Summer 2014, Shanghai. My iPhone beeped. A Wechat message popped up.Footnote 1 It was from Andrew.Footnote 2 He sent me a photo of a document in Chinese. It was an announcement by the US government stating that the quota for the EB-5 VisaFootnote 3 for Chinese citizens had been filled, and that no more applications would be accepted during the financial year ending on 30 September 2014.Footnote 4 For the past three years, Andrew had been in the process of applying for an EB-5 visa to the US. Only a week before, he had told me that the message he received from his agent was positive. The immigration agent promised him that his application would go through, and he might get his I-526 Form soon.Footnote 5 “Hai,” he sighed in his Wechat message, “I was hoping to send the kids out sooner so they could have an adventure and broaden their perspectives.”
Andrew is one of hundreds of thousands of wealthy Chinese aspiring to emigrate to a foreign country as business investors. The US immigration office expected that the EB-5 quota would be filled as soon as the 2015 financial year began on 1 October, as many applications were already in the pipeline. This wave of rich Chinese migrating through business investment rose suddenly. In 2012, an immigration lawyer in southern California mentioned that the annual quota of 10,000 EB-5 visas had never been maximized since its inception in 1990; in just two years, the situation has completely changed.Footnote 6
The US is not the only target destination: Chinese nationals were the main recipients of business investment visas in Australia. Their share of that country's business innovation and investment programme was 72.2 per cent of the total 7,010 granted in the 2012–2013 financial year, rising from 11.3 per cent in 2002–2003.Footnote 7 Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong, Spain and other European countries have also attracted Chinese investors. According to a Hurun Report published in 2014, among a sample of 393 Chinese who had a net worth over 10 million yuan, 64 per cent had already emigrated to a foreign country or would attempt to do so in the near future.Footnote 8
There are many obvious motives for this apparent exodus of wealthy Chinese: anxiety over children's well-being in the competitive Chinese education system; a desire to protect one's wealth; concerns over food security and air pollution in urban China; and worries about potential social upheavals and changing political attitudes towards the wealthy are all mentioned in the media or by other China scholars.Footnote 9 I acknowledge that these reasons undoubtedly encourage the rich to emigrate, but I argue that this type of migration is above all a form of class-based consumption. International mobility is one of the most valued commodities and the business investor visa comes with an extraordinary price tag. Possessing it signals the recipient's class position and provides access to a perceived wholesome living environment and an imagined elite lifestyle overseas. Emigration also allows the first-generation rich to secure and advance the class position of their children among the global elites. Moreover, the particular form this type of migration takes, yimin bu yizhu 移民不移住 (migrating without settling), and the split household it frequently entails, allows some businessmen to fulfil their family responsibilities without abandoning their businesses or indeed the fun of a Chinese masculine business culture.
Class Society and the Logic of Mobility
The emigration of rich Chinese is both a Chinese social phenomenon and a migration phenomenon. Before introducing the empirical analysis, this section presents a brief review of selected research in these fields.
Class in post-reform China and the changing face of the elite
The exodus of wealthy Chinese forms part of the process of class formation in post-reform China. The transition from a planned to a market economy, as well as its engagement with global capitalism, has inevitably changed the social landscape of China. The old institutional bases of classification, such as the household registration system and political hierarchy, have compounded with market forces to give rise to an increasingly stratified society.Footnote 10
Several characteristics distinguish class in China. First, China has a relatively underdeveloped middle class. The 2006 Chinese General Social Survey shows that only 12.1 per cent of the population in China and 25.4 per cent in urban China could be objectively categorized as middle class.Footnote 11 Second, class boundaries are increasingly salient. Government officials, corporate managers, private business owners and technical professionals form the top strata, and the rest of the population occupies peripheral positions in society. There is insufficient mobility between classes.Footnote 12 Finally, class-consciousness has emerged among Chinese people. Those who identify themselves by class status express their class identity through their consumption, ranging from food, clothes and leisure to housing.Footnote 13 Li Peilin observes that consumption style itself, where one lives and what one buys, enhances one's subjective class identification (zhuguan jieceng rentong 主观阶层认同).Footnote 14
Most recent academic research about class in China focuses on the middle class, and studies about the upper class or the elite are relatively few. There is an uncertainty about who the elites are. In the earlier post-reform era, the elite class (jingying jieceng 精英阶层) usually encompassed Party bureaucrats who had political power and professional employees with higher education.Footnote 15 Increasingly, the elite category has extended to include successful business owners. However, because the label jingying 精英 in Chinese denotes a certain cultural superiority, the inclusion of wealthy business people – a category of people often associated with unethical behaviour and sometimes decadent lifestyles in popular imagination – makes the social status of the jingying jieceng ambivalent.
