For many, China might seem like an unusual source of migrants entering from the U.S. southern frontier. Since the 1990s, China has transformed from an isolated and impoverished society to the world’s second-biggest economy. However, once believed to be a rising tide that could lift anything, this economic miracle has waned in the wake of COVID-19, leaving a legacy of astronomical debts, social burdens, and political dissatisfactions about government malfeasance. People who had faith in the Chinese Dream were suddenly confronted with a bleak outlook on the future of their homeland. Struggling to find an alternative to the grim economic prospects and ever-diminishing political liberties at home, many Chinese started pursuing a fairy tale-like American Dream, much as their predecessors did in the 19th century. And like their forerunners, most newly arrived migrants did not discover the land of wealth and prosperity in the way they imaged. Yet that has not stopped people following one after another in pursuit of opportunities and freedoms they believe are no longer available in China.

Since the 1800s, Fujian Province, where Chen was born, has been the epicenter of Chinese migration. The province, along with the surrounding Pearl River Delta, has a migration tradition that traces back centuries ago.  

“There has been a long-time migration stream from coastal areas of Fujian down to Southeast Asia,” said Charlotte Brooks, a historian who studies East Asian immigration at Baruch College in CUNY. “Great armadas sailed, establishing more outward connections during the Ming Dynasty.”

When the ethnically Manchu Qing Dynasty succeeded the Ming in the 18th century, they imposed a more draconian approach to migration. “Permanent migration was looked upon very unfavorably by the political authorities,” said Kevin Kenny, a migration historian at New York University. “Under the law, it’s punishable by severe constraints, including death.” 

Yet people in the region were still eager to seek economic opportunities elsewhere. “It’s really a cluster of things: the growing weakness of the central government, the growth of the population, the lack of officials, and the emergence of Western powers,” said professor Brooks, “You have all these different things that created this growing population of people who are seeking new economic options.”

From the 19th to the early 20th century, southern China was consumed by a series of environmental, social, and governmental changes. The “Taiping Rebellion,” was one of those sources of turmoil. A man named Hong Xiuquan led a cult-like, Hakka-based variant of Christian theology against the Qing dynasty, causing 20 million people to perish. 

During that era, China's southern fringe was often neglected by the central government, creating a power vacuum symbolized by the Taiping Rebellion. Amidst great political uncertainty, people who sought a stable future projected their hopes abroad.

In contrast to domestic disturbances, the rise of colonial empires in modern-day Vietnam and Malaysia brought economic opportunities right next door. Nanyang, the Chinese toponym encompassing the states encircling the South China Sea, absorbed waves of Chinese migrants from the Pearl River Delta. Overseas Chinese capital and traders established a strong presence in the area with plantations and trading networks during the 19th century.

U.S.-bound migration only took off in the mid-1800s, following the emergence of Hong Kong, which was colonized by Britain as a part of the settlement with the Great Qing after the First Opium War, which ended in 1842. Once a fishing village engulfed by jagged mountains, Hong Kong soon became a major trading hub tying the East together with the West. During this same period, the California Gold Rush broke out across the Pacific Ocean, creating a hunger for miners and railway workers. Chinese workers hired by Transcontinental Railroads built a reputation for overseas migration in the Pearl River Delta, forming a growing diaspora community within a concentrated geological origin.

With the Qing government's prohibition against migration, migrants had to establish their own reliable social fabric. The kinship network, maintained by trusting relations from sworn brotherhoods and villages where people shared the same surname filled the gap. Those networks facilitated the transnational movement of people and capital. Migrants relied on these trusting relations to find accommodation, employment, and means to send wealth back home.

Generations of snowballing effects formed a universal approbation of international migration, regardless of legality, in today’s Pearl River Delta. Yong Chen, a professor of Asian American history at UC Irvine, describes outward migration as a regional cultural phenomenon, especially among places like Changle in Fujian and Chaozhou in Canton. “You can find a lot of multi-story houses in Changle, all elaborately built but often left vacant,” said professor Chen. “Those were constructed with funding from migrants who settled overseas and remitted their savings back home.” 

