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Liu Shuai, a migrant from China, waits in line to register with Panamanian migration officials at the Indigenous Embera community of Bajo Chiquito on April 21.Tito Herrera/The Globe and Mail

In late March, Liu Shuai left his home and his debts in China. He flew first to Iran, then Turkey and Morocco before landing in Ecuador. From there, he began a journey of at least 5,000 kilometres by land, entering Colombia, then crossing into Panama by foot through the Darien Gap, a jungle traversed by no road, and where wildlife predators and untamed rivers are a constant threat.

His destination, like that of hundreds of thousands of others, is the southern border of the United States, where he hopes to claim asylum and find a new way in life.

Unlike the Haitians, Venezuelans and African nationals who have transformed this route into an increasingly dense corridor for migration, Mr. Liu is not fleeing a home riven by violence or an economy that is visibly crumbling.

He is fleeing nonetheless, part of a swelling current of Chinese people who have grown so disillusioned with the direction of their country that they are abandoning it, preferring their chances with a migration route across mountains and rivers that break bodies and spirits.

China’s Communist Party ensures its people have little formal way to register displeasure with their own government. Those walking into Panama are voting with their feet in what amounts to a stunning rebuke of China under Xi Jinping, the authoritarian leader who recently began an unprecedented third term. Some say they believe China’s age of optimism, its decades-long stretch of rising opportunity, wealth and well-being, has reached its end.

In the first three months of 2023, Chinese migrants made up the fourth-largest nationality to cross the Darien, behind only Venezuelans, Haitians, and Ecuadorians. Last month, 1,657 people from China made the journey.

It’s a modest number relative to the immensity of China’s population, but their ranks have been growing. Nearly as many Chinese crossed the jungle this March as in the entirety of last year.

Chinese migrants who spoke with The Globe and Mail in Panama described losing faith with their country after its leadership imposed punishing pandemic lockdowns that largely succeeded in constraining the spread of COVID-19, but dealt a death blow to many small businesses.

Their exodus is small but freighted with meaning. It suggests the strangulating deployment of government power during the pandemic has prompted some to reconsider their willingness to make the sacrifices demanded of those living under Communist Party rule.

Mr. Liu once ran a restaurant that served Guangdong rice noodles and grilled fish. But the restaurant failed during the pandemic, leaving him with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and little hope of paying it off. China has no personal bankruptcy law, leaving little means of legal escape from business failure.

In China, “many have lost work, many have no money,” he said. “And the economy has stagnated.”

Better, he figured, to take his chances on a distant new country.

“Pay in the U.S. is relatively high, right?” he said.

China suddenly abandoned its stifling pandemic restrictions last year after the spread of public protests.

Those crossing the jungle, however, say the return to normal has done little to ease worries about life in a country that is being battered by the dictates of its leader and competition with the U.S. In fact, those entering Panama today left home months after the end of China’s COVID restrictions. Some did not even have passports until February.

Chen Lifeng, 23, managed a warehouse for a cosmetics company before his departure. He heard about the Panama route through a video recommended to him by Douyin, the original Chinese incarnation of Tik Tok, as he browsed his phone during a lockdown.

Young Chinese are unaccustomed to economic weakness in a country that has managed a decades-long record of growth. But a grim outlook has grown impossible to ignore, Mr. Chen said, pointing to a decline in purchases for the products he once handled. “Right now, even food is quite expensive, how could people care about cosmetics?” he said.

Beijing’s increasingly bruising competition with the U.S. has added to the dim outlook. “So many factories have evacuated from China and moved to Vietnam or Southeast Asia,” he said.

Mr. Chen’s dissatisfaction extends beyond the economy. Yes, finding work has grown more difficult, with the unemployment rate for urban Chinese aged 16 to 24 rising to 19.6 per cent in March. But finding a wife and family may be even harder.

“Because of China’s one-child policy, there are lots of men but few women,” he said. “I have no desire to go back to China. I have no job. I’m not married. I have no child.”

John Gao, 46, too, cannot imagine returning to China. A manager at a software company, he achieved career success in the burgeoning Chinese high-tech sector. But when he became a Jehovah’s Witness three years ago, his life changed. Chinese authorities have cracked down on the religion, which the country classifies a cult, like Falun Gong.

Worried his arrest was imminent, Mr. Gao left, using a Jehovah’s Witness app on his phone as a guide. It contains an address for the church’s headquarters in New York that has become his destination, far from a country that, he said, has changed.

Under Mr. Xi, China has veered from the economic and political direction of the past 40 years, Mr. Gao said. “I personally believe that era has finished,” Mr. Gao said.

It is instead, he said, reverting to some of the policies that marked the Mao Zedong era in the opening decades of Communist China.

“Look at the control of religion, of culture, of the voice of the people,” he said. “It’s all being controlled ever more severely.”

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