Most scholarship on contemporary elites is concerned with the production and reproduction of the so-called elite.Footnote 16 John Osburg's ethnography is among the few that probe into the social practices of the wealthy. Following the leisure activities of rich men in a provincial city, he points out that their private consumption, especially their nightlife consumption, is essential to establishing their business networks and defining their elite masculinity. Consumption, that is the goods they purchase, the places in which they entertain and the women they are seen with, is an important signifier of their status among their peers.Footnote 17 However, amidst the panic surrounding the perceived decline in morals in ChinaFootnote 18 and Xi Jinping's 习近平 anti-corruption campaign, the practices Osburg describes no longer carry the prestige they may once have had owing to their linkage with political corruption and lax sexual mores. In the second decade of 21st century, several Chinese entrepreneurs have become among the wealthiest people in the world, and the rich people in urban China, with the assistance of an industry that services the rich, are looking for different and maybe more legitimate ways to distinguish themselves.
From economic to cultural logic of migration
The contemporary outmigration of wealthy Chinese also manifests the cultural logic of migration. Except for forced displacement, migration studies prioritize the economic logic for migration.Footnote 19 Not only do studies of labour migration focus on its economic motivations, the analyses of the motives for the contemporary outmigration of ethnic Chinese business people from South-East Asia also stress economic rationales.Footnote 20 The growth of the East Asian economy in the 1980s and the increasing pace of economic globalization, coinciding with the initiation and expansion of business immigration programmes in North America and Australia in the 1980s, motivated ethnic Chinese capitalists, the Homo Economicus as described by David Ley, to search for profits and capital accumulation globally.Footnote 21 However, the cultural logic of migration has been highlighted in more recent mobility phenomena. Migration is seen as a form of lifestyle consumption, an ideology and a way to fashion oneself as a modern subject.Footnote 22
In the 1990s, a new form of cross-border mobility captured researchers' attention. Labelled lifestyle migration, it refers to “relatively affluent individuals of all ages, moving either part-time or full-time to places that, for various reasons, signify, for the migrant, a better quality of life.”Footnote 23 Under the umbrella concept of lifestyle migration are diverse types of migration phenomena, including retirement relocation, second-home ownership and leisure migration.Footnote 24 Lifestyle migration literature emphasizes individuals' quest for self-realization and for quality of life, and describes this migration practice as a form of break from the pre-migration life.
Julie Chu's Cosmologies of Credit provides another insight into the motivations for migration. Chu argues that mobility has become an index, a value signifier and “a privileged qualisign of modern selves and relations” among aspiring Fuzhou migrants.Footnote 25 In other words, mobility or immobility signifies a rural villager's social distance to modernity.
Both lifestyle migration's emphasis on mobility as an identity expression and Chu's observation of migration's performative dimension help us to understand the phenomenon presented in this study. The migration of rich Chinese mainlanders can certainly be considered a form of lifestyle migration. Wealthy Chinese investors do not see their migration as a means to economic gain, at least not primarily. Instead, each aspires to a version of a good life. Collectively, however, this practice becomes a “qualisign,” helping to erect class boundaries and signify elite class position.
Data and Methods
This paper uses three types of qualitative data supplemented with statistics published by commercial consulting companies. First, I conducted interviews with 18 individuals or families in China and the US from May 2012 to August 2014. Three of the interviewees were immigration agents (yimin zhongjie 移民中介) who worked for two migration service providers, and one was a paralegal with a Los Angeles law firm that handled immigration cases. Fourteen of my cases were wealthy individuals or families who had successfully migrated as business investors, or who were applying for investment visas. Table 1 in the Appendix presents the profiles of these emigrants, including age, education, occupation, sources of wealth and migration destinations. Individuals from the same family are considered as one case. Some individuals and families were interviewed multiple times at different stages of their migration process. Most of the informants were in their late 30s and early 40s and had a university education, matching the profiles of investor emigrants reported by Hurun Report (Hurun baifubang 胡润百富榜), a publishing company that surveys high net worth individuals (HNWIs).Footnote 26
The second type of data used is ethnographic data from participant observation. I undertook field trips to Shanghai and a nearby city in China in January 2012, May 2012, January 2013 and August 2014. In August 2013, I stayed at an informant's house in Orange County, California, and visited areas populated by Chinese immigrants in Southern California. During these field trips, I participated in social gatherings and documented people's discussions about emigration and their evaluations of different destinations. Through participant observation, I gained a more comprehensive understanding of the general concerns that led to emigration decisions and the issues that emerged during the emigration process, as well as post-migration life.
