Climbers (part one): A way out of China
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This summer, I went to report a China story in a place I'd never expected to find one. The deserts, jungles, and borders of the Americas. Isn't that group Chinese? Okay, I'm going, Marguerite. Okay.

I wanted to meet Chinese people on a journey that's come to be known as "zǒuxiàn" or "walking the line." It's a striking new trend that's emerged in the last two years. Chinese migrants fly across the world to South America, then make their way on boats and buses and on foot across some of the wildest stretches of the planet to reach one place.

The United States of America. The infamous Darien Gap on the border between Colombia and Panama is the only land route between South and North America. Those attempting to cross it risk robbery and death. This route is taken by many desperate migrants from countries torn apart by war, crime and poverty. But in the last few years, more and more Chinese people have been taking this route to reach the U.S. too.

Last year, there were more than 37,000. That's nearly 10 times more than the year before, and 50 times more than the year before that. And that surprised me. Because China is a superpower. It's the second largest economy in the world. It's at peace, and it's strong enough to challenge America for global dominance. I wanted to understand: who are these Chinese migrants? What is driving them out of China?

And what awaits them in America? The greatest invasion in history is taking place right here in our country. They are coming in from every corner of the earth. They're coming at levels that we've never seen before. I reject the false choice that suggests we must either choose between securing our border or creating a system of immigration that is safe, orderly and humane. We can and we must do both.

These migrants are crossing the US border illegally, but once they do so, most of them try to stay by turning themselves into the Border Patrol and seeking asylum. If the US grants them asylum, they can stay legally and one day, eventually, become citizens.

This is not a story about the geopolitical sweep of great power competition. It's about the most basic dream that both America and China promised to its people: that of a better life. It's about Chinese individuals who've lost hope in China's ability to fulfill that dream, but still believe in the American promise.

I'm Alice Su, The Economist's senior China correspondent. This is the first episode of Climbers, a four-part series on Drum Tower in which we meet Chinese migrants and follow them on their Zou Xian journey, from the deadly jungle in Colombia all the way to the Chinese neighborhood in LA where they're starting to build their new lives. But not all of them will make it.

This week, we head to a tiny town on the Colombian coast where Chinese migrants began one of the most dangerous legs of the journey. We ask, why are they taking such a risk? Are they prepared for what lies ahead? And for those who do make it all the way to America, will it be worth it? This is Drum Tower from The Economist.

We've just arrived in this beach town called Nicocli. It's on the coast of Colombia, and it's gorgeous. In June this year, I went to Nicocli, a remote tourist town in Colombia right on the edge of the Caribbean Sea. But it's not your typical holiday destination.

You know, there's all these things that make it very unusual. For one thing, when you go along the beach, there are all of these tents set up. Basically, they're migrant encampments and you see that there are migrants there mostly from Venezuela, but also from Haiti and from other parts of the world. Some of them have been living there for months. They have mats set up. They have their children there. Some of them are getting haircuts at night, which shows you just kind of how long they've been here, trying to save up enough money to go on the next leg of their journey.

Nkokli is a tiny town being pulled in two opposite directions. You see these cheap, colorful hostels everywhere, Western tourists drinking cocktails on the sand, party music in the background, but also migrants living in tents and humanitarian groups giving out water in between the beach bars. Migrants are coming here from all over the world because it's a well-established starting point for this route to the United States.

This tiny town is the last spot where migrants can visit ATMs and supermarkets before they enter the jungle, the Darien Gap. My producer Marguerite Howell and I came here because we knew that everyone who crosses the Darien Gap goes through this town. When we arrived in Nicolclis, I found it hard to imagine that we'd actually find any Chinese people here.

To get here, I'd taken three flights from Taipei flying more than 30 hours and then driven across bumpy roads surrounded by cows and banana plantations. And everyone was speaking Spanish. It felt so far away from the world I usually report on.

But I'd seen the stats. According to Panama's government, in 2023, more than 25,000 Chinese people crossed the Darien Gap, making them the fourth largest nationality, just behind Venezuela, Ecuador, and Haiti. More than 10,000 Chinese people had crossed the Darien in the first five months of this year alone. So there had to be some Chinese migrants here.

