Beijing Ms. Liu was lucky. Actually, the 44-year-old Chinese didn’t want to fly back from Shanghai to her adopted home of New York until the end of March. But friends warned her a few days earlier of an impending lockdown in the eastern Chinese economic metropolis. In a cloak-and-dagger operation, she packed her bags, took her parents with her and drove to the airport in Pudong. “I’ve never experienced anything like it,” she says. “We ran away like refugees,” says Liu, who doesn’t want to read her first name in the newspaper.
Liu and her parents narrowly escaped Shanghai’s draconian lockdown, which is only now beginning to be eased. Around 25 million people have been stuck in the city in the past two months and have only been allowed to leave their homes in exceptional cases.
Raised in Shanghai, Liu has lived her whole life in the city. She has lived in New York for around four years. Actually, she only wanted to visit her parents and then return to the USA alone. But Liu decided to take his parents with him. “They couldn’t have taken care of themselves during a lockdown,” says Liu. “A lot of my friends in Shanghai tell me they want to get out of China,” she says. “Even people I don’t know well ask me how I made it out.”
The most popular emigration country is Portugal
Many Chinese citizens are currently in the same situation as Liu and her friends. More and more would like to leave their homes in view of the draconian restrictions being imposed across the country in the name of Covid prevention. On April 15 alone, amid Shanghai’s dramatic lockdown, the Chinese word for “emigration” was searched more than 71 million times on Wechat. About a month later, on May 17, there were already more than 100 million searches.
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The number of posts read on the subject on the Weibo social network also skyrocketed to more than a million in mid-April. It is now no longer possible to search for the word “emigration” on the Chinese search engine Baidu or on Weibo. Weibo points out that the searched word includes “sensitive information”.
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The British agency Henley & Partners, which advises people on acquiring citizenship or residence permits through investments worldwide, has observed a surge in inquiries from Chinese citizens since the harsh lockdown in Shanghai. As the company announced when asked by the Handelsblatt, there were an average of 118 percent more inquiries from Chinese nationals in April and May than the average for the first three months of the year. The most popular destination for Chinese who want to emigrate is Portugal.
Jack Zhang, who has been advising Chinese citizens on emigration from Guangdong, the technology center in southern China, for eight years, has also observed a sudden increase in interest. Since the lockdown in April, he has received up to 20 inquiries – per day. Before it was only a fraction of that.
In total, Zhang estimates that since the lockdown, he has received between 300 and 400 requests from Chinese nationals who want to leave China and hope to use his help to obtain a foreign passport or residence permit from another country. 70 percent of them came from Shanghai. However, he believes that only five percent are seriously considering emigration. Inquiries have recently returned to normal, Zhang said.
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When the Handelsblatt asked whether more visa applications from Chinese citizens had been received at the German diplomatic missions in China since Shanghai was sealed off at the beginning of April, the Federal Foreign Office said that the number of visa applications by Chinese citizens at the German diplomatic missions in China had not increased had increased to a significant extent.
One reason for the reluctance to apply for visas could be that many people cannot leave their homes because of the lockdowns and they also see that leaving the country is currently almost impossible.
The number of passports issued is negligible
Even before the pandemic, it was not easy for Chinese citizens to get a long-term visa in popular destinations such as Europe or the USA due to the strict regulations. But since the outbreak of the pandemic, the Chinese authorities have also been putting obstacles in their way.
Since the beginning of 2020, the authorities have almost stopped issuing new passports. According to official information, the number of passports issued in 2021 was just two percent of the number in 2018 as a whole, i.e. before the crisis. Citizens are instructed to only leave the country in urgent cases.
At the end of March, a report from a police agency in Hunan Province caused great concern on Chinese social networks. She had asked citizens to return their passports – they would be given them back “after the pandemic”, it said. The publication Radio Free Asia recently reported that Chinese citizens returning to their home country were asked what they did abroad. Apparently, some even had their passports invalidated on the spot.
The Chinese immigration authorities described the reports as false – but at the same time repeated their warning to citizens only to leave the country in exceptional cases.
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