Half of China's millionaires want to leave country

This may add more insight: I'm Chinese (mainlander) myself and I'm not rich (student). All my friends are not rich either. Yet almost everyone wants to leave the country.<p>This is probably due to high real estate prices (around 1M RMB in large cities like Beijing and Shanghai for a decent apartment that can get you a girl to marry you, yet you don't really "own" the property even if you buy it. Technically the state still owns your apartment and you were just paying for "usage fee" because that's how communism/socialism works. In comparison, newly college graduates earns around 6k RMB/mo); broken health care system (probably worse than the U.S, since most of the Chinese family are relying on their only child to provide health care money when they grow older); harsh job market (simply too many people for not so many jobs, so the wage becomes low); and plus, a dim future for all of the lower income families or family without connections.<p>Yes you can argue that there's so many opportunities in China, but somehow we voted with our feet: everyone who has a means to leave left. Most of the famous Chinese actors are now foreign citizens or at least with a green card alike. For average families, they send their kids overseas for school. That's why you see so many Chinese students overseas, doing boring PhD degrees if they are poor or enroll as an undergrad if their family could afford. For their families, getting their kids to an overseas school is like taking the first step to a much more promising future.

This summer Forbes reported...<p>"China Daily reported Friday that unnatural deaths have taken the lives of 72 mainland billionaires over the past eight years. (Do the math.) Which means that if you’re one of China’s 115 current billionaires, as listed on the 2011 Forbes Billionaires List, you should be more than a little nervous." (<a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/raykwong/2011/07/25/friends-dont-let-friends-become-chinese-billionaires/" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/sites/raykwong/2011/07/25/friends-dont...</a>).<p>I wonder how much fear is playing into this desire for exodus.

There is too much bias from reporters these days to work out actual trend from manufactured trends with regards to china.<p>Silly to say "half of china's millionaires want to leave" without saying how that percentage is different from "all chinese"...<p>China long ago loosened restrictions on emigration, to allow Chinese to be educated overseas and then (hopefully) return to China, so that it could benefit. I think this increase of emigration could be a natural progression of that policy (as Chinese now have a lot more ties in other countries).<p>The 'unaffordable housing' issue, sounds similar to Australia (Median house price is 8+X median yearly/salary), so I doubt it is a reason for leaving.<p>People who are saying it's "too be free", are clearly just anti-P.R.C, again, by-in-large chinese are happy/apathetic about the govt in china. Those that care about politics, join the party and have just as many rights (to vote and affect change as americans have).<p>Very difficult to work out 'truth' here...

Note that the claimed reason is better education opportunities for their children. There is definitely a perception here in China that connections and schooling are critical for a life of success and wealth.<p>That said, I have my doubts they would be able to directly ask, "Do you want to emigrate?". So perhaps that is why they tacked on the education bit for plausible deniability (i.e. I love my country but my child should go to Harvard).

Once you're rich enough, you become concerned with protecting that wealth and your own well-being. You want transparency from your government, rule of law (in a transparent, predictable manner) and political stability. Those are not strong points in China these days.

Remember the way America plans to compete with China is to wait for China to fail. So there are a lot of Americans straining their eyes for a glimmer of salvation. That is the context for pretty much every American story on China you see.<p>The reality is that Chinese rich are hedging like all the rich do. Putting 20% of your wealth in a safe investment outside your home country is not unusual. And they are gearing up to send their child overseas to the best schools they can find - just like all the other tiger economies did.

The original report is here (in Chinese): <a href="http://pic.bankofchina.com/bocappd/report/201111/P020111101574895209302.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://pic.bankofchina.com/bocappd/report/201111/P0201111015...</a><p>Later on I'll have a read and translate any interesting parts of it. Right now it's 4 AM here, I'm coming off a long and not-very-fun debugging session, and I'm going to sleep.<p>There was a very similar report published about half a year ago by China Merchants Bank. HN discussion: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2660178" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2660178</a><p>I blogged about that report and translated some portions of it at the time, see there for my thoughts on these things. my analysis in short: not many people taking concrete action, not many people leaving permanently. <a href="http://notlearningcantonese.posterous.com/rich-emigrants-as-shirkers-and-traitors-a-loo" rel="nofollow">http://notlearningcantonese.posterous.com/rich-emigrants-as-...</a>

The trend is definitely true, but it's been there since day one when there began to have "rich Chinese". This CNN post made it sounds like, suddenly the rich Chinese worry about them being killed or end up in jail, because they oppose the chinese government? This is laughable.<p>“We see too many worried entrepreneurs nowadays who are afraid that they would end up in prison for offending Chinese officials,” You gotta be kidding me, most of the richest Chinese ARE the Chinese officials!! If they do end up in jail, it has much more to do with them accumulating their wealth illegally by abusing their power, than say, publicly posing a middle finger to Mr. Hu.<p>This article looks like just another typical heavily biased manipulative CNN crap, which throws in some data at first to make it believable, and then hijacked the real reason behind the data, adding their own interpretation. Reading CNN's news on China is just like reading Fox's news on Obama.

This seems to reinforce some points made by Paul Graham in his 'How to Make Wealth' essay. Especially regarding governments not allowing individuals to accumulate wealth. <a href="http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html</a>

Money can buy you bigger houses, fancy clothes, new cars. But it can't buy you freedom, in China. That's why the millionaires leave, to be free.

Can someone enlighten me on how so many (or so few) people got so rich off of property?

This is not necessarily a bad thing for China or a good thing for countries that want these millionaires. I bet after migration many of these millionaires migrate will establish companies that connect with sources inside China for outsourcing. In an economic sense, the millionaires are very much Manchurian candidates.

<i>One quarter of China’s top 1000 richest people obtained their wealth from property, compared to less than 10% among the world’s 1000 richest, the report says.</i><p>Are they comparing the top-1000 richest people in China to the top-1000 richest people in the world? That's not a very good comparison. It's like comparing the top-1000 students from a single college, to the top-1000 students from every college in the entire world.<p>I'm not sure if the actual report makes this comparison too as I cannot read Chinese.

Not just the millionaires but many people want to too.

Since this is Hacker News and all, I'll pose a question: we had that news story on how few Indian hackers and tech startups there are, what about in China? Are any of these millionaires profiting off things like Baidu is with web tech working for the government?

Hmmm, it's really too bad the US doesn't have enough sense to invite more of these people into our country.

Common man also want to leave China <a href="http://www.rediff.com/business/slide-show/slide-show-1-tech-apple-workers-forced-to-sign-no-suicide-pledge/20110504.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.rediff.com/business/slide-show/slide-show-1-tech-...</a>

Just for the record, that photo isn't really China. It's SAR Hong Kong. Different legal systems, different story.

THIS IS A PROBLEM

Is the real problem that lots of party functionaries without much money has power and little oversight? So they can press money out of the local rich, without repercussions?<p>Or is political uncertainty the real problem -- the political climate next month can be halfway back to the cultural revolution?<p>Or a third alternative?<p>Edit: Word choice, for clarity.

Atlas wants to shrug.

Hmmm.....I can't disagree with the contents of the post. Yet I think it is a piece written to distract from the issues facing our own nation by doing an implicit juxtaposition between China and the U.S.<p>I am of the opinion that we should spend less time denigrating others and more time having open and honest discussion AND reporting of the issues facing us here in the U.S. Pointing out issues and flaws in others in now way helps fix the flaws in ourselves.