At
The Economist Gady Epstein writes that middle-class Chinese are
emigrating in growing numbers, “in search of a cleaner, slower
life”:
FOR
years Lin Chen resisted his wife’s entreaties to move abroad. Then,
when their daughter was born in 2012, he started thinking about her
schooling. He realised he wanted a less stressful education than the
one he and his wife endured in their climb to the middle classes, and
he wanted to leave space for fun. “My wife and I suffered a lot,”
he says. “I don’t want my daughter to suffer through all that.”
And
so the Lin family will soon be off to Adelaide, Australia, part of
the greatest and most consequential wave of emigration in modern
Chinese history: middle-class Chinese seeking not better
opportunities or political freedoms but a better quality of life.
Chinese emigrants are leaving good jobs, cashing out their
high-priced homes (or investment properties) and leaving China’s
rat race behind. They are unlikely to find better jobs anywhere else,
but the air and water are less polluted where they are going, the
social safety-net less frayed and the food safer to eat. And there is
no one-child policy.
