Run part 1: Why are Chinese people running to Japan?

Alice Hsu
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Alice Hsu
The economist two years ago, at the height of the zero COVID lockdowns, the chinese word run began trending online. It was being used as a kind of code because run sounds similar to the english word run. Netizens used this chinese character to avoid censorship as they discussed running away from China.

David Rennie
And since the lifting of zero COVID rules, some chinese citizens have been running. They've been quietly moving to the rest of the world. China doesn't release emigration statistics, but according to the UN, the number of people leaving China in recent years has shot up. And one of the most popular destinations is Japan. This week, we're starting the first of a three part look at some of the Chinese who have moved to Japan and what their decision to go says about the country they've left behind.

Alice Hsu
I'm Alice Hsu, the economist senior China correspondent, and I'm here with my co host, David Rennie, our Beijing bureau chief. This week we're asking what is pushing chinese people to run. This is Drumtang from the Economist.

David Rennie
Alice, how have you been? Hey, David. I'm well, I'm a little bit sleep deprived. I think I told you recently that we've been having a lot of earthquakes here. And one unexpected side effect is that my dog Gary, I think, has developed a little bit of anxiety.

Alice Hsu
So every night when it's time to go to bed, he gets really nervous and he starts pacing around and, like, walking around for hours. My husband and I are sleeping with earplugs. And then other than that, we've been playing a lot of calming music for dogs, like, all day at home, so. Oh, poor Gary. Gary's got PTSD.

Yeah. But I read that dogs don't really have memory. Like, they don't have long term memory or much short term memory either. So I think he should forget about it soon. But, yeah, I'm just waiting for the soothing music to kick in.

David Rennie
I hope soothing music for dogs is less annoying than soothing music for toddlers, which I had to live through for a certain period, which is really unbearable. David, how are you? What's going on in Beijing? Alice, I've been on the road this week. Maybe we'll talk about it in a future episode.

But I've been in Ningxia, and I went to a small town where I think their local police had not seen many foreign journalists. They got extremely overexcited to the point that not only were a lot of people following us, but one of them, we realized, was actually wearing these funky smart glasses with little camera embedded in them. So I think it was like, there's a foreign journalist. We get to open the secret spy cupboard of cool stuff. And so, oh, it's a little bit odd.

Alice Hsu
It wasn't like those AI glasses where he looks at you and then your information will pop up on the screen. It's David Rennie. Who can say, but they were weird glasses, and they were being very intense. Okay. I look forward to hearing about it.

David Rennie
So, Alice, I am also really looking forward to hearing about the people that you have been meeting in Japan. Yeah. So I've been speaking with people who left China in the last few years for all kinds of reasons. And later in this series, we will focus on political dissidents. But this week and next week, we're actually going to be talking about people who are not activists or dissidents.

Alice Hsu
They're just ordinary people who had been making their lives and building their futures in China. But then in recent years, they made this dramatic decision to go and build their futures somewhere else. Going back to, I guess, the 19th century, Japan has been a big destination for chinese workers or students and immigrants. What makes this wave different? Yeah, you're right, David.

Actually, when you look at the visa numbers in Japan, chinese people are ranked number one in every visa category, except for now, actually, blue collar work, and they're their number two to Vietnam. But what's really different in the last few years is there's been a huge rise in middle class, basically wealthier chinese people who are moving to Japan mostly through these business or investment visas. Those numbers have tripled over the last decade, jumped 25% since 2020 alone. That's amazing. And that's such a window on the relative dynamism.

David Rennie
Not long ago, the idea of leaving super dynamic, booming China for declining, aging Japan would have been unsinkable. Right? Yeah, it's surprising. And actually, I interviewed an immigration consultant who's helping chinese people move to Japan. He was like, I definitely got into this business at the right moment because this is a big, bold market.

Alice Hsu
More and more middle class people especially, are going to be looking at Japan trying to move there. And he thinks that this trend is only going to continue in the next few years. And there's a kind of political rebuke there, too for the Communist Party. No, that kind of aspirational, increasingly affluent middle class was meant to be the winners from the chinese system. They were the people who were being made to feel secure and given sort of optimism about the future.

David Rennie
And if they're leaving, that's quite a shock. Yeah, it's funny that you bring up the word secure, because actually, one thing I heard over and over again from the people I was talking to was this refrain where they would say, I felt like in China the last few years, like, I don't have a sense of security. And that was the main reason why a lot of them were choosing to move. That is so interesting. I mean, it reminds me, in Europe, you often hear people talking about economic insecurity.