So we were just walking around here and I was getting kind of nervous because I wasn't sure if we would find Chinese people but after about 10 minutes of walking through the town, we came to this hotel where our local guide says a lot of Chinese people usually gather and as we approached, I could see there was like this group of Chinese people just standing in a circle on the porch.

And we approached them and I talked to them. I said, are you from China? And they said, yes, we are. And I asked them, you know, what are you doing here? And they're kind of like, what do you think we're doing? Obviously, we're walking together. And what they mean is that they're going together on this smuggling route up to the U.S. The Chinese people said they were walking together or walking the line.

In the last two years, this term "walking" has become an online slang term in Chinese social media for smuggling to the United States through South and Central America. Zouxian started going viral in 2022 when China lifted its zero-COVID restrictions and people started exiting the country. Chinese migrants posted videos of themselves crossing the jungle on Douyin and KuaiShou, the Chinese versions of TikTok.

Some of them had a distinct influencer vibe. They would put adventurous music over videos of themselves trudging through the mud. And they were often really cheerful. They'd meet migrants from all over the world and take selfies with them. India! Brother! Yeah! Victory!

I watched one Chinese guy film himself singing on a canoe going through Panama. He was singing a song about being brave and holding on to your dreams in the middle of a storm. You can hear kids laughing behind him, but you can also hear one kid saying, "I'm scared."

Chinese people were seeing these videos on social media too. And I could understand why some of them would be inspired to go, because it didn't look that hard. But what was it actually like on the ground? By the time I went to Colombia, the term 走线 had already been censored online. Those videos had vanished from the Chinese internet. But there were still lots of Chinese groups discussing routes and itineraries for 走线 on encrypted messaging apps like Telegram.

I'd been lurking in those groups and watching the conversations for months, but I was still amazed to finally meet Chinese migrants walking the line in person. Most of them didn't want to talk on the record. They were focused on surviving the trip without upsetting their smugglers, who they called snakeheads, or being discovered by the Chinese government. They were suspicious of one another, too. They worried that the other Chinese people on the way could be fraudsters or Chinese government spies.

It was clear that the migrants were transforming Nikokli. The whole town was catering to them. There was a street full of shops selling gear for migrants planning to cross the Darien Gap.

So we're at the shop where they are selling these tarps and tents for people to sleep in when they go through the jungle. Ironically, they're actually made in China. We're also looking at these black rubber boots in all sizes. They also have insect repellent. They also have these like little gas burners. And it's clear that there's definitely Chinese customers coming here because there's a sign on the wall that says, we receive payments with bank cards. And then it says in Chinese, we receive payments with bank cards.

Basically the same thing. I asked the shopkeepers who wrote it for them and they said it's just the computer. The Colombian saleswomen said they had lots of Chinese customers who shop here before they cross the Darien. It's become so normal there that it can sound like the migrants are just picking up some gear for a camping trip. But the Darien Gap is no joke.

This is a race into hell. Welcome to the Darien Gap, a 60-mile stretch of roadless, lawless, remote rainforest that links Colombia to Panama. Migrants have reported rapes and robberies. Families with small children struggle to scale muddy mountains and escape rushing waters. Along the way, they face exhaustion, disease, drowning, and the very real risk of being robbed, assaulted, or even killed.

The Darien Gap is a wild, muddy jungle that stretches across the Colombia-Panama border. Part of it is controlled by a drug trafficking cartel called the Gulf Clan. They work with smugglers who take the migrants across some of the jungle. But on the way, they still face hunger, disease, and dangerous wildlife. Jaguars, venomous snakes, crocodiles, and even piranhas. Once the migrants leave the cartel-controlled part of the jungle, they risk being robbed by armed gangs.

Women and children are often sexually assaulted. More than 300 migrants have died or disappeared in the Darien Gap since 2022, according to the International Organization for Migration. So I was wondering, did the Chinese migrants know just how many risks they were facing? And what had happened to them in China to make all these risks seem worthwhile?

It's funny that I was worried about finding Chinese migrants in the Kokli because soon I started bumping into them all over the place. I saw them on the street, in the supermarkets, buying supplies, and in restaurants. At one point, we met a Chinese lady at a beach restaurant complaining that there wasn't enough meat in her soup. And I wondered, how is she going to survive the dairy and gap?

