Despite her well- paying tech job, Li Daijing didn’t hesitate when her cousin asked for help running a restaurant in Mexico City. She packed up and left China for the Mexican capital last year, with dreams of a new adventure.

The 30-year-old woman from Chengdu, the Sichuan provincial capital, hopes one day to start an online business importing furniture from her home country.

“I want more,” Li said. “I want to be a strong woman. I want independence.”

Li is among a new wave of Chinese migrants who are leaving their country in search of opportunities, more freedom or better financial prospects at a time when China’s economy has slowed, youth unemployment rates remain high and its relations with the U.S. and its allies have soured.

While the U.S. border patrol arrested tens of thousands of Chinese at the U.S.-Mexico border over the past year, thousands are making the Latin American country their final destination. Many hope to start businesses of their own, taking advantage of Mexico’s proximity to the United States.

Last year, Mexico’s government issued 5,070 temporary residency visas to Chinese immigrants, twice as many as the previous year — making China third, behind the United States and Colombia, as the source of migrants granted the permits.

A deep-rooted diaspora that has fostered strong family and business networks over decades makes Mexico appealing for new Chinese arrivals; so does a growing presence of Chinese multinationals in Mexico, which have set up shop to be close to markets in the Americas.

“A lot of Chinese started coming here two years ago — and these people need to eat,” said Duan Fan, owner of Nueve y Media, a restaurant in Mexico City’s stylish Roma Sur neighborhood that serves the spicy food of Sichuan, his home province.

“I opened a Chinese restaurant so that people can come here and eat like they do at home,” he said.

Duan, 27, arrived in Mexico in 2017 to work with an uncle who owns a wholesale business in Tepito, near the capital’s historic center, and was later joined by his parents.

Shifts in a trend

Unlike earlier generations of Chinese who came to northern Mexico from the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, the new arrivals are more likely to come from all over China.

Data from the latest 2020 census by Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography show that Chinese immigrants are mainly concentrated in Mexico City. A decade ago, the census recorded the largest concentration of Chinese in the northernmost state of Baja California, on the U.S.- Mexico border across from California.

The arrival of Chinese multinationals is leading an influx of “people from eastern China, more educated and with a broader global background,” said Andrei Guerrero, academic coordinator of the Center for China-Baja California Studies.

In a middle-class Mexico City neighborhood, Viaducto-Piedad, near the city’s historic Chinatown, a new Chinese community has been growing since the late 1990s. Chinese immigrants have not only opened businesses, but have created community spaces for religious events and children’s recreation.

Viaducto-Piedad is recognized by the Chinese themselves as Mexico City’s “true Chinatown,” said Monica Cinco, a specialist in Chinese migration and general director of the EDUCA Mexico Foundation.

“When I asked them why, they would tell me, ‘because we live here. We have stores for Chinese consumption, beauty shops and restaurants just for Chinese,’ ” she said. “They live there; there is a community and several public schools in the area have a significant Chinese population.”

In downtown Mexico City, Chinese entrepreneurs have not only opened new wholesale stores but have also taken over dozens of buildings. At times, they have become a source of tension with local businesses and residents, who say the expansion of Chinese-owned enterprises is displacing them.

At a mini-market in a bustling downtown neighborhood selling Chinese products such as dried wood ear mushrooms and vacuum- packed spicy duck wings, 33-year-old Dong Shengli said he moved to Mexico City from Beijing a few months ago to help manage the shop for some friends.

Dong — who has since found a job with a wholesaler importing knockoff designer sneakers and clothing — said he had worked at China’s National Energy Commission, but was persuaded by his friends to come here.

He plans to explore business possibilities in Mexico, but China still has a pull for him. “My wife and my parents are in China. My mother is elderly, she needs me,” he said.

Others are leaving China in search of greater freedoms. That’s the case for 50-year-old Tan, who gave only his surname out of concern for the safety of his family, who remain in China. He arrived in Mexico this year from the southern province of Guangdong and got a job for a few months at a Sam’s Club. Back home, he got by doing various jobs, including at a chemical plant and writing magazine articles during the pandemic.

But he chafed under what he described as a repressive atmosphere in China.

“It’s not just the oppression in the workplace, it’s the mentality,” he said. “I can feel the political regression, the retreat of freedom and democracy. The implications of that truly make people feel twisted and sick. So, life is very painful.”

What caught his attention in Mexico City were the protests that often pack the city’s main avenues — proof, he said, that the freedom of expression he longs for exists in this country.