Every french protest march has people talking about. But in China, that was always the bargain, right? Was that, yes, you knew you were going to lose some of your freedom. People understood that. But the deal was that China would be safe, low crime and secure, increasingly strong military, but also that there'd be this kind of economic promise that was the deal between the party and the people.

So when you were talking to people who are kind of run in Japan, were they kind of framing it like that, that there's a promise in some way that has been broken? Well, David, I think the best way to answer that is to let you hear from some of these people directly.

Alice Hsu
So I spent about a week in Tokyo, crisscrossing the city, taking the subway, taking the trains, meeting a bunch of chinese people, most of whom had just moved there in the last two years.

One of them was this guy who goes by the english name Charlie.

Charlie is what we call a ba ling Ho in China. He was born in the 1980s. He's from the province of Shanxi, but he had been living in Beijing for 14 years, almost 15 years before coming to Japan. He was working in tech in Haidian district, the area where all the universities and all the big tech companies are. And we met in this kind of retro japanese cafe with stained glass on the ceilings and jazz music.

And the waiters were all dressed up, and there were a lot of kind of older customers there, like drinking tea and eating fancy little sandwiches. We just met there because it was across the street from where Charlie is now working in Tokyo. Yeah, it doesn't sound like it's a tech bros hangout. The fancy challenges and the pensioners in the St class. It sounds very interesting from a kind of socio economic point of view, that life story, moving to Beijing to work in tech.

David Rennie
He's. On paper, he's a kind of winner who shouldn't want to leave. Yeah. And, you know, Charlie told me that that's how he felt at first, for a while, like he's part of the relatively successful, optimistic, hopeful mainstream. But then at a certain point, everything changed.

Alice Hsu
So Charlie's saying here, all of a sudden you realize, oh, my God, people like me, we're actually the minority. And that's really scary. What do you mean by that? Well, David, first to understand that we have to go back to the way that Charlie grew up. He told me that he was born in the eighties and he grew up alongside China's opening to the world.

He saw China's rise as tied to global trade, especially trade with America. He certainly didn't see the US as a threat. And in the 2010s, he was in Beijing working in tech, feeling like China is the place to be. It's full of so much opportunity. On weekends, he would gather with all his friends in Zhongguansun, the tech district of Beijing.

David Rennie
Yeah. The Silicon Valley of Beijing. Yeah, that's right. And a lot of his friends, they were young Chinese who had gone abroad, studied at elite western universities, but chose to come back because they wanted to work at startups. They had all these dreams of making it big and going public in America, and they were always meeting with investors and thinking about a bright future of an interconnected world with China on the up and up.

It's really not that long ago that a lot of people sounded like that. Yeah. And Charlie told me he had thought about moving at some points, but then he would always be like, well, why don't I just stay in Beijing? Because I can make some more money. His friends were all in the same kind of ladder.

Alice Hsu
They were all thinking, like, two more years, I can buy an apartment within the third ring road. I'm going to make money. Beijing was the place to be. Charlie had a friend who moved to Australia back in 2015, and everybody else made fun of him.

David Rennie
Oh, that is quite rude. So he's talking about, you know, how people referred to moving to Australia as, like, Australia village, right? Like it's some hamlet. Why would you go to Australia village? It's like, yeah, good man is good waters.

And it's so boring. Yeah, it's like hao shan, hao shui, hau liao. The scenery is nice, but there's nothing to do. Nothing is happening. And the way that Charlie described his dream back then, you know, he and all his tech buddies, he said they were all thinking about how, you know, China is gonna open up to get more and more connected with the world.

Alice Hsu
We're going to get more foreign capital into China. It's going to go into chinese tech and do these startups that we're all doing, and then one day we're going to go public in America. That was like their big dream was to be at the New York Stock Exchange and hit that gong and have your making it. You're getting rich. Yeah, it's not long ago, but it just feels like another age, doesn't it?

David Rennie
All those big tech companies that were going to make billions and billions of dollars for their founders by listing on the Nasdaq in New York or listing on the Star exchange in Shanghai, and then they started getting blocked. And you had most shockingly and financial being canceled at the very last minute in 2020, and now we've got TikTok being threatened with being kicked out of the US. How did Charlie feel about those years? Was that how he saw it? Yeah.