For others, those houses are like monuments advertising the prosperity to be gained from working aboard. Unlike pouring their hopes of upward mobility into education, like many other Chinese communities, people from Changle seek to transform their fate through overseas migration. “They are determined at a very young age,” said professor Chen. “Not setting eyes on getting into the college but aiming to trace outer townspeople’s steps to getting jobs aboard.”

This cultural consensus fostered the emergence of professional smuggling merchants known as “shetou,” or “snakeheads” translated literally. They provide organized immigration services, amassing migration resources from means of transportation to employment opportunities at immigration destinations. They have fanned the outflow of migrants, putting them on outward-bound ships, providing them with forged paperwork, and entrapping them with loans.

Snakeheads charter smuggling ferries setting off from the shore of Fujian. Their routes traverse through Malacca, passing the African continent around the Cape of Good Hope, and finally cross the Atlantic Ocean to reach New York City. The Golden Venture was one of the smuggling ships that undertook this voyage. The repurposed cargo ship with a hull size smaller than 150ft crammed 286 Fujianese migrants for its four-month sail. After being stranded near Rockaway Beach in Queens, New York, in the early morning of June 6th, 1993, the malnourished and desperate passengers jumped off the boat and swam to the shore. Ten died during this anguished last attempt to cover the final leg of their voyage to the United States. 

Smuggling services sometimes come with a steep price tag. According to no capitalization necessary Professor Chen, the cost per migrant could get as high as $50,000 to $60,000 during the late 20th century. This includes the cost of the ship tickets and other service fees needed to settle at their destinations.

The current wave of Chinese migration entering through the U.S.-Mexico border plan their migration with a more DIY approach. With routes and travel plans widely accessible all over the internet, the predatory and costly services of snakeheads have lost their appeal to post-COVID migrants. Even Fujianese people like Chen now prefer “ZouXian” instead of relying on snakeheads to arrange their path. Chinese migrants now follow traveling tips shared through social media like Douyin (TikTok’s Chinese censorship-friendly version)” and chatrooms on Telegram, an instant messaging app. 

Flushing, an East Asian ethnic enclave west of LaGuardia airport, is likely the closest thing to a sonorous Chinese townlet that Cheng can find around New York City. Along one of its narrow lanes, constantly jammed with traffic and clogged with pedestrians, he found a Chinese employment agency called Hong PingGuo, or Red Apple.

Xing Geng, the boss of the Red Apple employment agency, was quite pleased with Cheng's attitude. “This kid is very proactive,” Geng praised. “As long as there’s some money to be made, he will be happy.”

Geng migrated to the United States with her husband two decades ago from Xi’an, a large, ancient imperial capital city in central China. She is in her 50s, runs the agency using four mobile phones, and has a loud, hoarse voice.

The agency operates like a date-matching app between business owners and migrants. Employers with job vacancies call up Geng, Geng negotiates rates, and dispatches immigrants willing to take the offer.

“I’m losing my bargaining power,” Geng complained. Before the migrant influx, she used to be able to maintain a minimal monthly rate of $2,500. Now people on Douying are willing to work for $800 a month plus foods and a bed. “Whenever I get a call from an employer asking me for the rate, I would say ‘you tell me!’” Geng said. “They will hang me up right away if I dare to name the price.”

“All jobs are filled,” said Li, a man from Shanghai in his 50s. “We won’t have any opportunity unless others quit.” Since losing his job at Artron, a prestigious printing shop in Shanghai, Li flew to the United States using his travel visa. He was expecting a job in Red Apple’s reception room. 

“If you are a chef, you would be irreplaceable,” said Li. “People who don’t have any manual skills like me couldn’t find any jobs.” Without work permit, people like Li have little options other than minimum-waged unskilled roles like cargo loaders, restaurant servers, line cooks, and non-professional construction workers. These positions are called “XiaoGong” in Chinese, literally meaning “small laborers.” 