At the restaurant where she still helps out in the trendy Juárez neighborhood, Li said Mexico stands out as a land of opportunity for her and other Chinese who don’t have relatives in the U.S. to help them settle there. She said she left China partly because of the competitive workplace culture and high home prices.

Self-confident with a contagious smile, Li said she’s hopeful her skills working as a sales promoter for Chinese tech giant Tencent Games will help her get ahead in Mexico.

She says that in Mexico City she has not met many Chinese women like herself: newcomers, young and single.

Most are married and are moving to Mexico to reunite with their husbands.

“To come here is to face something unknown,” she said.

“I’m not married, I don’t have a boyfriend, it’s just myself,” she said, “so I’ll work hard and struggle.”

Haven in Thailand

Some Chinese families seeking to escape a grueling education system have found a haven in Thailand.

For DJ Wang’s son, the competition started in second grade.

Eight-year-old William was enrolled at a top elementary school in Wuhan, a provincial capital in central China. While kindergarten and first grade were relatively carefree, the homework started piling up in second grade. By third grade, his son was regularly finishing his day around midnight.

“You went from traveling lightly to carrying a very heavy burden,” Wang said. “That sudden switch, it was very hard to bear.”

Wang, who traveled often to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand for his job in tourism, decided to make a switch, moving his family to the city that sits at the base of mountains.

The family is among a wave of Chinese flocking to Thailand for its quality international schools and more relaxed lifestyle.

Jenson Zhang, who runs an education consultancy, Vision Education, for Chinese parents looking to move to Southeast Asia, said many middle-class families choose Thailand because schools are cheaper than private schools in cities like Beijing and Shanghai.

“Southeast Asia, it’s within reach, the visa is convenient and the overall environment, as well as people’s attitude towards Chinese people, it allows Chinese parents to feel more secure,” Zhang said.

A 2023 survey by private education company New Oriental found Chinese families also increasingly considering Singapore and Japan for their children’s overseas study. But tuition and the cost of living are much higher than in Thailand.

Within Thailand, the slow-paced city of Chiang Mai often ends up being the top choice. Other options include Pattaya and Phuket, both popular beach resorts, and Bangkok, though the capital is usually more expensive.

The trend has been ongoing for about a decade, but in recent years it’s gathered pace.

Lanna International School, one of Chiang Mai’s more selective schools, saw a peak of interest in the 2022-23 academic year, with inquiries doubling from a year earlier.

“Parents were really in a rush, they wanted to quickly change to a new school environment” because of pandemic restrictions, said Grace Hu, an admissions officer at Lanna International, whose position helping Chinese parents was created in 2022.

Du Xuan of Vision Education says parents coming to Chiang Mai fall into two types: Those who planned in advance what education they want for their kids, and those who experienced difficulties with the competitive Chinese education system. The majority are from the second group, she said.

In Chinese society, many value education to the point where one parent may give up their job and rent an apartment near their child’s school to cook and clean for them, and ensure their life runs smoothly. Known as “peidu,” or “accompanied studying,” the goal is academic excellence, often at the expense of the parent’s own life.

That concept has become twisted by the sheer pressure it takes to keep up.

In a country of 1.4 billion people, success is viewed as graduation from a good college. With a limited number of seats, class rank and test scores matter, especially on the college entrance exams known as the “gaokao.”

“If you have something, it means someone else can’t have that,” said Vision Education’s Du, whose own daughters attend school in Chiang Mai. “We have a saying about the gaokao: ‘One point will topple 10,000 people.’ The competition is that intense.”

Free time

Another lure: In Chiang Mai, freed from China’s emphasis on rote memorization and hours of homework, students have time to develop hobbies.

Jiang Wenhui moved from Shanghai to Chiang Mai in 2023. In China, she said, she had accepted that her son, Rodney, would get average grades because of his mild attention-deficit disorder. But she could not help thinking twice about her decision to move given how competitive every other family was.

“In that environment, you’ll still feel anxious,” she said. “Should I give it another go?”

In China, her energy was devoted to helping Rodney keep up in school, shuttling him to tutoring and keeping him on top of his coursework. In Thailand, he has time for hobbies and hasn’t needed to see a doctor for his attention-deficit disorder.

Rodney, who’s about to start eighth grade, has taken up acoustic guitar and piano, and carries around a notebook to learn new English vocabulary — all of it his own choice, Jiang said.

Wang says his son William, who is now 14 and about to enter high school, finishes his homework well before midnight and has developed outside interests. Wang, too, has changed his perspective on education.

“Here, if he gets a bad grade, I don’t think much of it, you just work on it,” he said. “Is it the case that if he gets a bad grade, that he will be unable to become a successful adult?”

“Now, I don’t think so.”