Alice Hsu
Charlie told me that when that ant financial IPO was canceled, and remember, for a while, Jack Ma disappeared from public view. And of course, Jack Ma is like the tech startup superstar of China. For Charlie, it was a huge shock. He says it kind of shattered his dreams. And a lot of his friends, too, were really surprised.

A lot of them had bought new cars and homes in Hangzhou, close to the Alibaba headquarters, because they were getting ready for that public offering. And then they were like, whoa, what is happening? And then soon, because Charlie was working in the tech industry, he started seeing layoffs. At one point, he was working at a company that was kind of like a chinese version of LinkedIn, so he could see that there was this big surge in young people uploading their cv's and having all these anxious discussions about how hard it was to get a job. Yeah, and Charlie's making some economic points here alongside his sense of political alienation.

David Rennie
And I don't think that we should be judgmental if part of his disappointment with China was just purely about people thought they were going to get rich. There was always a mix, wasn't there, in the west, our kind of bet that China might converge with the kind of liberal democratic world, was that exactly a growing middle class in the cities. Yeah. They would want more prosperity, but then once they became affluent, they would want more freedom to speak and think. So you can imagine that all of those disappointments and senses of shock, there's no right sharp line between economic disappointment and sort of a sense of political disillusionment.

Alice Hsu
Yeah. And I think for Charlie, it wasn't just the sense of, okay, maybe I'm not going to get rich, but it was this sense of, whoa, I thought China was opening up like, I thought tech was the place to be, and then suddenly the state is cracking down on the private sector and really surprisingly, ways that you can't predict. And that was what really scared him. And then at the same time, he saw that, aside from his friends in tech, he felt like the mainstream of chinese society was just getting more and more nationalistic, kind of being more hostile to the outside world, hostile to the west, and blaming everything on America and on the west in a very antagonistic way. Yeah.

David Rennie
And of course, among the kind of young nationalists online, there was also a real edge of, in some cases, real resentment against private sector tech billionaires. So there was a kind of populist nationalist edge over and above the, kind of the swirling tensions with Trump's trade war and a more divided world. Yeah. So for Charlie, all of this is kind of swirling around him, and he's starting to realize, like, whoa, I think the mood in this country is changing. The dreams that I had, they may no longer be aligned with the direction that this country is going.

Alice Hsu
He told me that when you work in the tech industry, you know, that China's rise is actually thanks to the rest of the world's help, which I thought was kind of an uncommon thing to hear these days from a chinese interviewee. He told me, you know, I worked in tech, and I know basically China's abilities come from overseas capital and systems and technology, like we've learned from the outside. But now there's this attitude within China that we're just inherently superior and the world is trying to keep us down. Well, we don't need them. We can't even fight them.

We can struggle against them. I have to say, I've heard that from other tech people. I mean, some quite big tech bosses. Their view is that Xi Jinping had picked a fight with the Americans way too soon, that China just was in no way ready for that. Yeah.

And then on a personal level, because Charlie's in his late thirties and he's married, he doesn't have kids yet, but he wants to. And he started noticing that the chinese education system was also getting kind of disturbing. He told me the story from one of his friends who does have a kid, and it really bothered him.

David Rennie
Yeah. Wow. That would shock you. Yeah. The kid comes home from school, his friend's kid, and asks his mother is Disneyland American.

And the mother goes, yeah. And the child says, so we shouldn't go to Disneyland then, because Americans are bad. They want to chaguire and they want to harm us. And so Charlie tells you he found that pretty scary. Yeah.

Alice Hsu
You don't know what to say to that. Americans are villains. And Charlie was worried that this is the kind of thing that kids are going to start picking up from school. And he was telling me, when I was in school, it was totally different. When I was in college, we watched BBC documentaries about the Tiananmen square killings in class.

And teachers would, like, tell us things quietly. Nowadays, teachers are under surveillance. People are reporting on them. They're worried about what they say. All of this is part of why Charlie start to feel like actually he's in a minority and his worldview doesn't match with the way that the rest of the country is going.

David Rennie
Right. And of course, at exactly the same time as they're cracking down on companies like Ant financial, you then hit the pandemic.

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Dot.

David Rennie
So, Alice, how did the pandemic affect Charlie? So Charlie told me that for him and his wife, it was really the last straw. A new outbreak in China, sending its capital city into a new lockdown. These are actually the most extreme measures to be undertaken by any major international hub so far. To stop the virus from coming back.

Into an area takes me back. We all don't want to remember it, wipe it from our brain. No. My goodness. I remember thinking about it because, you know, Gary, your dogs are corgi, right?