Journalistic reports supply the third type of qualitative data. The visibility of this form of migration has stirred up heated discussions in the Chinese media, providing a wealth of data for researchers. With the help of a research assistant, I accumulated over 80 media reports dated between May 2010 and February 2014. These media reports, mostly in Chinese, were originally published in newspapers in mainland China and Hong Kong, and later posted on websites such as xinhuanet.com, Time-weekly.com and news.sina.com.cn. All quotes are translated from Chinese to English by the author. In addition, this paper employs statistics from commercial marketing or financial firms, especially Hurun Report.
The Emigration of the Wealthy in Contemporary China
In China, the trend for the rich to emigrate is considered as the third migration wave (yiminchao 移民潮) of the post-reform era. The first wave was family reunion-oriented migration, as well as student migration, in the 1980s. The second wave took place from the late 1980s to the early 2000s and saw a large group of skilled professionals and students leaving China. The third wave, composing of wealthy emigrants, started in the 2000s.Footnote 27
According to the 2011 “Private banking white paper” (Zhongguo siren caifu guanli baipishu 中国私人财富管理白皮书) published by the Bank of China and Hurun Report, there were 960,000 individuals in China who had a net worth of over 10 million yuan in 2011.Footnote 28 The number has been steadily increasing every year but it is still less than 0.1 per cent of the population of China. These individuals were relatively young, with an average age of 39. The major sources of their wealth came from private enterprises (55 per cent), real estate investments (20 per cent), stock market investments (15 per cent) and high paying professional jobs (jinling 金领, 10 per cent).Footnote 29 Of these rich Chinese, 60 per cent intended to emigrate, or had already emigrated, to a foreign country, with the US being the most popular destination.Footnote 30
The emigrants, contrary to the popular image of the uncouth nouveau riche, are mostly well educated. According to one survey conducted by Hurun and Visas Consulting, over half (55 per cent) have graduated from university and nearly one third (30 per cent) have master's degrees. Only 13 per cent have less than a high school education.Footnote 31
Many motives are attributed to the current wave of emigrants from China. The most common reason cited is children's education. The 2011 Hurun Report shows that 50 per cent of the people who expressed an interest in investing overseas stated that their “children's education” was their primary motivation.Footnote 32 The rigid and competitive Chinese education system, which demands excessive homework and encourages cramming practices, has incited widespread criticism within Chinese society. Emigrant parents hope to use their economic resources to give their children a quality education.
Asset protection is another frequently reported reason. The rich are seen as busily moving their wealth overseas for safekeeping. Ye Tan, an economic analyst, writes that asset insecurity is a “shadow” looming over wealthy Chinese.Footnote 33 China is perceived as lacking adequate protection for property rights. In addition, wealthy business people are haunted by the discourse of “original sin” (yuanzuilun 原罪论) – an accusation that most successful enterprises obtained their wealth, at least initially, by partnering with corrupt government officials and by illegally appropriating public resources.Footnote 34 Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign has only heightened these insecurities. Furthermore, the historical precedents of the communist persecution of the wealthy give the current rich little assurance that their assets will be safe.Footnote 35 However, although the public is anxious about the draining of wealth from China,Footnote 36 rich emigrants reportedly moved on average only 16 per cent of their assets to a foreign country. A mere 8 per cent of the people surveyed by Hurun Report invested more than 50 per cent of their money in the host society; most invested in real estate property in the destination countries.Footnote 37
The Hurun and Visas Consulting Group's survey also indicates that air pollution, food safety and welfare come before concerns over wealth itself. One media report highlighted a popular statement among wealthy Chinese: “If a problem can be solved by money, it is not a problem.”Footnote 38 The report argues that rich people do not have a sense of “well-being” (xingfu 幸福) in China. In the face of the environmental consequences of rapid industrial growth, the public health consequences of irresponsible business operations and the social consequences of polarizing economic development, many wealthy Chinese opt for a more peaceful and wholesome living environment.