The arduous working conditions have been a consistent theme for Chinese working-class migrants in the North American Continent and Caribbeans since the Mid-1800s. “They were doing hard physical labor on sugar plantations, guano mines, and railroads,” said Kevin Kenny, the immigration historian. “They were described as coolies, a pejorative term.”

"Coolies" is a term believed to have been transliterated from South Asian languages. Its origins, commonly believed to include “kuli” in Tamil, “quili” in Urdu, and “kuli” in Chinese, meant wages, hirelings, and “bitter force,” or hard labor. Under the Western context, the word was used to label Indentured workers paying off long-term contracts but ultimately free, as slaves.

“Chinese laborers are reduced ideologically into the status of coolies,” said Kenny. “The argument was made that they were being exploited as the equivalent of slaves.” The American Civil War ideologically affirmed that slavery has no place in the United States. However, this humanitarian stance was maliciously used to prevent Chinese laborers from entering the U.S

Chinese laborers were the first group to be regulated under U.S. federal immigration policy. The Page Act of 1875 was established to prohibit the recruitment of workers for “immoral purposes,” which included coolies and prostitutes. The pernicious argument and the legal basis it created yielded the notorious Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. The law explicitly targeted laborer migrants from China, a group defined by their race and social class. Immigrants of Asian origin were unable to be naturalized until the 1960s.  

When Cheng decided to start fresh in the US, he left behind all the credentials from his degree in civil engineering and past working experiences in the industry. He used to work as a filing clerk in Jiangnan Construction Management and Consultant Company Limited, a state-owned enterprise based in Jiangxi Province. The firm caught on to China’s land-development-driven economic growth in past decades.

“I started working as an intern site surveyor,” Cheng recalled. “Life was harsh back then, but it was all worthwhile.” What was not so worthwhile was the archivist job Cheng had earned through the painstaking grind. “After a series of exams, I got promoted,” Cheng said. “I got further and further away from the on-site works and ended up in an office job.”

“That archivist job would have made me begin my retirement life prematurely.”

Cheng was earning 6,000 yuan, less than a thousand dollars per month, a rate that was nowhere impressive but reasonable for a college graduate in Jiangxi province. In the job, he felt he lacked a sense of purpose. “I felt like I was there dawdling in a position without excitement,” Cheng said. “That was the biggest reason why I chose to get out.”

The ultimate drive for migration may only need two factors, an almost guaranteed unsatisfactory future, and a glamorized destination promising wealth and opportunity. Migrating to the United States has become a gamble, with its risks and uncertainties frequently overshadowed by the allure of the American Dream.

“Migrants from Fuzhou know where their future lives are going to end up if they choose to stay in their village,” said Yong Chen, professor of Asian American history. “If they take a bet and migrate, their perceived opportunity could expand infinitely.”

A grim prospect of lives in China became clearer for many after the COVID-19 pandemic. David Ownby, a sinologist, and professor of history at the University of Montreal, has been keeping close touch with Chinese intellectuals, translating and archiving their literature via his project Reading the China Dream.  

“For intellectuals, I think they were very discouraged,” said Ownby. “They’re always unhappy with how things are, but I thought things really were worse this time.” Following Xi’s succession to power in 2013, China went through a phase change, bringing its rapid economic growth to a more gradual pace, and shrinking its social liberty.

“Xi wanted to consolidate the economic growth, but keep China from becoming a pluralistic society,” said Ownby. “People were already sort of worried about the kind of ideological discipline he wanted to reimpose on society.”

