Thousands of Chinese citizens are illegally entering the United States via the San Diego-Mexico border, seeking asylum like the citizens of impoverished Central African and war-torn West Asian nations, and pulling out a Chinese reality into the free world away from its glittering coastal cities...
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China's poverty is on display at the Mexico-US border in the form of thousands of Chinese migrants
Thousands of Chinese citizens are illegally entering the United States via the San Diego-Mexico border, seeking asylum like the citizens of impoverished Central African and war-torn West Asian nations, and pulling out a Chinese reality into the free world away from its glittering coastal cities. Experts suggest that this may be a reflection of the dire straits faced by some sections of the Chinese economy.
Data from the US Customs and Border Protection shows that this year, until August 2023, a total of 20,273 Chinese migrant encounters occurred at the US-Mexico border, up from 2,176 a year earlier, a whopping increase of 831 per cent.
The number is likely to increase even further after the end of 2023 when annual data on migrant encounters is released.
The extraordinary increase in the number of Chinese migrant encounters confirms two things that many China watchers have been saying for a long time.
"One, the glittering Chinese coastal cities or even the exceptional hinterland city like Chongqing are not a measure of the wealth of China," said Sridharan Subramanyam, a China Watcher at Chennai Centre for China Studies.
"The poverty in China's rural areas, due to various reasons, is real," he told WION.
This August, the city of Zhuozhou in China's Hebei province was devastated by the worst floods that hit northern China in living memory.
Less than 50 km from Beijing, thousands of homes were damaged in the wake of Typhoon Doksuri.
Several blog posts about the Zhouzhou floods, which accused the authorities of deliberately flooding certain Chinese towns to control the water levels in Beijing, were censored from the messaging platform WeChat.
"The attempt by government officials is to prevent the leakage of facts (on poverty as well), as we saw in the recent Beijing floods," Subramanyam added.
The second aspect, the expert said, is that China's economic situation in the last two years has been very dire.
Faltering economy behind rising illegal Chinese migration to the US?
To recover from the global economic consequences of the Covid pandemic, Chinese leader Xi Jinping introduced the 'dual circulation' policy to encourage domestic consumption after a fall in external demand for Chinese goods and services.
The policy has not paid off, Subramanyam pointed out.
"The Chinese do not have enough trust, at least in near terms, of their economy doing well and are saving even more than they already used to do so highly. The consumption rates as a result have been falling," he said.
What else is pushing China's poor into the US?
The draconian ‘zero-Covid’ policy, coupled with the trade war with the US and the
latter’s ban on semiconductor technology, are all adding to Xi Jinping's woes.
Moreover, Xi Jinping's flagship Belt and Road Initiative, a massive trade and infrastructure network that seeks to connect the country with the West in a model based on the ancient Silk Route, is "failing", Subramanyam said.
An analysis of a dozen countries most indebted to China — including Pakistan, Kenya, Zambia, Laos and Mongolia — shows that paying back the debt "is consuming an ever-greater amount of the tax revenue…and draining foreign currency reserves", Associated Press reported.
Behind this, AP said, "is China’s reluctance to forgive debt and its extreme secrecy about how much money it has loaned and on what terms, which has kept other major lenders from stepping in to help."
"China has not only been unable to generate much return on (BRI) investments. It also is in danger of losing the capital in several countries in the last three years," Subramanyam added.
Meanwhile, the slow but relentless de-risking leading to the relocation of industries from China to other countries is continuing to expand distress in the world's second-largest economy, pushing thousands of blue-collar workers to look for greener pastures elsewhere in the world.
All these may be acting as the 'push factor' in the migration of Chinese to the US. It's an irony of history that, centuries ago, they were among the first Asians to migrate in search of better lives, escaping the poverty at home, which led to the ubiquitous China Towns in several US cities.