Do you remember the moment where they started killing pets when people were being taken to quarantine because they'd been near someone who tested positive? And then they'd go into their apartments, and there was that video of someone's corgi being beaten to death with an iron pipe. Yeah. Yeah. It was terrifying.

I had, like, kind of evacuation rescue plans for the cats. It was an awful time. You experienced worse than I did. For Charlie and his wife, they were in Beijing the whole time, and they didn't have a pet killed by a pandemic worker. But at one point, they did become secondary contacts.

Alice Hsu
So it's like they were contacts of contacts of somebody who had COVID. And so because of that, they were locked inside their apartment, and they couldn't leave for two weeks. You know, in some cases, they just stick a paper seal on your door and security cameras pointed at your door, and if you left, then they would come around and take you off to a quarantine hospital. So they were not messing around. Yeah.

It's like you literally can't open your front door. I remember watching videos, actually, of some people who were, like, lowering their dogs with ropes outside of the window to, like, let them pee on a patch of grass and then, like, pull them back up. More extreme than anywhere else in the world, I think. And for Charlie and his wife, it was that kind of physical feeling of losing control that really affected them. He told me his wife is from Shenzhen, you know, the very wealthy, prosperous, huge chinese city next to Hong Kong, and she's relatively privileged.

So she had never considered leaving China before. But this experience, those two weeks, just really hit her in a different way. And Charlie remembers how on the last day that their lockdown was lifted, at midnight, at the moment that they were free, his wife was like, let's go downstairs. And they went downstairs for the first time where they could just be outside and breathe the air, and she started crying and getting really upset. And he says, that's when they realized, okay, you know what?

We can't go on like this. Yeah. That was something that came across with a lot of kind of white collar Chinese, that their privilege suddenly didn't protect them at all, and they suddenly realized that they weren't as secure as they deceived. Yeah. And Charlie told me that, actually, that experience started triggering their anxiety about all these other things they were insecure about.

Like, for example, he told me even though they lived in Beijing for all these years, they didn't have hukou. They didn't have household registration there.

So if they had a kid in the future, the kid wouldn't have the same access to the education system as Beijing kids, and eventually they would have to go back home. And it's kind of like something that they had always been worrying about in the back of their minds. And his wife at this moment, started bringing it up and saying, you know what? We're just not really secure here. Like, we can't ever settle.

We don't really belong. And finally, she just says this. She says there's no point to staying here. It's useless. It doesn't matter how much money you make, no matter how much money you make, you still won't feel secure.

Male anchor. You don't feel a sense of safety.

David Rennie
Yeah, that sounds a lot like a kind of 30 something version of involution, right? Neiduan, that idea that you're just kind of running to stand still. Yeah, you keep running and running, but you never have enough, and you never feel like you're in a secure place. And actually, Charlie also said another part of this is that he's afraid of being laid off because he's in his late thirties already. And there's this idea in China that once you hit 35, you're at risk of being fired, because especially in tech, a lot of tech companies prefer to hire people in their twenties because they will work longer hours for less pay.

Alice Hsu
And he is very aware of that. He's like, I'm almost 40, and people like me, actually, if I lose my job, I'm going to be the most unwelcome kind of person in the job market. And some of that's actually written down, right. If you want to take the guo cards, like the civil service entrance test, I think that caps out at 35. And then there's that whole idea that only young people can take the really brutal working hours in the big tech companies.

David Rennie
The famous kind of 996, working nine till nine, six days a week. Once you hit over 30, maybe you can't hack it. Yeah. So Charlie has all of these personal insecurities, and then he's also worried that the domestic economy doesn't look good, and he's concerned that there might be conflict coming one day over Taiwan. So, Anis, does he think that other people feel this way?

Alice Hsu
I mean, remember that Charlie told us he feels like a minority, right, in the sense that he saw everybody getting really nationalistic and jingoistic about facing off with the west. And he felt like he's one of the few who don't feel like that. But actually, since 2022, the worst year of zero COVID. And with the economic downturn afterwards, he thinks that now there's a lot more widespread angst and insecurity than before.

So Charlie's saying here that he thinks basically everybody in chinese society feels insecure these days. Nobody has that entering gun. And he's like, whether you are a business owner or a civil servant, he thinks that even the officials don't feel secure. And then he said, actually recently, he was chatting with some friends and they were asking each other, do you think even Xi Jinping himself feels secure? I have to say, when you see officials nowadays, you think it's like a one in ten chance they're gonna be in prison the next couple of years.

