deathmtn

Very quickly, Cao found herself pulled into an educational arms race with other Chinese parents. “The middle class? They are super, super competitive, and that is a big part of what they want here,” says Cao, opening her phone to reveal a school chat group of Chinese parents. It is a cavalcade of paranoia and passive aggression. “Should the kids go to a private or a public school? Should they do this particular exam? Is that school good? Is that teacher intelligent enough? What scores did everyone get? It’s not what I wanted,” she says.

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After extensive research, James fixed on Urawa, a suburb in the prefecture abutting Tokyo, about 70 minutes from the heart of the city, as the place to live. The property is relatively cheap and the public education is pretty good, he says. But suffusing all these decisions is something else: “In the past, it was always about America. Nobody wants to go to the US now. Not with Trump. A lot of us have membership of the Chinese Communist party, just because that was what we needed to do to get ahead in business. So now, with that membership, you are afraid you’ll probably be denied a [US] visa.”
Tokyo feels politically safer. “I don’t know who will win between the US and China, but Japan is in the middle. Japan is a good place to set up my second life,” says James. “Japan is stable. It has rational politics. It has no Chinese nationalists. No Maga. It just has a normal society. And I think that the number of people [in Shanghai] who share this kind of thinking is on the rise. Everyone has a third term for Trump or a fourth term for Xi in their mind, and they don’t like it.”