Gao Zhibin and his daughter left Beijing on February 24 in search of a better and safer life. Over the next 35 days, they traveled through nine countries by plane, train, boat, bus, and on foot. By the time they arrived in the United States at the end of March, Gao had lost nearly 14 kilograms.
The most distressing part of their journey was crossing the brutal Panamanian jungle known as the Darien Gap. 39-year-old Gao recounts that on the first day, he suffered from sunstroke. On the second day, his feet swelled up. Weak and dehydrated, he got rid of his tent, a moisture-resistant mat, and his change of clothes. Then, his 13-year-old daughter fell ill. She was lying on the ground, vomiting, with a pale face, a feverish forehead, and her hands on her stomach. Gao thought she might have drank contaminated water. Crawling through the muddy and treacherous Darien jungle, they rested every 10 minutes. They managed to reach their destination, a camp in Panama, at 9:00 p.m.
Gao mentioned that he felt he had no choice but to leave China. “I think we will only be safe if we go to the United States,” he said, adding that he believed Chinese ruler Xi Jinping could lead the country into famine and possibly war. “This is a unique opportunity I have to protect myself and my family,” he said.
This year, a larger number of Chinese immigrants arrived in the United States through the Darien Gap, only surpassed by Venezuelans, Ecuadorians, and Haitians, according to Panamanian immigration authorities.
The Darien Gap is a dangerous route that was mainly used by Cubans and Haitians, and to a lesser extent, people from Nepal, India, Cameroon, and the Congo. Chinese migrants are fleeing the world’s second-largest economy.
The more educated and wealthy Chinese migrants use legal channels, such as education and work visas, to escape bleak economic prospects and political oppression, motivations shared by migrants from the Darien Gap.
Most of them follow a manual circulating on social media: cross the border through the Darien Gap, surrender to US border control agents, stay in migrant detention centers, and apply for asylum citing a well-founded fear of what would happen if they return to China. Many are released within days. When their asylum applications are accepted, they can work and start a new life in the United States.
Their escape is a referendum on Xi’s government, now in its third five-year term. Boasting that “the East is rising while the West is declining,” in 2021, Xi claimed that the Chinese governance model had proven superior to Western democratic systems and said that the center of gravity of the global economy was shifting “from West to East.”
All the immigrants I interviewed this year crossed the Darien Gap, a journey known as zouxian, or the walking route, in Chinese, coming from a lower-middle-class background. They said they feared falling into poverty if the Chinese economy worsened and no longer saw a future for themselves or their children in their home country.
In Xi-governed China, anyone can be targeted by the State. You can get into trouble for being a Christian, Muslim, Uighur, Tibetan, or Mongolian. Or for being a worker demanding overdue wages, or a homeowner protesting because their apartment has not been delivered or completed, a student using a virtual private network to access Instagram, or a Communist Party official caught with a copy of a banned book.
The increasing number of desperate Chinese migrants facing the Darien Gap is a reversal of a deeply rooted pattern.
In the 1980s and 1990s, millions of Chinese emigrated to developed countries, including the United States, in search of better living conditions and freer societies. When the Chinese economy took off in the early 2000s and the government loosened some social controls, a large majority of Chinese students returned to their country after graduation. Salaries in China were rapidly increasing, and employment opportunities were abundant.
Until September 2018, Gao was a success story in China. He grew up in a village in the eastern province of Shandong and moved to Beijing in 2003 to work on an assembly line in an electronics factory. He earned about $100 a month. Using his street smarts, Gao made money by helping factories and construction sites hire workers.
In 2007, he rented land on the outskirts of Beijing and built a building divided into around 100 tiny rooms. He earned around $30,000 a year from renting those rooms to migrant workers. He got married, had two children, and brought his parents to live in Beijing.
In 2018, the local government wanted to reclaim the land for urbanization. Gao refused. The authorities cut off water and electricity and pumped sewage from the toilets into the courtyard, forcing the tenants to leave. Gao won the lawsuit he filed against the government but received no compensation. When he petitioned higher authorities, he and his family were harassed, threatened, and beaten. He and his wife divorced, hoping the authorities would leave her alone.
Over the following years, Gao worked wherever he could and devoted most of his time to his legal petition and studying law. Life became very tough during the pandemic. Gao and his ex-wife, who still lived together, had twins in January. He had four children and no work or future. He was desperate.
In February, Gao came across social media posts mentioning Chinese people arriving in the United States through the Darien Gap. He and his daughter applied for passports and a few weeks later flew to Istanbul and from there to Quito, the capital of Ecuador, where most Chinese people begin their journey to the United States.
Another migrant who crossed the Darien Gap and whom I spoke to, Zhong, requested to use only his surname for fear of reprisals. He has a similar background to Gao’s.
Born into a Christian family, he made his way from a village in the southwestern province of Sichuan, China, to achieve a middle-class life in the city. He trained as a cook at the age of 16 and worked in restaurants throughout China. During the pandemic, he faced economic difficulties. To pay his mortgage and car loan, around $800 per month, he worked on an assembly line in 2020.
Trouble for Zhong, now in his thirties, began in December when police officers stopped his car for a routine alcohol test and saw a Bible on the passenger seat. They told Zhong he believed in an evil religion and threw the Bible on the ground and stomped on it. Then, the officers took his phone and installed an app that turned out to have software capable of tracking his movements.
On Christmas Day, four police officers entered a house where Zhong and three other Christian believers were holding a prayer service. They were taken to the police station, beaten, and interrogated.
Like Gao, Zhong found social media posts about the Darien Gap. He borrowed around $10,000 and left home on February 22.
He cried three times, he said. The first time was at the end of his first day in the Darien Gap: he lay inside his tent, full of remorse, thinking the journey was too difficult. The second occasion was during his three-day journey through Mexico with another fellow migrant on a motorcycle in the pouring rain. He cried again when he was detained at an immigration center in Texas. He had applied for asylum and didn’t know how long he would be held. It could be three or five years, he thought. After seven days, he was released and flew to New York.
Upon arriving in Flushing, a…