The young Chinese man looked lost and exhausted when Border Patrol agents left him at a transit station. Deng Guangsen, 28, had spent the last two months traveling to San Diego from the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, through seven countries on plane, bus and foot, including traversing Panama's dangerous Darién Gap jungle.
It has become known as “runxue,” or the study of running away. The term started as a way to get around censorship, using a Chinese character whose pronunciation spells like the English word “run” but means “moistening." Now it's an internet meme. The monthly number of Chinese migrants crossing the Darién has been rising gradually, from 913 in January to 2,588 in September. For the first nine months of this year, Panamanian immigration authorities registered 15,567 Chinese citizens crossing the Darién. By comparison, 2,005 Chinese people trekked through the rainforest in 2022, and just 376 in total from 2010 to 2021.
Xi Yan said she decided to leave China in March, when she traveled to the southern city of Foshan to see her mother but had to leave the next day when state security agents and police officers harassed her brother and told him that his sister was not allowed in the city. She realized she was still on the state blacklist, six years after being detained for gathering at a seaside spot to remember Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel peace laureate who died in a Chinese prison.
Catholic Charities of San Diego uses hotels to provide shelters for migrants, including 1,223 from China in September. The average shelter stay is a day and a half among all nationalities. For Chinese visitors, it’s less than a day. Many migrants who spoke to the AP did not give their full names out of fear of drawing attention to their cases. Some said they came for economic reasons and paid 300,000 to 400,000 yuan .