Dan Wang

They were wary of conscription, they were wary of taxation, and they didn't really like assessors coming over to look at their grain all the time, sometimes bearing disease.

And Scott was really remarkable for having spent quite a lot of time in these zones talking to people who have oral histories, which gives them more malleable ethnic identities and they can run away much more effectively.

I think about this a lot because I've spoken to a lot of Chinese who have decided to run away exactly in these highlands.

Again, my family origins are in Yunnan province.

This is exactly the part of Zomia, a highland Southeast Asia that James C. Scott has written about.

I feel like people from where I'm from, Yunnan province, have some of the more libertarian attitudes in China.

They really don't like the state looking over their shoulder, many of them

practice agriculture up in the mountains, which is much more difficult for the states to come over and assess.

And I think part of the problems of the engineering state is that many people have decided to retreat to these different parts of these different corners of the world.

In 2023, I went on this walk and talk with Kevin Kelly around Chiang Mai, and we walked from one of the highest mountains in Thailand down to the city of Chiang Mai.

And afterwards, my wife and I spent a lot of time with Chiang.

mostly young Chinese, young Chinese who are in their 20s or early 30s, who ran away from China, decided that the censorious nature of the overbearing state was more than they could bear.

And they decided to make art, dabble in crypto, smoke dope in the mountains around Chiang Mai.

And I thought,

It is really strange that Xi Jinping is trying to achieve something he calls the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people.

And there's a lot of young people who are saying, no thanks, we'll give that a pass.

There's a lot of millionaires.

By one count, 14,000 millionaires departed from China in the year 2023 to move to Singapore, to move to Japan, to move to the UK and the US, in part because the Communist Party has smashed a lot of their businesses.

There's a lot of people who are not so creative or not necessarily very wealthy who decided to hop on a plane to Ecuador where they don't need a visa, walk across the Darien Gap into the United States.

And at its peak in 2024, there were several months in which USCBP was apprehending something like 30,000 to 40,000 Chinese nationals at the Texan border.