I couldn't help noticing the class difference between the Chinese and the other migrants. Locals in Nekokli were noticing it too. On the street where everyone was buying camping equipment for the jungle, I met a man offering to recycle the goods that Chinese migrants weren't able to bring into the jungle.

He was buying everything the Chinese people had abandoned in their hotels: clothes, shoes, cell phones, computers, sports shoes, and reselling it in Nekokli. He said the Chinese stuff was great, really high quality, and people in town loved it.

Soon, I found these Chinese migrant hotels. They were scattered across town and they had signs in Mandarin advertising room prices and offering money exchange. I went into one of them, a narrow building about four stories high. It had simple rooms, unadorned white walls, and every room was occupied by Chinese migrants. Some of them were sitting on plastic stools in the hallway, smoking. Others were standing on the balcony looking at the busy street below.

And inside these hotels, the migrants were more relaxed. They'd finished buying their equipment, so they were just sitting around waiting for the snakeheads to text them when it was time to move. And they started to tell me their stories. My two sisters and I are all surnamed Huang. So all along the journey, everyone has been calling us the three Huang sisters. I met Sister Huang in the hallway of the migrant hotel.

She was wearing a bright pink dress and flip-flops and shouting for her younger sisters to pass her a hairdryer. She was in her 40s and sharing a room with her two sisters, who were both in their 20s. And she invited me into her hotel room to answer my questions. The younger sisters were shy about talking to me, but happy to lounge around on the bed. They were looking at their phones and teasing each other. They reminded me of my own sisters back home.

I sat on the bed too, and the oldest Huang sister opened her WeChat to show me how the snakeheads were organizing their trip. Look, these are Chinese people walking through the jungle. Hello.

This is the person who's leading us through the jungle. The snakeheads were posting photos on WeChat of their Chinese clients. They'd gather them in groups and take photos at stops along the way, from Quito, Ecuador, to this little town in Colombia.

They did this to prove to their bosses and to other Chinese customers that the migrants were being delivered safely. I added one of these snakeheads on WeChat too. And I asked him, "How much does it cost to book a trip across the Darien Gap?" He got back to me straight away in very bad Chinese. He said there were three packages. The most expensive trip cost $1,500 and took only two days on horseback. The second tier was $700 and included two days of walking and another two days on a boat.

The third option, which was what most of the other migrants took, cost about $300 for a week of walking through the jungle. The Huang sisters were paying for the second tier. And so were most of the other Chinese migrants, although some of the ones with children were paying for the horses.

Sister Huang had come a long way. She grew up in a rural village in Guizhou, one of the poorest provinces in China. And she told me what she thought of her options back home. In my hometown, the women my age are all farming or taking care of their children. That's it. Either that, or you are grinding away in a factory, right? Well, that's not what I want.

I don't want to leave day by day with my face to the yellow earth and my back to the sky. Farming or factory life wasn't for her. Sister Huang had already broken many of the norms and conventions in her hometown. She'd left the village to go work in towns, then cities, and then even abroad as a migrant worker in Singapore. She became financially independent, which gave her the capacity to divorce her gambling husband and raise two children to university age.

She was like so many other rural migrants I'd met before inside China, full of ambition and grit, willing to work as hard as it took to attain a better life. It's not that I'm brave. It's just that in your heart, you've got to ask yourself, what do you truly want? So I asked her, what do you want? What I want is a different life.

In the last two years, Huang said China had changed. The economy was slowing. People weren't spending money. So many families had spent all their savings and so many businesses had closed during the three years of zero COVID. Huang was working at an online supermarket platform. The company started demanding that she work longer and longer hours while paying her less and less. Before it was okay. You could make about 10,000 RMB per month.

But now, still working the same hours, you only come away with 5,000, 6,000 tops. Sometimes not even that much. Would you keep on going for that? This is happening all across China. There's an online term for it. Involution, or Neijuan. It's the idea that you reach a point where everyone is working harder and harder, but getting fewer and fewer returns.

Sister Huang didn't want to stick around in that downward spiral. Yeah, the company squeezes you so much that you've no motivation left to keep going. So we wondered, is there a way out? Is there a path to better prospects anywhere else in the world? We asked around and heard that other places were better. So I thought, this is a gamble worth taking.

