including her nine-year-old son, decided to stay behind. "I told them that I wanted to find a backup plan so that my son could have another option in the future," she said. "My family said a lot of hurtful things to me, like, 'You abandoned your family and your child.'" Ms. Liu stated that restarting her life in Japan has been difficult, but it has been worth it.

Ms. Liu is one of thousands of Chinese immigrants who, traumatized by China’s strict “zero-COVID” policy, have moved to Japan seeking a new life. China's abrupt lifting of restrictions from that period sparked rare public discontent and led to protests, prompting a government response. Just five months after the end of the Shanghai lockdown, a deadly apartment fire in Xinjiang ignited China's "White Paper Movement." Residents took to the streets, holding up blank A4 sheets of paper to protest, expressing their discontent with the government's strict pandemic measures. This movement quickly spread throughout the country, and the policy was abruptly canceled at the end of 2022.

Despite the rapid policy reversal, the economy has not rebounded, and an increasing number of Chinese people are emigrating in search of a different quality of life. Ms. Liu described her first three months in Japan as a painful experience, having to start over in a city where she didn't even speak the local language. "Every time I saw a child on the street, I would cry because they reminded me of my son," she said. Despite the difficulties, Ms. Liu is convinced that she is building a future for her family in Japan. She believes one of the major benefits of living there is that children receive more respect in schools. Now, part of her work involves visiting other Chinese immigrants in Japan and sharing their stories on her social media accounts. "I have interviewed a lot of people, and they all feel the same as me," she said. Overall, she feels that most of the people she has encountered still believe the challenges of immigration are worth it.

China is the largest group of immigrants in Japan. As of June, out of more than 3.3 million foreigners living in Japan, 844,000 were Chinese, according to government data. This is up from 762,000 in 2022 and 654,000 a decade ago. Given the historical tensions and the rise of Chinese nationalism and anti-Japanese sentiment, Japan may seem like an odd choice for Chinese immigrants. "I would say it's always been there because nationalism is embedded in the education system and propaganda machine in a systematic way," said Rose Luqiu, an associate professor of journalism at Hong Kong Baptist University. However, Dr. Luqiu has recently noticed some changes. In September, a 10-year-old Japanese boy was stabbed to death near a school in southern China, exacerbating tensions between Beijing and Tokyo, after Tokyo had been asking Chinese authorities to do more to ensure the safety of its citizens.

This was the second incident of a Japanese child being attacked in China in a matter of months, prompting the Japanese embassy in Beijing to warn its citizens in China to remain vigilant. Dr. Luqiu believes that since the attack, and due to Beijing's attempts to attract more tourists to shore up its weak economy, censors have been working harder to limit anti-Japanese sentiment on China's heavily controlled internet. "The rise of nationalism is the result of state propaganda, but recently it seems to be changing," she said. "After the attack, you can finally see that kind of content has decreased, so I think the government has started to censor certain types of content. In China, everything can be controlled, so if they want to make the national image more positive… the narrative or content online can be easily controlled." Ms. Liu hopes her social media accounts might, in some way, foster more understanding between the people of Japan and China. "I want to improve my Japanese so that I can also start talking to Japanese people and hopefully bridge the gap between China and Japan," she told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Nonetheless, these tensions remain a top concern for Wang Bing (音译), who moved to Japan in 2021 and started his own real estate brokerage. While he didn't face the same family opposition as Ms. Liu over his decision to move to Japan, he feels a sense of apprehension every time he returns home. "I tell my wife and son not to mention that we are traveling back from Japan," he said during their annual trips back to China. Mr. Wang used to perform stand-up comedy in Shanxi, northern China, but he increasingly felt constrained by the country's strict censorship and limitations on his creative freedom. "The local cultural department would ask us to reserve seven tickets for them at every show in case they wanted to come and check [our material]," he said. As a real estate agent in Osaka, his main clients are from China who are looking to buy homes in the Kansai region. Some are looking for housing, while others want to purchase properties to rent out — a way for Chinese immigrants to apply for Japan's business management visa.

Mr. Wang says some of his clients are business owners who are worried about the Chinese economy, so they are choosing to live in what they perceive to be a safer place — he jokingly describes them as birds looking for better trees to nest in. "A lot of people from Shanghai and Zhejiang are coming here, and most of them don't even care how they will make a living," he said, adding that he noticed a surge in immigration after the Chinese government ended its "zero-COVID" policy in 2022. China has strict restrictions on the outflow of money, so Japan is also attracting people looking for a safe place to store their money, especially for middle-class and wealthy Chinese. "In Japan, like in the US and the Western world, the respect for private property is the cornerstone of the system," said Q. Edward Wang, the coordinator of the Asian Studies program at Rowan University. "But in China in the last five years or so, the policy has been to develop what they call 'common prosperity.' We all know about the crackdowns on the super-rich, like the heads of Tencent and Alibaba… Of course, the policy has changed now, but that fear is still there." Alibaba founder Jack Ma is also reportedly among the Chinese immigrants who have moved to Japan, where he is a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo.

More broadly, Japan offers greater freedoms than China, especially under Xi Jinping's increasingly heavy-handed rule, and it's both comfortable and close to home. "[People] have a strong sense of distrust in the government's ability," Mr. Wang said. "[People] basically want to take control of their lives, and if you go to China today, you see a lot of complaints and criticisms about government policies and so on. So I think that distrust is the biggest motivation for anyone with resources to move out… if not themselves, then their assets." A fan of Mr. Wang's stand-up comedy contacted him shortly after he moved to Japan to tell him that his old jokes would absolutely not work now. Mr. Wang felt this confirmed his decision to move to Japan. "I knew that if I didn't leave, I would get into trouble for what I said."