The draconian “Zero-COVID” policy brought China a tremendous financial burden. Productivity losses associated with COVID control in 2020, one year after the outbreak, are estimated to be over 2600 billion yuan, about $360 billion, about 2 percent of China’s annual gross domestic product, according to a study published by Bulletin a journal of the World Health Organization. Provincial governments also kept up the healthcare expenditures in the following years. According to the 2022 budget report published by Guangdong Province, in the year alone 71.1 billion yuan, about $9.8 billion, was spent on vaccination and testing, 1.5 times compared to the previous year. 

“COVID was a sort of a turning point for the Chinese economy,” said Claudia Astarita, an international analyst at Institut d’Asie Orientale. “It was creating the condition for the nation to pass this stage of readjustment and make it more performant.” 

“China’s existing growth model has a self-enhancing tendency,” said Ran Tao, a professor of economic policy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “It brings resistance to pushing for the structural reform.” This past job drove Cheng to the U.S. shows how state-backed enterprises had been eating away civilian-owned ventures' opportunities. The private sector has been on a dwindling trajectory. Within the country’s 100 largest listed companies, the percentage of the private sector had been on a downward spiral from 55.4 percent, a peak reached in 2021, to 36.8 percent at the end of 2023, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, an American thinktank.

The model, which brought China’s unprecedented and likely never-to-be-duplicated infrastructure expansion and urban sprawl, relies upon the government’s monopoly of land, according to professor Tao. Instead of taxation, selling land, more specifically “land use rights,” is the single most significant source of China’s government funds budget revenue, constituting as much as 80 percent in 2023, according to an estimate published by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, based on data from Ministry of Finance of China. In the past two decades, this economic engine was fueled by China’s rapid urbanization and the unwavering public stigma of real estate as a safe capital investment vehicle. Around 60 – 70 percent of household wealth is linked to property ownership, according to a 2023 report published by the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions and Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center.

Yet this seemingly never-ending speculative housing market has started dying down. “The secondhand housing market has started cooling down at the end of 2019,” professor Tao said. “The housing market entered a cold winter since the end of 2020.” Coupled with the birthrate landslide and years of ferocious housing development, China now has 5 billion sq. meters, or about 2,000 sq. miles of excess housing, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. That is enough to cover the entirety of New York City four times, or give 50 million families each a typical 100 sq. meters flat.

However, when in crisis, the state again congregated its control of the capital market. The state stimulus package was not designed to boost the purchasing power of the populace. The government was reluctant to the concept of distributing stimulus checks and vouchers to the low-income demographic, criticizing the policy as “using welfare to foster laziness,” a phrase used by China’s National Development and Reform Commission.

“The state still leaned on expanding infrastructure expenditures to save the economy,” said professor Tao. Banks, which should channel the flow of low-interest loans into firms producing consumer products and paying their employees’ salaries, maintained their preference towards government-backed projects. According to professor Tao, in 2022, more than 2,700 infrastructure projects began construction, thanks to a total of 740 billion yuan of stimulus funds and yielded more than nine percent of growth in government infrastructure expenditure.

The advancing state-owned sector means private ventures must retreat. For Cheng, this macro-economy phenomenon translated into civil-owned contractors never winning the bid. Cheng, although worked for a state-owned enterprise, sympathized with private entrepreneurs. “They help so many people putting food on the table,” said Cheng. “If they go out of business, all those people would lose their livelihood.”

“I despise state-owned companies more,” Cheng said. “They’ve already got so much capital and are still greedy enough to snatch jobs from those small firms. It’s shameless.”

“My thought might be weird,” said Cheng. The decision to leave the comfort of an office job would indeed be a bizarre choice for some three million people in China ardently trying to vie for positions through the civil service exams in the past year.

For those who grew up witnessing the Chinese economy’s seemingly never-ending growth in the past two decades, the downturn brought on by the pandemic was an unusual challenge of their confidence. “It is possible that this category of people is afraid that this time will never come,” said professor Astarita. “And China is going backward rather than forward.”

The United States, once again, became beacon of elusive hope shining down on some Chinese confronting the grim future. “Whatever the government does with money, it’s not getting into my pocket,” said professor Ownby, “Chinese people may have just joined a lot of the rest of the world thinking that there are more opportunities in North America.” 

