As a teacher in his early twenties, Zhang felt the premonition of a crisis. The new millennium had dawned, and Zhang (who asked that I use only his last name, for fear of government retaliation) was living in a middling city in central China drilling vocabulary to high-school students. One day, surrounded by fellow-teachers near retirement age, he peered into his future and recoiled. “That kind of life, predictable from beginning to end, terrified me,” Zhang told me. And so, in 2001, Zhang quit his job to become a beipiao, a slang term for migrant “drifters” seeking prospects and purpose in Beijing.
Zhang arrived in the capital during a beguiling stretch of dynamism. After the crackdowns in Tiananmen Square, in 1989, the Communist Party had shifted its focus to economic growth, dismantling old structures and seeding—in the media cliché of the time—the “germs of a civil society.” Journalists published daring reports on official corruption. Lawyers championed the rights of workers. Bookstores and universities became hot spots of public discussion. The year Zhang arrived in Beijing, China joined the World Trade Organization in what state media called a “historical necessity.” And, eight decades after famed visits by John Dewey and Bertrand Russell, China fêted the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, best known for his idea of the “public sphere,” where private individuals discuss matters of common interest.
Zhang basked in Beijing’s emerging space for self-exploration. He found a job as an editor at a small publishing outlet and frequented bookstores. He wrote book reviews, attended concerts, and sat in on lectures at Peking University, China’s summit of higher learning. In the early two-thousands, universities were open to the public, and classrooms were frequented by what the media called youxuesheng (“wayfaring students”). Zhang fondly recalled biking through the vortex of street venders at the university’s south gate and paging through lecture posters on the campus bulletins. “Back then, we used to go to Peking University for everything,” Zhang told me. “We ate there, showered there, and played basketball there.”
But the public square began to shrink in China—at first slowly, in the years leading up to Xi Jinping’s rise to power, in 2012, and then precipitously thereafter. Party journals began to cast civil society as a “trap” set by Western agitators. Hundreds of human-rights lawyers, investigative journalists, and feminist activists were detained, imprisoned, or placed under surveillance. Chinese universities bore the markers of Xi’s obsession with “total security.” Gates were barricaded and featured facial-recognition scanners; outsiders were no longer permitted to freely enter campuses. When Zhang visited Peking University around 2017, he had to wait in an hour-long queue for visitors’ identification.
Zhang, who had risen to become an executive at a large Chinese publisher—“the front lines of ideology,” as he put it—grew well-versed in the workings of censorship. In 2018, the Party issued a sweeping assessment plan. Each publisher would be evaluated on a “social benefit” score, which emphasizes political and moral propriety. Companies were docked points for publishing content that went “against the Party and government directives,” which resulted in budget cuts that affected employees’ salaries. Zhang was darkly amused by the new system, in which patriotism and profit were so explicitly married. “Everyone was still groping about in it,” he recalled. “Like, ‘Hey, if I published an article in the People’s Daily, would it add a point?’ ”
Zhang’s mental health declined, and he began to imagine a life overseas. He had long thought highly of Japan: during one trip, Zhang’s wife had feared she’d lost their three-year-old child on the subway, only to find her rescued by an elderly Japanese woman. What if he started his own publishing company in Tokyo? A few years ago, his team passed on a memoir he had championed from a writer from China’s industrial northeast, claiming that the depiction of economic hardship in the region was “too bleak.” Zhang’s spirits sank. “There was not a single part of that book that was overtly critical,” Zhang told me. Before long, he applied for a business-management visa in Japan, which is a popular path for Chinese citizens who hope to eventually gain permanent residency there. In September, 2021, the Zhangs officially moved to Tokyo.
For reasons ranging from political repression to pandemic lockdowns and a relentless work culture, a growing number of Chinese have become practitioners of runxue—“run philosophy,” or emigration. In each of the past two years, more than three hundred thousand Chinese have left the country, according to data from the United Nations—more than double the number in 2012. They include China’s wealthiest, who have snapped up luxury villas in Singapore and contributed to record-high real-estate prices in Tokyo, as well as those who have embarked on the perilous trek to the United States via the Darién Gap, on the border between Colombia and Panama. Among this exodus, many are like Zhang: skilled, educated members of the middle class who once enjoyed the public life available in China’s cities.
