The Communist Party is trying to tighten its grip on the Chinese diaspora
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Ms Song is typical of many Chinese who have moved to the West in recent years: well-educated and wealthy, unlike the labourers who dominated earlier emigrant communities. The number of Chinese abroad has doubled since 1990. It has risen particularly fast since 2000. The pandemic heightened the desire of many members of the elite to leave, as their resentment grew of covid-related controls and the party’s ever-tightening restrictions on freedom of expression. China ended its battle against covid late in 2022, but its faltering economy and high youth unemployment are fuelling people’s anxieties. Many young Chinese now use the term runxue, “the art of running”, to convey their desire to flee.
There are about 10.5m people living outside mainland China who were born on the mainland. Only the Indian, Russian and Mexican diasporas are larger. Some of these Chinese are among the country’s richest people. In many countries, they have long dominated wealth-related visa schemes. More than 70% of the 81,000 investor visas issued by the American government to dollar-millionaires between 2010 and 2019 were given to Chinese citizens. Since 2012 some 85% of people who have received Australia’s “golden visas” for investing over A$5m ($3.3m) in the country have been from China. All but 41 of the 1,300 people who applied for the equivalent Irish scheme in 2022 were Chinese.
If the proportion of foreing nationals with the intention of building their life in your country is minuscule, them having significant representation in the general power structures is a non-issue. It wouldn’t surprise me if, in the event that China grew a significant immigrant community, they still wanted to deny them representation, but complaining about that right now is akin to a Brazilian complaining that Norway wants them to protect their jungle when Norway isn’t protecting their own jungle.
If I was a good-hearted Chinese politician, I would also be trying to get Chinese migrants in Western countries to get adequate representation, because that would help them get some muscle to protect themselves if they were ever going to be discriminated against.
Right, ignore the entirely obvious political ramifications of why China wants these people in positions of power and pretend it’s because good hearted party officials think they need protection.
They can’t be wrong if they change the goalposts.
If you begin to oppose good decisions because there are monsters with their own self-interest in mind backing them, you are going to take terribly stupid positions, such as turning against defending Ukraine from Russia. Opposing Chinese minorities getting representation similar to their population is just as racist as opposing black people getting representation in US institutions or Muslims in French ones. Just oppose representatives who are undoubtedly serving spurious interests.