“There has always been a sentiment of revering everything foreign (chongyang meiwai) in China,” said Tianxiang Liu, a visiting scholar at George Washington University who spent the past decade researching Chinese public opinion at Renmin University of China. “Despite the growing nationalistic narrative, people are still seeing Chinese elites sending their families overseas.”

“People in Canton used to call America ‘Jinshan (Gold Mountain),’ they were convinced that the United States is filled with money,” said professor Chen from UC Irvine. “Now the optimistic prospect of lives in the United States could spread even further.” With the help of social media, the fairytales of the American Dream were no longer constrained by region.

The current wave of migrants’ motives echoes with their predecessors, but Dr. Liu thought there are still some nuanced differences. “Migrants from the past still wanted to send money home and even move back to China once they earned a living in the West,” Dr. Liu said. “Migrants today are determined to stay in the United States no matter what. The political atmosphere in China has created this widespread feeling of unease.”

 “I wouldn’t even take a civil service position with 15,000 yuan per month,” said Zhang, 26, an immigrant from Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang region. 

In November 2022, a fire broke out in a residential high-rise in the city’s Uyghur neighborhood. Ten residents, who failed to escape from their apartments succumbed their lives to the flame, which took the fire department three and a half hours to put out. An internet consensus believed the rigorous COVID lockdown, which commonly utilizes barricading apartment doors and closing all neighborhood emergency accesses, has delayed the rescue attempts. This voice soon developed into dissents calling an end to the country’s COVID policy, later known as the “A4 protest,” named after blank copier papers demonstrators used as a symbol of the silencing from the austere state censorship. Chinese government revised the three-year-long lockdown on December 7, only two weeks after the Urumqi fire. Many credited this sudden 180 to the widespread social unrest, a rare public outcry challenging the state authority. 

“I did not come here because this is America,” Zhang said. “I did it because I wanted to leave China.” He also contemplated migrating to Europe. Unlike entering the United States through “Zouxian,” migrating to Europe could not be done without any legal document.

“This year, many migrated to Europe too, using travel visas,” Zhang said. “I personally don’t have much patience. I was afraid of waiting for a visa.”

He entered the United States through the Arizona Border, was detained at Phoenix, and transferred to a facility near Las Vegas. After paying a $4,000 bound, he bought a domestic flight to New York City and started his job hunting in Flushing. He was working as a package loader, striving to save up for future legal expenses.

“My living expenses are about 8 percent of my income. Sometimes I have nowhere to go or eat (fengcan lusu).” Zhang laughed. “It doesn’t seem to match the Engel’s Law.” He was living at one of the city’s shelters in the Bronx to maintain this extreme budgeting.

Having established a still-trembling foothold in New York, Zhang was planning everything according to the cost it would take to fulfill his ambition. He was expecting his asylum proceeding to begin, with the help of legal services, and he also wanted to take his girlfriend to the United States. Instead of having her wade through the same legal labyrinth, Zhang considered having her arrive via a travel visa.

“If her visa application doesn’t go through, I will get her to Mexico and wait for the CBP One application,” said Zhang. CBP One is an online asylum application service exclusive to asylum seekers located in Central and Northern Mexico. The app prescreens immigrants under the humanitarian parole authority and does not grant asylum, meaning Zhang’s girlfriend will still have to pull together legal resources afterward. 

“It will be a legal process to get in,” Zhang said. Skipping detentions and prosecutions for illegal border crossings would already be a win.

Zhang is hoping to see more of his fellow Chinese to get out. “Even though we may never be able to overthrow the Chinese government that we are no longer satisfied with,” said Zhang. “Having more Chinese living in a place with separation of powers and healthier legislature would be a control group in a social experiment.”

“By then we will know if it’s our social structure causing all the problems or if there is some tendency within us Chinese people.”