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.
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.
My other co-worker hates it that Chinese girls seem to prefer foreign boyfriends (albeit a stereotype, but who knows how reflective it is of reality?). He deems it particularly difficult because there are so many more men then women in China already.
The fee part sounds like something other than communism.
The propaganda has invented a new saying, calling this the Chinese Socialism, and it tries to credit itself for the economic boom after the 1980s. We the people think that the gov is just trying to collect massive money after they abandoned soviet communism so everyone had a chance to make a better life. The chance is getting slimmer as the gov is getting much more greedy than in the 80s.
"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." (http://www.forbes.com/sites/raykwong/2011/07/25/friends-dont...).
I wonder how much fear is playing into this desire for exodus.
Silly to say "half of china's millionaires want to leave" without saying how that percentage is different from "all chinese"...
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).
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.
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).
Very difficult to work out 'truth' here...
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).
There was a comment (I think on Top Gear, so take it with a grain) that if you drive a new Porsche through Beijing, the air coming out the tailpipe is cleaner then the air going in the front.
China has a lot of internal tensions, not the least of which is that as people become more affluent, they start to want greater transparency from the government, greater fairness, and more independence. All of those desires put them in conflict with the current regime. The party may be able to keep things under control, but I don't think there's any question that it's already grappling to maintain order via censorship, suppression of dissent, etc.
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.
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.
There was a very similar report published about half a year ago by China Merchants Bank. HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2660178
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. http://notlearningcantonese.posterous.com/rich-emigrants-as-...
“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.
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.
As for traditional media, the Economist does tend to be relatively neutral, and not adding too much of their own "secret ingredients". But that's just my own opinion.
The question is not freedom but legal security. Here in China you never know when the goverment will show up and take you money or company away from you.
It is how everything works in a Communist society, everything bends to the party, the people, the land, the environment. The results to each is usually the same.
The SF peninsula is an example of this - families that made money in mining bought up land south of the city in the 1800s, then actively worked to promote policies that would lead to growth of the city in that direction.
It is then further furled by a combination of speculative investment and local government/bank/construction industry collusion. This is quite similar to what happened to the States in post-2000 housing bubble, but in greater scale due to stronger government control and growing economy.
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.
I'm not sure if the actual report makes this comparison too as I cannot read Chinese.
Or is political uncertainty the real problem -- the political climate next month can be halfway back to the cultural revolution?
Or a third alternative?
Edit: Word choice, for clarity.
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.
By the way, you are free to do your own research and publish a story about number of U.S. amount of rich people wanting to emigrate.
