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Why foreigners who endured China’s Covid lockdowns are now leaving
- Some of those leaving say they have sensed an increasing wariness towards them amid heightened tensions between China and the West
- Even for those who do want to stay, students from developing countries report problems meeting the strict work visa requirements after graduating
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Foreigners living in China who stuck it out through three years of strict Covid controls have spoken about why they finally decided to leave the country last year despite efforts to reopen to the outside world.
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Some spoke of an increasing wariness, even hostility, towards foreigners while others said they were worried about a repeat of their lockdown experiences.
Their exits come against a backdrop of heightened tensions between China and the West, which some suspect may be influencing everyday attitudes towards them, and a heightened focus on national security that emphasises the threat from malign foreign forces.
For Sophie Redding, a British PE teacher at an international school in Wuhan, the city where the coronavirus was first detected, multiple factors played a part in her decision to return to Britain last month.
Her partner, who was also in Wuhan, encountered visa problems, and she started to feel that the city she once regarded as “home” had become “less welcoming”.
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“All of a sudden, strangers would start telling me to go home. People would see me in a lift and wait for the next one. When DiDi [a ride-hailing app] drivers I ordered arrived and realised I was a foreigner, they’d refuse to take me,” the 30-year-old said.
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