I had been trying to make sense of why Chinese people would go all the way to Colombia to hire smugglers and cross the Darien Gap just to get a higher-paying job in America. Sister Huang kept talking about finding a "chu lu," a way out, a path of upward mobility. You only live once, right? You only live once. Either you are brave enough to go and fight for it, or you just stick to your path.

Accept your status and put your hat down, right? In China, for people in the lower income class, for ordinary migrant workers like us, there's just no way out. That phrase stuck with me. 出路 and escape, a way to make it, a way out. And I realized this wasn't the first risk Huang had taken for the sake of changing her status.

She'd already left her village, left her husband, and defied social norms to chase her ambitions. And up until now, those risks had paid off. But this time, she was taking a bigger gamble than ever before. And I worried about whether Huang really understood how dangerous this trip was. She was worried too, especially for her two younger sisters who'd never left China before.

They had these huge backpacks on the floor and plastic bags full of bread and water they'd bought for the jungle. And they kept discussing if the bags were too heavy and how they didn't buy waterproof boots because they thought they had too much stuff. So far, their trip had gone smoothly, except when they bought the wrong plane tickets on their way from Egypt to Ecuador. But Huang told me about another group of Chinese migrants who had been stripped naked, robbed, and abandoned on a hillside the day before.

Her sisters were scared. Huang wanted to make sure her sisters brought enough U.S. dollars to pay off anyone who demanded money from them, but not so much that they'd become targets. And this was a dilemma for many of the Chinese migrants. They could afford to pay double or sometimes even quadruple the smuggling costs that the other migrants paid. Locals joked that they were VIP migrants, but that also made them vulnerable to robbery.

And they seemed to just know so little about the countries they were about to go through. At one point, Huang forgot the name of which country she was in, and I had to remind her, this is Colombia. I left the Huangs' room worried for them. But then I met another migrant couple who made me even more worried. I saw them walking up the stairs in the hotel, loaded with heavy bags from the supermarket.

The husband was wearing sunglasses and taking each step slowly. The wife had a low ponytail and a soft face. I ran to catch up with them. They told me to call them Agan and Ajin. They were 41 and 44 years old. I then realized that the husband was visually impaired. He wasn't totally blind, but he could only see blurry shapes.

They invited me into their room on the hotel's top floor, and they introduced me to their two kids, Angela, who's 12, and Tom, who's 10. The kids were skinny and energetic, wearing big t-shirts and playing with a tablet on the top bunk of a bunk bed. I asked Agan and Ajin why they were here, and just a note here, they requested that we alter their voices. We're mainly doing this for the kids, so they can be in an environment where they can live a good life.

It wasn't just about the economy. They said they'd been politically awakened in the last few years. I'd say we woke up to reality relatively late, maybe in the last couple of years. Especially me. I feel my past self was half awake and half asleep.

Agan is a southerner from Guangdong province, so he speaks Cantonese. He said he often listened to Hong Kong radio stations in the past. And he noticed a difference with Chinese media, especially during the pandemic. Everything was positive energy, and it didn't match what he was experiencing in real life. I used to always get the feeling that something was off. But when you're living inside an information cocoon, you don't have the full picture.

So if you look at Chinese domestic media, there's a positive spin on everything, right? But it doesn't seem to match with what everyone is experiencing in real life. Actually, once you see through it all, you realize that power flows from the top to the bottom in this society. And for ordinary people, you can't live life with dignity, right? Even a minor city management officer can insult you or even beat you up.

And that discrepancy made Agan angry. Agan started following social media influencers in 2019. He discovered there were live streamers on apps like Douyin who would make videos from outside of China or create chat rooms with more critical discussions of what was happening in the country. He didn't use a VPN, but he managed to find small corners of the Chinese internet where people were criticizing the Communist Party.

And it was in those corners that he also learned about Zou Xian. The more he listened to the influencers, the more Agan felt that China was doomed. He said it was heading down the path of North Korea. He wanted to get the kids out. And his wife, Ajin, agreed. Actually, it's for my two children, for them to have a freer future. My husband and I, at our age...

No matter how bad things get in China, we could ride it out. But I don't want my children to end up like us. But sitting there with the family beneath a buzzing light, I couldn't imagine how they were going to get across the Darien Gap. They had a smuggler arranged, but Agan couldn't even see clearly. And the kids were so small. Agan said they'd explain to the kids why they were leaving, but they didn't fully get it.