David Rennie
I mean, it's gotta be pretty scary with all the anti corruption campaigns. The courtroom is not far away for some of them. Yeah. And you have to think, I mean, China's having so many national security campaigns. Surely if you felt secure, you wouldn't need to do so many of those.

Yeah, it's definitely a besieged feel sometimes. What was the kind of direct, concrete impact on Charlie and his wife if they got to this point of kind of real unhappiness? Well, they started doing research. They decided, we need to get out of here. And in mid 2022, they started looking into all the places they could go.

Alice Hsu
They looked at North America, but they found that actually, immigration has gotten tighter in Canada and the US. He found out that he was qualified for Perth, Western Australia, but he still felt like it was a bit remote. Europe also felt really far away, but Japan was somewhere that was close. It was easy to get to. He met an agent through a friend, and the agent said, you know, it's not too hard for you to get a business visa.

And so in spring 2023, they moved. So how did the move to Japan go? How's he doing? Well, Charlie's doing great, actually. He told me he was anxious at first because he'd never been an immigrant, but it's been easier to adjust than he thought.

Learning Japanese. He's enjoying life in the city. He went to a Coldplay concert. His wife went to the Taylor Swift concert. He's going to tibetan movie screenings.

And when I met him, he was just like. He was really relaxed. He was kind of exuberant, actually. He told me his wife was also happy. And it just feels so good to be an ordinary person living our normal lives and not worrying about a sudden event coming in and changing everything.

They've met a lot of other chinese couples around their age who recently moved. And actually, he said they're planning to start having kids. Well, that is a real slap for the Communist Party of China. Right? Because they're desperate for people exactly like Charlie to have lots of kids.

David Rennie
But if you can only get that sort of sense of confidence going in Japan, that's remarkable. And it's fascinating what you say about sudden events changing things. I guess what he's saying is that's the arbitrary nature of policymaking in Xi Jinping's China. The crackdowns on tech or the pandemic controls. So does he find Japan just very, very different from that?

Alice Hsu
Yeah. And you know what really struck me was Charlie told me he's only making about a quarter of what he used to make in China. So he's taken a huge pay cut, but he actually feels more secure and more relaxed. And he said, you know, it's true, Japan hasn't really seen much growth in the past 30 years, but once you come here, you realize that there is a safety net here that we don't have in China. Like a welfare safety net.

Yeah. He told me, like, if you want to have kids, you don't need to worry about it because it doesn't cost that much money you want. You're not going to end up bankrupt just because you had kids or because you suddenly had a major illness. Even as a foreigner who's a newcomer to the country, he has access to social services in a much more easy way. He actually says he wishes that he had left earlier.

Charlie says that after they left, they started looking back and they realized there were a lot of unreasonable things about the system they lived in in China. And he's like, when I was inside it, I was making money. So I was just able to numb myself and convince myself, it's fine, you know, I'll always find a way to make it through. But you never think about, like, what if one day you don't have that much money, if your income is slashed, like, what are you going to do? That is such a powerful counter argument to that line.

David Rennie
We've heard from Xi Jinping and other communist party leaders about how we can't have a more generous welfare safety net because it will make people lazy. Xi Jinping has talked about welfarism and how countries in Europe or Latin America that people are lazy. Actually, if you have a well designed safety net and health insurance so you don't get bankrupted by being sick, it actually frees people up to take the job that they enjoy. It's actually good for economic development. That's, I think, what Charlie is showing.

And again, of all the countries to be showing China up in this way, it's such a rebuke for the chinese leadership that it's Japan, that country that they've loved to kind of write off as aging and graying and stagnant and sort of on its way out, but actually sounds like Charlie's found things in the way Japan works that help him be a business person and feel secure and confident enough to take risks and get a different job. I think what really strikes me about Charlie is that he was actually, on the surface, doing better in China than he is now. He was making more money. He was living in a flashier, more exciting city back then, but he and his wife never really felt secure enough, despite how much money they made, to really start building their futures, to start having kids. And in order to find that kind of security, he had to leave.

So, Alice, how representative is Charlie's story about needing to leave? I mean, I'm sure if I were the chinese foreign ministry, which isn't going to happen for a number of good reasons, but if I were the chinese prime minister, said, well, you know, you found one disgruntled person, but otherwise everyone's happy, no one's leaving. What do the actual stats say? It's tricky because China doesn't release official statistics about emigration. So there's no headline number like how many people are leaving China to other countries.