These stated reasons may all be real, but what this paper aims to show is that despite these expressed motives, this form of migration is essentially a type of class consumption. Mobility, along with the recent fads of spiritual pursuits, cultural learning and physical exercises, is a practice the moneyed urban elite, and especially those with a better education, adopt in order to attain social status and to adopt the style of a global elite without breaking with their accustomed business practices and, in the case of some men, the particular masculine culture they have embraced. Moreover, mobility allows rich Chinese to equip their children with elite educational credentials and transnational cultural capital.
Mobility as Elite Class Consumption
In sociology, consumption has always been considered a status symbol that solidifies the group and creates boundaries between groups.Footnote 39 Among the rich Chinese, there is a strong desire for social distinction but their wealth has yet to be converted to social prestige. In reality, their ostentatious consumer behaviour has been the target of public ridicule, gaining them the satirical nickname, tuhao 土豪 (the country millionaires), which projects an image of crassness and a lack of taste. In response, an industry has sprung up in China that aims to service and accustom the rich to an elite consumer culture. As Lin Jiang, a successful lawyer and entrepreneur who launched a magazine to promote luxury commodities and an elite lifestyle remarked, “There are several tens of millions of people with cash savings of over 6 million yuan in China. We need to educate the rich about an elite consumer culture.”Footnote 40
The well-publicized Hurun Report is a flagship of such an industry. As a publishing and event company, Hurun Report has been publishing China's Rich List since 1999, tracking the changing demographics and consumption styles of the richest segment of Chinese society. While “documenting” the changes, it actively educates rich Chinese about luxury brands and elite lifestyles through magazines such as Best Things in Life. By describing what the most successful Chinese entrepreneurs and global moneyed elites do and consume, it serves as a weathervane for aspirational wealthy Chinese. From wearing a Patek Philippe timepiece to drinking Perrier-Jouët champagne or driving a Lamborghini, the urban rich emulate the consumption style of other global elites.Footnote 41 “Emigration” (yimin 移民) is one such coveted commodity.
Emigration has the ability to signify class status because the freedom to move is “perpetually a scarce and unequally distributed commodity,” and “in our late-modern or postmodern times” has fast become “the main stratifying factor.”Footnote 42 It is an especially prized commodity in contemporary China. Decades of restrictions through passport control and household registration have intensified the desire for mobility among Chinese people. From the “fever to go abroad” (chuguore 出国热) to the sense of “displacement” at home, emigration has always been seen as a ticket to a better life.Footnote 43 With the loosening of passport controls and economic development in recent decades, accompanied by the flourishing study abroad opportunities and travel agencies, mobility itself is now no longer unattainable. Yet, means of mobility now represent different levels of power and resources.Footnote 44 Emigration through business investment comes with a much higher price tag and brings immediate long-term residency with no demand for physical labour and very few institutional constraints. It ensures a higher degree of freedom of movement and thereby signals a higher social status. The recent trend in business investment migration is a form of class consumption through which the wealthy Chinese express their social status and group membership, as represented by my informants' narratives and practices surrounding emigration.
“Shenfen” as an exclusive commodity
The rich use the expression “buying status” (mai shenfen 买身份) when talking about emigrating. Here, shenfen refers to legal residency in the destination country. It is not a commodity most Chinese can afford. The minimal capital requirement for the US EB-5 business investment visa is US$500,000, and can run as high as AUD5 million for the Australian equivalent. Therefore, it is an intrinsically “restrictive” resource, preventing “misrepresentative use.”Footnote 45 In other words, it is not to be appropriated by people who do not belong to this class.
In the summer of 2014 in Shanghai, all the immigration agents I interviewed clearly indicated that their targets were successful entrepreneurs (qiyezhu 企业主), high-level managers (gaoguan 高管) at private or foreign firms, and those who have made substantial gains from early investments in the real estate markets. They considered migration unsuitable for people who could barely afford it. One agent told a story of a couple who had used up all their savings and sold their apartment to make up the more than 3 million yuan required for the EB-5 visa in order to send their 21-year-old son to the US. The son succeeded in his immigration attempt. Nonetheless, the agent said gravely:
I understand the old couple's love towards their son. Although we processed this application for them upon request, this is one case where I think that migration is not a good idea for them. Migration should be for those who have surpluses (youyu de 有余的). Looking at the makeup of their investment capital (zijin goucheng 资金构成) – they even borrowed some money – I don't think migration is suitable for them.Footnote 46
The EB-5 visa, as well as the other investment visas, requires a substantial amount of money, and families who don't have several apartments or large amounts of cash savings run the risk of losing all of their savings in the migration process. Therefore, despite the various social and environmental imperfections of living in China, emigration is not a path most families can embark upon.