I asked how they were feeling, and Tom, the boy, said he felt a kind of emptiness inside. He missed his friends. They were asking him on WeChat why he wasn't showing up at school anymore. His mom told him not to give away where they were.

I noticed that the whole family was wearing big cross necklaces. But Agan said actually they just bought those so that they could blend in on the trail. They thought wearing crosses might deter bandits from targeting them. I heard there are a lot of Catholics on this route. I don't know the specifics, but maybe if you run into a thug and they think you're someone of faith, you might have a better chance of being spared. And something else was worrying me.

Even if Agan and Ajun made it to America, how were they planning to stay? They were fed up with China's political system, but they hadn't been directly targeted by it. I asked if they were planning to seek political asylum. In the future, when you apply for asylum, I don't think you should lie. Just be truthful, right? You can't exaggerate or make up things that haven't actually happened to you.

I don't think that's necessary. For me, I think I've been through mental persecutions. That is what I call it. During COVID, so many absurd and inhumane things happened. Take for example, say you owned a pet dog. If you, the owner, got COVID, they would kill the dog, destroy it for humanitarian reasons. Even if it's just a dog, it's still... There were so many infuriating things happening.

You could really say we lived through mental persecution. This was really no joke. I could relate to the psychological pressure Agan was referring to. I lived through zero COVID in China too. But I couldn't help comparing his story to those of other migrants on this journey. They were fleeing places like Venezuela and Afghanistan. Agan and Ajan felt suffocated and desperate to make a new life for their kids. But was that enough to qualify for American asylum?

I doubted it, especially when some of the other Chinese migrants were telling me that they were going to get asylum by lying. Downstairs in the same hotel, I'd met a bald man in his 40s, also from Guangdong, who ran a tour bus business. He had fallen into debt during the pandemic.

And he told me that he loved China and would never have left if he wasn't in debt. And as soon as he made enough money in America, he planned to go back home. And when I asked him how he planned to stay and work in America, he told me outright that he was going to lie and exploit the asylum system.

He said political asylum in America is just a deceptive game. Americans get to feel good about their morals while actually using the system to import cheap labor for the dirty, tiring jobs that Americans don't want to do. That was the tricky thing about Zou Xian migrants. They had all kinds of different motivations. And it seemed so arbitrary that they were all on this journey together. Even Agan noticed that.

The most tragic thing here, Mr. Su, what I find most tragic is that the majority of Chinese people walking the line, they aren't believers in freedom or democracy or those kinds of values. I think that's really sad. Perhaps a lot of them are on this path because they want to strike gold. To be frank, I look down on those kinds of people. They might still believe that China is superior, right?

And America is just like the big countryside. On the one hand, they want to come here to make money. On the other hand, they criticize the U.S. and talk it down. I think this is tragic. Many of the migrants I met in Nekokli had critical political opinions. They thought China was going in the wrong direction. But they hadn't done anything to try and change their country from within.

They'd never protested or petitioned or been punished for doing so. It was too dangerous and futile. They chose to leave China instead. But that meant most of them had no proof of persecution. I wasn't sure how they could possibly qualify for American asylum, especially when I met other migrants who had taken those risks in China and paid the costs.

I started to feel like something was wrong with me. I was worried that like some of my close friends, I too would suddenly go mad or that I'd suddenly disappear. Wang Jun is 34 years old. He's originally from Hunan, but he migrated to Shenzhen in the early 2010s. I didn't know if it was a mental or physical problem or what, but everything was piling up. I was anxious that I'd be taken away by the police.

And I was deeply worried about China's economic and political future. I felt hopeless. He joined a pro-democracy group there and was arrested and convicted of subverting state power as a result. He spent more than three years in prison.

Wang was released in 2020, but he still lived in fear. After I got out, I didn't want to get involved in discussions about democracy or even be around the pro-democracy people I knew. I didn't even dare to contact them because I was afraid the Chinese government could make my life difficult again.

Or they could do something worse and retaliate against me somehow. So in the three years after I got out, I kept very quiet. I just focused on work. I didn't dare to express the things I was thinking or speak about the injustices happening in our society. I didn't dare to speak at all.