Alice Hsu
But the UN does compile some statistics on net migration. And the way they do that is they look at the receiving countries, the number of chinese citizens going to other countries on different kinds of visas, the number of asylum seekers. And they some calculations also taking into account population growth and expected change. And when you look at the numbers that the UN is publishing, there are some striking trends over the last few years, but also from a longer range over the last few decades. David, let me send you this chart.

David Rennie
Cool. I think it's the first drum tower chart. I think we're breaking new ground in terms of being actual grown up journalists who look at charts. Oh, well, that is a very bumpy chart. There are definite massive jumps and falls in the number of net, annual immigration numbers.

Alice Hsu
Yeah. So basically this chart is looking@the.net. Outflow of people from China every year. So it's not how many people are leaving, but it's how many people are leaving. What's the difference between people leaving and people coming in?

And every year, China has always been a net emigration country, so there are more people leaving than coming in. But you see these big jumps in the early nineties, right after the Tiananmen Square protest, there's a huge spike in people leaving China. And then for most of the nineties and the two thousands, it hovers around half a million people net outflow each year. And then after the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the number actually starts to drop quite dramatically. And if you remember that's kind of the boom time, like what Charlie was talking about in the 2010s when it felt like, oh, like China's on the rise, and then you start to see an increase again in people leaving.

And this is what surprised me about the chart. I thought it was going to be after COVID, that the big jump would happen. But actually, the big jump happens in 2018. It's the year that Xi Jinping changes the constitution. Also the year that I arrived in Beijing.

David Rennie
There goes the neighborhood effect. Yeah. Oh, my God. David is here. I gotta leave.

It's over. This place is done. Yeah. Well, basically, in 2018, there was this big jump of 60% to nearly 300,000 people. Net outflow from China.

Alice Hsu
And then in the last three years, there's been a net outflow of more than 310,000 people every year. And the people who work in this field, immigration services for chinese people, they expect that number is going to keep climbing. Yeah. And I have to say, as I'm sure you find when you're around educated, 30 something chinese, for every Chinese that does run and leave, there's a whole ton more who spend a lot of their evenings with friends talking about it. Yeah, that's true.

And, of course, because China's population is so huge, ultimately the number of people leaving is still a small drop in the ocean compared to the people who are staying. That being said, I think it's especially striking to look into the cases of people like Charlie, like the kinds of people who were pretty successful and who you didn't expect to leave before. And that's a sort of new trend that we haven't seen. I mean, there have always been dissidents, activists, minorities, people in special categories of political pressure who want to leave China. But someone like this deciding, you know what?

This is just not the place for me anymore. I think that's got to be something quite troubling. Yeah. These are the successories, the people who were going to accept that deal from the Communist Party, but it sounds as if the deal isn't working out for them. Yeah.

And, David, Charlie is kind of an example of that group of chinese citizens. But I also wanted to spend time with people from different sectors of chinese society, maybe some of the chinese migrants from the working class that are more like the kinds of people who've been going to Japan for ages, like working in restaurants and factories and so on. I wanted to find out if these changes. Charlie had talked about how he felt like chinese society was going in a different direction. He was becoming a minority.

He was alienated from where his own country was going. Was that also affecting this other group of people, peoples decisions to run? Or were they just moving for economic reasons? But that is next week.

Yes, tune in next week for the second episode in this three part series on why chinese people are running. Well meet a young worker with a background very different from charlies whos also moved to Japan, and well be asking how political is the run phenomenon. Thank you for listening to Drum Tower. And thank you especially to Claire from Portugal and to Nicola, a british student who is learning Chinese in Taiwan. He says he loves listening to the podcast while in the gym and walking to class.

David Rennie
We love reading your emails and so please keep sending us more@drumeconomist.com. Today's episode was free, but to continue listening to this series you'll need to become a subscriber, so just search Economist podcasts or click the link in the show notes.

Our editor is Poppy Seabag. Montefiore alize Jean Baptiste and Gerhard Chen produced this episode with additional help from Constance Chan. Sound design is by Carla Patella Drumtaz. Music was composed by Jocelyn Tan, and the executive producer is Hannah Mourinho.

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Run part 1: Why are Chinese people running to Japan?

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Episode Summary

Main Takeaways

Episode Chapters

1. Introduction: Reasons behind the trend

2. Charlie's story: A personal journey

3. Broader impacts: Socio-political implications

Actionable Advice

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Transcript