“Yimin bu yizhu”: mobility as consumption
The appeal of business investment migration lies in the flexibility of residency and freedom of mobility. Emigration, or getting a permanent residency overseas, does not mean permanent relocation to a foreign country, as reflected in the popular slogan, “immigrating without settling” (yimin bu yizhu 移民不移住), promoted by immigration agents. For rich Chinese, emigration is primarily a form of lifestyle consumption. For a number of them, it is also a solution to particular lifestyle problems pertaining to Chinese masculine business culture.
Aiwa Ong's study of wealthy ethnic Chinese business people found that obtaining multiple residencies and passports was a strategy for capital accumulation, reflecting a form of historically cultivated cultural logic of overseas Chinese business families.Footnote 47 In contrast, among the mainland Chinese new rich, active capital accumulation was not the primary motivation behind them becoming “business investors” in the destination country. All the entrepreneurs I interviewed agreed that China was the place where opportunities lay and where they knew how to play the rules of the game. They had no clue how to make money overseas other than buying and selling properties. They imagined that only the big capital firms in the US or Australia were able to make money and that individual immigrants could not really be part of that.
Many investors did not expect to make money from their so-called investments and indeed some even foresaw a significant loss to their seed money. But they were okay with exchanging the value of an urban apartment for a foreign residency. Having a foreign residency means freedom of mobility, and with it a consumer haven and a particular lifestyle: one can spend several weeks a year relaxing in a Spanish town or just get away from the intense dealing and socialization of the Chinese business world.
One interviewee, Andrew, was even prepared to accept the potential global taxation regime in the US. He explained his calculations from a consumer's perspective:
A half a million to one million [US$] house … in the US would cost me over 30 million yuan in Shanghai, the latter without a swimming pool. Ferrari 458 [costs] 4.5 million yuan in China, but just over 1 million [yuan] in the US. The Porsch Turbo I am driving is 2.6 million [yuan] here, but only US$120,000 in the US. I want one more child (a third one). In China, they will fine me several million [yuan]. It won't cost anything in the US. How much can I save – you think about it. A bit more tax is legitimate (yinggaide 应该的). [We] shouldn't always think of taking advantage and not giving some. Plus food, air, water. These are not calculable with money.Footnote 48
Peng was a real estate developer in his 50s. He spent AUD1 million and applied for residency under the Business Innovation and Investment scheme (188).Footnote 49 He bought an apartment near Chinatown in Sydney, within walking distance of Darling Harbour. Peng usually spent two months a year there. Australia, in his mind, was a place where he could relax. In his own words:
The air is clean, and the food is the same. When I am there I don't have to deal with all these business issues. As soon as I come back, I am on high alert (gaodu jinzhang 高度紧张). It is very tiring doing business in China. So, being able to relax there (qingsong qingsong 轻松轻松) is really great.Footnote 50
Yang bought two apartments in Barcelona. After spending over half a million Euros, his family received their five-year residency visa for Spain. He and his wife had separate businesses in China. His daughter had just entered an elite high school in Shanghai and wished to study in a US university. None of the family members planned to live in Spain. It was purely for the freedom of mobility. “We only visit once a year – we go there for vacation anyway (fanzheng ni ye qu wan ma 反正你也去玩嘛).”Footnote 51
Yimin bu yizhu, the freedom of mobility investment migration brings, is also a solution to the problems that arise from the lifestyles of rich Chinese businessmen. It allows some business people, especially men, to fulfil their responsibilities to their family without giving up the excitement of China and the lifestyles they have embraced. A popular saying compares the better living environment abroad to the excitement of China: “Terrific mountains, terrific waters, but terribly boring; terrible filth, terrible chaos, but terrifically exciting.”Footnote 52 Among some Chinese businessmen, elite masculinity is expressed through their “economic might” as well as “their desiring” and “being desired” by young and beautiful women.Footnote 53 Homosocial leisure and extramarital sexual activity are integral to the business activity of yingchou 应酬 (socializing for business purposes).Footnote 54 Informants in my study displayed a more reflexive or ambivalent attitude towards this kind of masculinity, perhaps because of regional differences – my study was carried out in Shanghai and a nearby town – or because of the aforementioned recent attempt at a cultural makeover in order to distance themselves from “tuhao.” They often expressed a strong desire for a healthier and cleaner lifestyle. Several business owners, one real estate developer included, specifically stressed that they tried to minimize yingchou, and alcohol consumption in particular, in order to protect their own health. Almost all of them exercised regularly. Nonetheless, extramarital affairs were commonplace and brought tension to family life. The men I interviewed who had mistresses were not indifferent to the impact of their sexual practices on their families, and some felt guilty because their wives were their college sweethearts. Yimin bu yizhu conveniently removed the wives and children away from the businessmen's lives inside China, while giving them parallel “cleaner” lives abroad.
