Beijing wanted especially for manufacturers to maintain operation. While the rest of the world was having trouble producing stuff— masks and cotton swabs, electronics for remote work— and while foreign consumers had stimulus money to spend, Chinese factories were positioned to meet the world’s demand.

For a while, that scheme worked. China’s trade surplus hit a record high in 2021, and then again in 2022, approaching almost a trillion dollars. In spite of the tariffs that Donald Trump imposed on gigantic categories of Chinese-made goods, the United States and China experienced record trade in 2022.

6. Fortress China

“China feels like a space in which the ceiling keeps getting lower,” Yiju told me one day. “To stay means that we have to walk around with our heads lowered and our backs hunched.”

Young people in Chiang Mai told me they’ve felt a quiet shattering of their worldviews over the decade of Xi Jinping’s rule. These are people who grew up in bigger cities and attended good universities, some of them overseas, which endowed them with certain expectations: that they could pursue meaningful careers, that society would gain greater freedoms, and that China would continue to be more integrated with the rest of the world. These aspirations have mostly shriveled. Though their lives in big cities can be quite pleasant, with new milk tea shops to try or art space to take selfies around, they work in jobs that are stressful and menial. They feel smothered by political controls. After the lockdowns, many of them grew aware that they had an unwelcome tendency to inflect every future scenario with a sense of catastrophe.

Not everyone has been thrilled with the move to Thailand, where they don’t foresee great job prospects.

Shanghai’s foreign population was in decline even before the pandemic: Between 2010 and 2020, China’s most internationalized city lost a quarter of its long-term foreign residents. Since the lockdowns, this population has taken another big drop. Shanghai drew foreigners and Chinese who were excited about the economic and creative boom in the city. For business executives, a posting to China used to pave the way toward the C-suite. That’s starting to feel less the case since China has become such a different market (given political complexities and data controls) that a posting there is now viewed as a quagmire.

Both the United States and Canada have reported doubling in the number of Chinese migrants who have obtained permanent residence after making a large investment (which could mean buying property): from 2,000 to 4,000 in Canada between 2019 and 2023, and from 3,900 to 7,500 in the United States between 2019 and 2024.

Less fortunate Chinese take different path to the United States: through a grueling trek across the southwest border. US border officials have apprehended rising numbers of Chinese nationals: from 450 in 2021 rocketing to 38,000 in 2024.

Germany and Japan are mighty exporters with, respectively, eight million and ten million manufacturing workers. A country doesn’t need so many people to have a robust semiconductor industry: A few hundred thousand highly trained workers are enough. In 2025, China will graduate more than twice as many PhDs in STEM fields as the United States— and many in American universities are Chinese nationals likely to repatriate.