A generation ago, the West was the prime destination for China’s élites. Now a lot of them prefer Japan. More than two thousand Chinese reportedly entered Japan in 2022 on the business-management visa, a fifty-per-cent increase from 2019. Among the first to come were China’s tech entrepreneurs. Even their icon, Jack Ma, reportedly made an extended visit to Tokyo after a high-profile fallout with Chinese regulators in late 2020. A steady influx of middle-class professionals and cultural creators has come since. A Chinese writer, whom I’ll call Lu, arrived this past September on a work visa sponsored by a friend. It took him three months, much quicker than what he had estimated for the U.S. While some American politicians are spurning Chinese immigrants, Japan has created visa pathways for skilled workers and recent graduates of top universities. “Only the top-shelf professionals go to North America now,” Lu told me. “For petty intellectuals like me, we go to Tokyo.”
It took Zhang a while to join public life in his adopted city. “For people like us, who grew up on the mainland, freedom is a drug,” he told me. “Once we get here, even if we don’t do anything and just live off our savings, that is enough.” Then, last year, he began to see mentions in messaging groups of familiar names: scholars, journalists, and writers who had recently moved to or visited Japan. Last June, a Chinese historian he had long admired was giving a lecture at the University of Tokyo. “I just had to go,” Zhang told me. He entered the university campus through the gates, unbothered by meddling security guards. Then he went into the room, and saw a scene straight from his memories: there was the professor at the lectern and a rapt crowd of Chinese. “It was just—oh man—it was so emotional,” Zhang told me. His cherished life in Beijing was gone. Somehow, it had reappeared in Tokyo.
Roughly sixty million Chinese and their descendants live abroad today, according to the Chinese government’s estimates, a population roughly equal to that of France. I count myself among them. My parents were college students in Beijing in the nineteen-eighties, and were swept up in the democratic ferment that stirred from Eastern Europe to the streets of Seoul. When the military opened fire at Tiananmen Square protesters, they chose to leave China, forsaking their political idealism for the ordinary desire to make money and pursue happiness in the now. With the help of a relative, they immigrated to Tokyo, where they obtained Ph.D.s in chemistry and physics. They later moved to the U.S. So many of their college classmates left China in the decade after Tiananmen that class reunions take place in the San Francisco Bay Area.
I grew up in Tokyo, in the nineties; my parents bonded with fellow Chinese graduate students, but there were few other meeting points. Most seemed focussed on making ends meet or studying for a degree so they no longer had to. Just in the past year, however, a topology of Chinese bookstores, literary salons, and lecture spaces has arrived in Tokyo. I visited Tokyo in March, and within hours I was pulled into an online group chat of roughly two hundred and seventy Chinese émigrés. Every day, it seemed, the group was sharing a new seminar, a book club, or lecture to attend. The most striking difference between the new émigrés and my parents was not wealth or even their modern messaging tools; it was their appetite for congregation. “This year was definitely an inflection point,” one Chinese staff member at a bookstore named One Way Street told me. “We used to just meet up for drinks one-on-one.”
One Way Street, named after the essay collection by Walter Benjamin, sits on a secluded lane in Ginza, an upscale district of Tokyo. It is a modest space, with a white exterior and books arrayed so inaccessibly high they blur the line between merchandise and décor. A wooden spiral staircase leads to a seating area where, according to the beleaguered staff, the store has held more than a hundred events and lectures since it opened last August. When I visited, an animated Japanese banker was gesticulating to a Chinese audience about the intricacies of Japan’s finance system. Whenever he cracked a joke, spectators chuckled before the interpreter could get off a translation. Everyone, it seemed, was either bilingual or bluffing.
The Ginza store is the brainchild of Xu Zhiyuan, an intellectual turned entrepreneur who famously co-founded a bookstore chain in China. The first store opened in 2005, in a courtyard of Beijing’s Old Summer Palace; One Way now has locations in other provinces, and has expanded into podcasting, video programming, and coffee. The Ginza store seemed to have spun out of Xu’s own romantic yearnings rather than hard-nosed business logic. When China implemented travel restrictions in early 2020, Xu was stranded in Japan. For years, he had been researching and writing a multivolume biography on one of the great visionaries of modern China, Liang Qichao. There was some irony: In 1898, Liang had fled to Tokyo after a failed attempt to overhaul China’s imperial system made him a wanted man. Liang’s political writings reached something of a creative acme in exile, where he was energized by Japanese intellectuals and their bountiful translations of Western texts. Xu wanted to rekindle that earlier mingling of minds. His latest volume on Liang, “The Exile,” was published in the same month the Ginza bookstore opened.