The wives of these businessmen also wanted to emigrate to escape these family situations. They were often dependent on their husbands for a comfortable lifestyle and unwilling to forsake the luxury that money had brought them. This form of migration split the household geographically and assigned to the women the role of caretaker of their children abroad. This arrangement was desirable because it provided both the coveted big house and clean air – the imagined upper-class life overseas – whilst at the same time saved them from the pain of facing an unhappy marriage. The split household in a way allowed them to maintain the semblance of a normal, albeit long-distance, family life.
Social networks and group migration
Emigration as a form of class-based consumption is also reflected in the social nature of such a practice. Chinese business people's decision to emigrate is heavily influenced by their social connections. The majority of my interviewees admitted that they started to “do migration” (zuo yimin 做移民) because other people in their social circles were doing so. Peng applied to move to Australia because “my friends have all been doing it.” One of his limited activities in Sydney was hanging out with old friends in downtown Chinatown. Rich businessmen who spoke no foreign languages were particularly worried about loneliness. Chen Qiang tried to persuade his friends to migrate together with his family. He couldn't speak any English and rarely left his house in Orange Country by himself when he visited. He told me, “I need to take my tea-drinking buddies (hecha pengyou 喝茶朋友) to California with me. Otherwise I have nothing to do there. I can't just stay at home watering the plants! My wife said I killed them by watering them too often.”Footnote 55
There have even been incidents of “group migration” (zutuan yimin 组团移民). One news report mentions that the chief executive of a bank and eight of his managers all emigrated at the same time.Footnote 56 In southern California, several residential neighbourhoods were popular destinations for Chinese investors. In the summer of 2012, when I visited one family who had bought a million-dollar house on the top of a hill near Pamona, I noticed that there were more houses under construction. My host explained that those were all advertised for sale in China. A year later when I inquired about that development, he laughed and told me that they were all occupied by rich Chinese. The owners of the new houses only stayed for part of the year, but my interviewee knew many of them because his family was invited to participate in their barbeques or mahjong parties. Several houses were purchased together by executives from the same company.
Social comparison exerts migration pressure as well. When Andrew first called me long distance to discuss his EB-5 application, he expressed a degree of urgency. His daughter had just entered the top-ranked middle school in Shanghai. Yet, several months into the new school year, many of his daughter's classmates were leaving to continue their education overseas. “My wife was nagging me about this. If our children don't leave earlier, it will be more and more difficult to get into the good private schools in the US. Families are competing for the limited spots.” He wanted his daughter to start as early as possible: “Nowadays, there are already waiting lists for private American high schools. Too many Chinese children are applying. So, I want my daughters to start from junior high school.”Footnote 57
That the overseas migration of the wealthy elite in China has become a “wave” (chao 潮) shows that the decision to migrate is no longer a purely individual one. Several people I interviewed used the expressions genfeng 跟风 (following trends) or yangqun xiaoying 羊群效应 (herd mentality) to describe the phenomenon. Although individuals present their own reasons for emigration, what is obvious is that emigration itself signals their understanding of which social grouping they see themselves belonging to.
“Wan Shangceng”: Cultivating the Next Generation of Global Elites
Physical mobility is a form of capital that has the potential to be converted to other forms of capital, such as cultural and social capital.Footnote 58 Emigration is undoubtedly a strategy for capital conversion and class reproduction among rich Chinese. The most cited reason for emigration in China, as mentioned above, is concern over the quality of the education and learning environment in China. However, this “concern” has a strong class connotation. People of different income levels have different strategies for dealing with their children's education in China. Well-to-do, middle-class families opt for private education in China, so that their children are not “in the same school as migrant children and the children of their maids,” as one middle-class mother explained to me. Only the most affluent parents emigrate in order to give their children an alternative to the domestic education system.
