“Get Rich and Get Going”: Understanding Chinese Lifestyle Migrants to Western Countries

What is it about?

There is a tendency in migration studies to categorise all voluntary migrants without direct economic incentives as lifestyle migrants. Over the past two decades, members of the Chinese middle class who have migrated to Western countries after accumulating wealth in their homeland have often been subsumed into this category. This study argues, however, that contemporary wealthy Chinese migrants cannot be simplistically classified as lifestyle migrants. Affluent Chinese mainlanders are frequently motivated to move abroad by concerns about domestic political issues, aspirations for improved education, social and natural environments, and the pursuit of a relatively more autonomous lifestyle in the West. This study draws on sixty semi-structured interviews with affluent mainland Chinese migrants to Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States since 2000. It contributes to the broader debate on the classification of wealthy migrants from rising global economic powers by demonstrating that no single category adequately captures the complexity of their motivations or their evolving characteristics. The findings offer a deeper understanding of migration phenomena involving wealthy individuals from emerging economic powers—an area that has thus far received limited scholarly attention.

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Why is it important?

This study suggests that wealthy Chinese migrants cannot be fully captured by any single existing category in migration studies. Their migration to Western countries is driven both by political concerns—commonly observed among emigrants from authoritarian or less democratic contexts—and by lifestyle aspirations that are typically associated with migrants from the Global North.

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