Last year, in 2023, Wang started feeling like he couldn't breathe. He worried that he'd either disappear into detention again or lose his mind. I felt like my chest was tight and I couldn't breathe. I didn't know why. I went to the hospital and was tested for everything. All my results were normal. But this pain, it was something I could genuinely feel.

Even now, I still sometimes feel it because I was so worried about what might happen to me and all these other things that were going on. And then he heard about Zou Xian. I finally made up my mind. I'd leave China. But it wasn't easy. Even getting out of China was a struggle for Wang.

He tried to fly out from Guangzhou, but they wouldn't let him on the flight. And then he went to Yunnan, the southwestern province which borders Laos, to try and leave by land. The border police detained him and accused him of being in a telecom fraud network. But they had no evidence of it. And eventually, they let him go. As soon as I left and walked across China's border,

I felt this rush of relief. I could breathe again. I had tears in my eyes. It was so hard won.

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That's BetterHelpHELP.com. Many of the migrants in Nekokli felt that same rush of relief when they got out of China. But now, they were getting nervous again because the most daunting part of their journey was about to begin. On the town's main street, migrants were lining up with their bags and big bottles of water to get on boats which would take them across the stretch of water separating Nekokli from the entrance to the jungle.

we spotted a big group of Chinese people standing under a tent, taping all their gear in waterproof bags. They were anxious, waiting to hear their names called for the boats. But one group of three young men, all dressed in black, seemed excited. So I went to chat with them. One of them was named Sam Lu. He was from Wuhan. He told me he'd been one of the first people to get COVID all the way back in 2019, and he'd gotten so sick he thought he might die.

But at that time, the authorities kept saying it was nothing to worry about. Sam recovered, but his grandmother caught COVID from him and she died. Sam was devastated. He wrote about what had happened to his grandmother online. And then the police called him in and rebuked him for what he'd said. Sam had been set on leaving China ever since. He told me he'd sold his house to make this trip and he was ready to die on the way.

I asked him what made him so sure, and he said, look, a human mouth has two functions, to eat and to speak. But nowadays in China, people are only allowed to eat, but not to speak any truth. What kind of a life is that? We'd come to Nekokli to find out why Chinese migrants were coming all this way to reach America. I was amazed at the range of people we met.

They didn't always fit into neat categories of political dissidents or economic migrants. Some were in a gray area in between. Everyone complained about the economy, but many also blamed the political system and China's leader, Xi Jinping, for that. I was struck by how many of the migrants are parents, either on the road with their children or planning to reach America first and bring their kids over later. I was also struck by how broad their backgrounds were.

They came from all over China, not only the typical emigrant provinces like Fujian and Guangdong, but also Sichuan, Shandong, Hubei, Jiangsu, rural and urban, rich and poor provinces from every Chinese region. What really united the migrants I met was their shared sense of expectation. They wanted better lives.

For some, that meant better opportunities. For others, it meant greater freedom. They were no longer satisfied with the bare minimum of safety and enough to eat. And that set them apart from many of the other migrants on the same road. I kept thinking about what Sam from Wuhan said, that humans have mouths not only to eat, but to speak. A generation or two ago, Chinese people may have been thankful just to be free from hunger. But now, they're hungry for more.

The Chinese migrants were looking for a way out, a way up, a path to better lives for their next generation, a path that no longer seemed open in China. And they believed that America would fulfill that dream. But I wasn't sure if they were right. Would they even make it to America? And if they did, would it be worth it? We watched the Chinese migrants board the boats and waved goodbye. The crossing would take them about two hours, and the waters looked calm.

But I was worried about the Huang sisters, about Agan and Ajun, about Sam and his two friends, and about the many families we'd met. They were all heading into the unknown. We didn't know if they would survive the jungle. Did you ask if they have any tips on going through the jungle? I've reached out to the couple, but their phone might not have signal. Could you help me ask them if they have anything to eat in the jungle?

or what we should watch out for. I can't get a hold of them. We didn't know if they would even reach the American border. We're in a bit of an awkward situation. Aiyo, we were cheated out of our money twice by two different snakeheads. And then we were robbed on the road in Huchitan. And we didn't know what would happen once they got across it either. I told them.

I even told them I was sentenced to three plus years by the Chinese government. But still, I failed the interview. They don't care. They don't want to understand what happened to you back in China. That's all coming up in the next three weeks of Drum Tower.

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