But what kind of education do the emigrating Chinese expect to get for their children? What future do they envisage for their offspring? The expression used by Andrew, wan shangceng 玩上层 (playing at the level of the upper class), captures the aspirations of many rich parents. “Wan shangceng” involves, first of all, wan 玩 (play), indicating the possibility of not taking things too rigidly and seriously, that is, not to be like the ordinary Chinese students who “only know how many points they get from tests” (zhi zhidao fenshu 只知道分数). The children of the rich can opt out of the educational rat race and life can be fun and individuals can grow freely. Tao Ting and Chen Qiang, the couple who invested US$1 million through the EB-5 programme, sent their son abroad because they didn't want to see him miserable and spending 14 hours a day, six days a week, at school. They were very happy that their son, after enrolling in a private American high school, became a quarterback in the school football team, went fishing on weekends and participated in community service. Bank manager Zhou Ying's expectations for her son were that “he was happy.”
However, “wan shangceng” also involves “shangceng” – the upper class status that the emigrant parents imagine their children should occupy. In order to be among the elite, certain skills, educational credentials and characteristics are needed. Language skills are the first thing many parents believe will help their children get ahead. Andrew wanted to send his 11- and eight-year-old daughters to the US because, in his words, “wan shangceng needs good English, because in this world, the West still leads the world in whichever aspect you can think of.”
Other parents also had multilingual skills in mind. Xia Bin, an entrepreneur in his early 40s who had obtained Australian permanent residency, emphasized that China would continue to be a strong economy and Chinese would still be very important. He wanted his three-year-old daughter, who was living in Australia, to come back to China for elementary school in the future.
By the end of elementary school she will be able to read and write Chinese very well. That is enough. I don't really need her to read The Dream of the Red Chamber (Hongloumeng 红楼梦) … Nowadays, people spend 80 per cent of their day on WeChat. If you can't read and write Chinese, you can't communicate.Footnote 59
Aside from language skills, emigrant parents want elite education credentials for their children. Emigration is merely a means to circumvent the competition they witness in China. Even Tao Ting and Chen Qiang, while delighting in their son's opportunity to play sports in a private American high school, expected their son to go to a top college in the US, preferably an Ivy League college. After the son had repeatedly received unsatisfactory ACT and SAT scores, the parents resorted to paying for various education services and had people write the application essays for their son. With much help, the son entered a college in the University of California system.
It is clear that the “happy education” emigrant parents hope to obtain for their children does not mean that they give up trying to provide them with a competitive headstart. A “happy education” is a lifestyle affluent parents feel that they can buy for their children. Nonetheless, by escaping the highly competitive education system in China, what they expect is a form of transnational cultural capital that will place their children above others within China itself.Footnote 60 A story told to me by Xia Bin conveys this logic:
We used to have this store on the first floor of our office building, selling rice noodles. You ordered and they would deliver. Once this small boy, maybe only three or four years old, came up to deliver the noodles alone. We asked, “How come you are alone?” He said his sister was delivering for the fifth floor. He looked so small. So, one person joked with him, saying to him, “I will give you these snacks and you give me the noodles.” He said, “The boss will scold me.” “Who is your boss?” “My papa.” So, you see, my children will not be able to compete with a child like that in the things they are able to do. I can only hope that they will have more skills and do things at levels above them.Footnote 61
Mere skills are not enough. Elite character and disposition are also needed. Tao Ting wanted her son “to grow up to have greater character” (daqi 大气). She said, “In China, especially in the town where we lived, he would have just grown to be a limited and docile person (xiaojiaziqi 小家子气), not having the real manly disposition (nanziqi 男子气).”
The elitist aspirations of rich Chinese are clearly indicated in the 2014 Hurun Report on the educational choices of the richest Chinese. Among the surveyed millionaires, 28.7 per cent chose the UK for their children's education before university.Footnote 62 The Financial Times reported that English public boarding schools were receiving a rapidly rising number of Chinese applications.Footnote 63 Zheng Qing chose to send her 12-year-old son to a prestigious all-boy school in the US that listed among its graduates several prominent intellectuals.
A desire for class reproduction is also manifested in the concerns rich parents have for their children's future marriage prospects. Fei Yulin had been discussing different migration options with an immigration agent. His children were eight and three years old. He would remain in China to manage his business enterprise but he wished to send his children to a foreign country. His rationale was simple: “People like us are all emigrating. If staying in China, my children will have to marry the children of my drivers and employees.”
