In the spring of 2022, as Shanghai’s 25 million residents sat through a second month of confinement, one Chinese character began doing unusual work online. 润 (rùn) formally means “to moisten” or “profitable,” but its romanization resembles the English word “run.” Chinese internet users adopted it as coded shorthand for getting out, and runxue, the study of running away, entered the language.
Searches for “immigration” on WeChat jumped 440% on April 3, 2022, the day Beijing reaffirmed its zero-COVID policy. Six weeks later, the platform logged more than 100 million searches for “emigration” in a single day.
Four years on, the meme has cooled. The movement’s desperate edge was the “walking route”: Chinese migrants trekking through Panama’s Darién Gap toward the US border. American enforcement has since crushed that route, cutting monthly crossings from roughly 6,000 in December 2023 to double digits by mid-2025, and diaspora media now write about émigrés second-guessing the exit altogether.
Yet runxue always had two ends. One walked through jungles and made headlines; the other boarded flights to Tokyo and Singapore, moved capital through family offices, and made no noise at all.
Enforcement shut down the first, and it is the second, quieter end that never stopped moving.
The Wealthy Were Running Before the Word Existed
That quieter exit predates the viral meme by years. UN estimates put China’s net annual emigration at 310,000 people in 2021 and 2022, up from an average of 190,000 through the 2010s, and the Hurun Research Institute was publishing annual white papers on Chinese high-net-worth emigration back when the lockdowns were unimaginable.
Affluent Chinese families were diversifying for reasons such as children’s education and a hedge against regulatory surprise.
Wealthy Chinese who had thrived under the system, and often defended it, discovered during the lockdowns that money changed nothing: their doors were sealed like everyone else’s.
The years since have made the scale visible in program data across three continents, from the Caribbean to Southeast Asia, where Chinese applicants top the nationality tables of one program after another. China, meanwhile, remains the only major economy with no inbound residency program of its own.
The flow still runs one way; it has simply changed character, from panic-driven exit to deliberate acquisition of optionality.
A Narrowing Map
Part of what shapes Chinese demand today is the number of doors that have closed. Ireland’s Immigrant Investor Programme, more than 90% Chinese before its 2023 shutdown, is gone; Spain’s golden visa closed in April 2025; Australia scrapped its Significant Investor Visa, around 85% Chinese across its lifetime, in 2024.
Even the destinations still open keep raising the bar. Japan, where the Chinese population stood at roughly 870,000 at the end of 2024 and is on course to pass one million in 2026, raised the minimum capital requirement of its Business Manager visa sixfold in October 2025, from ¥5 million to ¥30 million (approximately US$200,000), while adding Japanese-language, staffing, and management-experience conditions. Chinese nationals held roughly 21,740 of the 41,615 such visas in circulation before the hike.
Malaysia’s Malaysia My Second Home (MM2H) program, where mainland Chinese account for 45% of the 57,686 participants, restructured its terms in 2024, introducing steeper tiers.
Singapore, meanwhile, tightened scrutiny of mainland-origin wealth after the US$2.3 billion “Fujian case” laundering scandal of 2023, slowing inflows and pushing some funds onward to Hong Kong, Japan, and the Gulf, where the UAE’s ten-year golden visa and zero personal income tax keep Dubai firmly on the Chinese shortlist.
As such, a Chinese family that committed to a single destination in 2022 has watched the terms change beneath it, sometimes twice.
The rational response, and the one the market now observes, is to buy flexibility rather than geography.
Passports Over Permits
That is why citizenship, rather than any one residence permit, now sits at the center of Chinese demand. A second passport does not depend on one country’s housing policies or visa requirements, requires no relocation, and can cover the whole family in a single application.
Grenada illustrates the logic. The country’s first-ever official nationality data, released in 2024, showed Chinese investors as the largest applicant group at 28%, and its citizenship by investment (CBI) program owes much of that pull to its E-2 treaty with the United States, which lets Grenadian citizens live and run businesses in America without joining the decade-long queues of US investor visas, pending a three-year domicile requirement.
Other Caribbean citizenship programs, broadly available from around US$200,000 under the region’s harmonized minimums, continue to draw Chinese applicants as mobility insurance that requires no relocation. Antigua & Barbuda, St Kitts & Nevis, and St Lucia each offer their own mix of family inclusiveness, real estate options, and processing speed.
In the Pacific, Vanuatu and Nauru serve families for whom timing matters most, with processing measured in two to three months, while São Tomé & Príncipe has opened an African option at one of the lowest entry points in the market.
Residence, Assembled to Order
Around the citizenship core, families may then add residence permits chosen for purpose rather than prestige.
Portugal remains the clearest case: Chinese nationals are still the golden visa’s largest cumulative cohort, with more than 5,300 approvals since 2012, and demand has migrated to the €500,000 fund route since real estate was removed in 2023. Monaco serves the very top of the wealth curve, while Latvia offers one of Europe’s quieter and more affordable footholds.
Across the Atlantic, the Bahamas pairs permanent residency with proximity to the US, and Paraguay and Uruguay have become low-cost, tax-friendly bases for families who want an Americas option without an American visa queue.
No single document captures the full story anymore. The portfolio does.
From Run to Plan B
The runxue of 2022 was a scream; the version visible in 2026 is a spreadsheet. Chinese families today are pricing a hedge, weighing Lisbon funds against Grenadian passports against Nassau residency with the same rigor they once reserved for school districts.
Panic buyers churn, while planners retain advisors, add family members over time, and layer residence upon citizenship as circumstances evolve.
The quiet exit wave has settled into something more durable: the normalization of the multi-jurisdiction Chinese family.
EC Holdings advises clients on citizenship programs across the Caribbean and Pacific alongside residency options worldwide, from offices including Beijing and its Singapore headquarters. Get in touch for a personalized consultation.
