CHINA’S ECONOMIC growth is encouraging its people to travel and work abroad. The country is the world’s biggest source of tourists. But other forces have also encouraged Chinese people to leave their homes. In the 1960s, tens of thousands of people fled China’s cultural revolution. As the country stabilised, that number dropped. But seven decades on from the UN convention on refugees, which was signed on July 28th 1951 and set out the rights of people who are granted asylum, the number is rising rapidly once again.

Between 2012 and 2020, the annual number of asylum-seekers from China rose from 15,362 to 107,864, according to data from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Since Xi Jinping took power at the end of 2012, 613,000 Chinese nationals have applied for asylum in another country. About 70% of them sought asylum in America in 2020. Many people arrive on tourist or business visas, and then make an asylum application; the ten-year visas for Chinese nationals introduced in 2014 eased the flow of Chinese people into America, says Yun Sun of the Stimson Centre, a Washington-based think-tank.

The increase has coincided with the rule of Mr Xi; he has governed China with an iron grip that gets tighter by the year. Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities have particularly felt the squeeze. Since 2017 at least 1m of them have been detained in concentration camps. According to former inmates and analysis of satellite imagery, prisoners are subjected to torture, forced sterilisations and indoctrination. Those outside the camps live under near-constant surveillance; some have been forced to work in factories in other parts of China. Hundreds, possibly thousands, have fled overseas.

In 2019 Sweden started granting automatic asylum status to Turkic minorities from Xinjiang, although only a few dozen people from China of any ethnicity apply for asylum there each year. America does not publish data based on ethnicity, but in 2019, 7,478 Chinese people were granted asylum there, more than any other nationality (statistics on refugees, among which Chinese people are much fewer, are published separately). Asylum-seekers are people who make their claim having already arrived in America; refugees apply to enter from outside the country, and their numbers, unlike asylum-seekers, are capped by government quotas.

The majority of Chinese asylum-seekers are likely to be Han, an ethnic group that makes up more than 90% of the population. Though they are not subject to race-based persecution, they too have seen their freedoms diminish since 2012. In 2015 248 human-rights lawyers and activists were detained and questioned by the police in what became known as the “709 crackdown” (a reference to the date of the campaign, July 9th). Although only a handful were formally charged, the round-up was widely seen as a signal from Mr Xi that he was not interested in tolerating even the slightest dissent. In recent years members of foreign and domestic NGOs, feminist organisations and churches have also been arrested. It is “hard to generalise” about the Chinese asylum-seekers in America, notes Ms Sun, but a variety of human-rights abuses have driven people to flee their home country. In recent years there have been reports of an increasing number of Chinese people crossing the border into America via Mexico, although this only accounts for a fraction of the total number of asylees.

The atmosphere in Hong Kong, which has been formally under Chinese sovereignty since 1997, is febrile. But the number of people from there claiming asylum in other countries has rarely entered triple figures. Only once, in 2019, the year in which the city was wracked by pro-democracy protests and violent clashes with the police, did the number surpass 200. This is because Hong Kongers who want to emigrate tend to have other, more straightforward, exit paths. Wealthy and educated, many countries welcome them with open arms. Australia offers generous visa policies to Hong Kongers already in the country, and Britain provides its former colonial subjects with a path to full citizenship. Between February and March this year, the first two months of the scheme launching, 34,000 Hong Kongers applied to come to Britain.

But for those in mainland China wanting to get out, the path is muddier. For Uyghurs in particular, leaving China or having any contact with foreign countries can put their families at risk. And would-be emigrants face the same problems of money, language and borders that inhibit people the world over. Mr Xi, who oversaw the removal of term limits on his presidency, shows no signs, as he grows older, of liberalising. The numbers of Chinese asylum-seekers may continue to rise.