Concluding Remarks
What are the social meanings of this business investor migration trend, the “third wave” of transnational migration out of post-reform China? This paper sees it as a form of class-based consumption and a strategy for class reproduction. Emigration through business investment is for the super rich only. Through this form of mobility, one can discern the solidifying class boundaries and the emergence of a self-conscious status group in contemporary China.
China today is an increasingly stratified society. Chinese are among the richest and the poorest people in the world. However, wealth has yet to be consolidated as a basis of social status. Wealthy Chinese, depending on their various means of getting rich and their levels of wealth, are a diverse group. They are both envied and targets of moral critique and cultural disdain, as symbolized in the satiric name “tuhao.” With the emergence of a coaching industry, including migration agents, devoted to cultivating and servicing a moneyed elite, rich Chinese in big cities can opt for a lifestyle makeover in an effort to gain social prestige. It is reported that China's millionaires have been smoking and drinking less, exercising more, giving fewer personal gifts and donating more to charity, and placing more emphasis on family relationships.Footnote 64 The wealthiest also show an inclination for self-cultivation. They are taking philosophy courses and embarking on spiritual pursuits, with some embracing esoteric religions.Footnote 65
Mobility is a major symbol of an elite lifestyle. By converting some of their wealth into a foreign residency, wealthy Chinese gain legitimate access to the West. What can counter the image of tu 土 in tuhao better than its direct opposite – overseas (yang 洋)? The West has always featured prominently in the Chinese imagination as representing modernity and civilization. Vanessa Fong's study of high-school students in Dalian points out that the “developed world,” and especially the West, has been imagined as a “paradise” by the Chinese youth.Footnote 66 The West is considered as a source of elite culture, even though Western culture, as construed in the Chinese imagination, is a (contradictory) hodgepodge that ranges from European aristocratic traditions to American liberal democracy.
Mobility itself, as a valued commodity, has become a characteristic of the global elite. A study by Barclays reports that high net worth individuals around the world are more mobile than ever.Footnote 67 Emigration, therefore, allows the Chinese urban rich to access an elite lifestyle. A residency in a developed country, with the freedom of mobility it brings, opens a gateway to the symbolic capital of the West and an opportunity to be physically among the global elite.
Nonetheless, attaining a global elite lifestyle through migration might be more an aspiration than an immediate reality. The post-emigration lives of rich Chinese are far from that imagined. They are, after all, immigrants. The cultural and racial barriers can be immense in many of the destination countries. From what I have observed in southern California, those immigrants lived a segregated social and cultural existence. One migration agent informed me that in order to help overcome her clients' post-migration social isolation, her company has been organizing charity events to help them donate money to local causes in order to make inroads into the local community.
Moreover, the Chinese rich, especially men, are torn between different desires. In a way, this form of migration is fundamentally at odds with the aspiration to attain an elite lifestyle and a cultural makeover. The “yimin bu yizhu” practice tends to split the family and impose a regressive gendered division of labour in the household, assigning the mother duty of care of the children overseas. The geographic distance between the husband and wife that such an arrangement entails is conveniently used to deal with the consequences of illicit sexual activity endorsed by the masculine business culture. Even among those families that have not yet encountered a marital crisis, such physical separation strains spousal relationships and is a clear threat to family life. In the end, emigration might just be yet another luxury commodity of the “tuhao.” Alternatively, maybe a male-dominated business culture is part of the global elite culture after all.
Acknowledgement
This research was funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (Type A, Grant Number 23251023) “Comparative studies on the migrant communities in the Pacific Rim: exploring emerging mobility trends and changing settlement patterns.” James Farrer and Jamie Coates have offered valuable suggestions on several drafts of this paper. I also want to thank Christian Hess, Sachiko Horiuchi, Seio Nakajima, Glenda Roberts, Hiroe Saruya, David Wank and Dacheng Yao for their constructive comments on the early draft of this paper.
Biographical note
Gracia Liu-Farrer is professor of sociology at the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies, Waseda University, Japan. Her research compares different immigrant groups' economic, social and political practices in Japan, as well as Chinese immigrants' mobility and belonging in different national and social contexts. She authored the monograph Labour Migration from China to Japan: International Students, Transnational Migrants (Routledge, 2011).
Appendix
Table 1: Profiles of the 14 Emigrating Individuals/Families
