Thread by @WilliamYang120

From @shenlulushen and @yifanxie: "More than two years of border restrictions and a protracted lockdown of #Shanghai are prompting some Chinese citizens to contemplate emigration, a prospect once unthinkable for many of them." wsj.com/articles/china…

One Shanghai resident was close to securing a coveted Shanghai residency permit. But the citywide lockdown, which has lasted more than six weeks, has shaken her and left her looking for a way out. She is now planning to emigrate to the U.S., where her employer is based.

Another Shanghai resident, Chester Yu, first began forming plans to leave China in early 2020 when the initial outbreak swept across China. “I felt like I was in jail. I could sense where China was heading back then,” he said.

Immigration lawyers and agents say they have seen a surge in inquiries over the past month. Emigration-focused chat groups have sprung up on China’s ubiquitous WeChat messaging app as well as on encrypted platforms like Telegram.

Over the past two months, said Ying Cao, a New York-based immigration lawyer, inquiries from Chinese high-net-worth individuals and middle-class professionals have surged 10-fold compared with a year earlier.

“They feel like it’s 1949 all over again,” said Ms. Cao, referring to the exodus of more than two million Chinese people to Taiwan and Hong Kong as the Communist Party won control of the Chinese mainland. “There is a shared sense of fear and urgency to get out.”

Searches on WeChat for yimin, the Chinese word for emigration, started increasing in March, around the time that Shanghai was tightening Covid controls in response to a surge in cases.

On March 15, Chinese users searched or shared content involving yimin 16 million times, according to WeChat’s publicly available data. A month later, on April 15, there were 72 million such searches and shares.

As searches for emigration have surged, the word itself appears to have become sensitive. Analytics tools operated by Chinese internet giants Baidu Inc. and Weibo Corp. no longer provide data on search interest for the term.

Even for those with the financial means to leave, the process has become more complicated. China has tightened border controls and stepped up measures to prevent capital flight.

Restrictions have increased on notarizations for immigration-related purposes, especially asset notarizations for those trying to emigrate through investment immigration programs, according to a U.S.-based immigration lawyer and an Australia-based immigration agent.

Middle-class professionals, particularly those with children, are keenly aware of the wrenching sacrifices that emigration entails.

In Suzhou, a city 60 miles west of Shanghai, a factory manager surnamed Wang says he wants to ensure his children don’t grow up in a society he believes is growing more authoritarian.