The journey from Dallas to the city in northern China involved two planes, three stops and more than 24 hours of travel. Tao, an electronics repairman in his early 30s, spent them wide awake — metal cuffs biting into his wrists and ankles, his mind racing.
He was being deported back to China, after American officials rejected his asylum claim. Questions swirled in his head.
What awaited him back in China, the country that he had tried so hard to escape? Would he be punished? Would he ever leave again?
Tao — whom we are identifying by his first name only in order to protect his family — was part of a record-breaking wave of undocumented Chinese migrants who, during and after the pandemic, made harrowing journeys through the jungles of Central America to the United States. Many, including Tao, were not high-profile dissidents but ordinary Chinese who felt suffocated by their government’s tightening grip on society and discouraged by dimming economic prospects.
Tao presented himself at the southern border in Texas and applied for political asylum, confident he would be accepted by a system he believed was open and liberal. The odds for any undocumented migrants applying for asylum in the United States are slim, but Chinese applicants have had a slightly higher success rate — in 2023, 11 percent of undocumented Chinese migrants like Tao were granted asylum.
But Tao’s claim was denied, even as others like him were getting through, as the Biden administration toughened its stance on illegal immigration.
That left Tao with a choice. After being sent back to China, he could go back to his previous life, working a dead-end job and hiding his political views, not only from the government but also from people around him who did not seem to feel the same — and who might report him to the authorities.
Or he could try to leave again, though that would be even more difficult now. His passport had been confiscated, his bank account was empty and his name was now on the authorities’ radar.
For Tao, the question was whether there was any space for him in today’s China. For decades, even Chinese who disagreed with the government’s tight controls had some space to express themselves. And the country’s economic boom made the restrictions on personal freedoms tolerable. But now, that growth is slowing, and the controls are growing. For some, only more extreme options remain.
We spent hours interviewing Tao and reviewed American immigration records, as well as official Chinese documents, social media posts and photos from his travels that he shared with us to support his account. He also shared text messages that he said were from Chinese security officers. And we talked to two people whom he interacted with when he was in the United States.
Still, some aspects of Tao’s account, particularly his interactions with the Chinese authorities, were difficult to verify, a common challenge in reporting on a security apparatus that is largely opaque. But the details he recounted are consistent with others who have described similar forms of pressure.
Tao, who is slim and boyish with a gentle demeanor, said that he wanted to share his story to try and make sense of his experience.
“There are rarely people who are willing to listen to me talk about this,” he said.
Between Reality and Propaganda
Tao was born in the 1990s, but as a child, he heard a lot about the year 1959.
His grandmother told stories about the Great Famine that began that year, wiping out one-fourth of the people in their part of Anhui Province, in eastern China. She said one woman she knew had been driven to cannibalism.
By the time Tao was born, in a village of about 20 families near the city of Fuyang, people were no longer starving, but poverty remained. His parents worked hard, alternating between factory work and pig farming, but still never earned enough. When they wanted to rebuild their adobe house with cement — the area was prone to flooding — they had to borrow money. When Tao was 14, contaminated formula poisoned many babies in Fuyang, becoming a nationwide scandal.
Yet in school, he was taught a different story. Textbooks in his Moral Education class declared that China would soon become a “moderately developed country,” but he wondered how the writers could be so sure, given the poverty around him. The books also extolled the Chinese military, but he learned from videos on YouTube — the site had not yet been blocked — that troops had massacred pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
He had questions, but few friends he could discuss them with. Whenever he tried to discuss politics at the dinner table, his father told him to focus on eating.
“I felt pretty torn,” he said. From his family’s stories, he said, he could “see what this society was really like, what this country was really like at the time.
“But many people don’t want to think about that,” he said.
He enrolled in a vocational college in the late 2000s, then moved to the coastal city of Suzhou to work as an electronics repairman, earning around $830 a month. He met a woman and thought they would start a family.
Still, he kept reading foreign websites, using software to bypass China’s internet censorship system. On overseas platforms like Twitter, he railed against seemingly every aspect of China under the Communist Party: food safety issues; income inequality; the personality cult around China’s leader, Xi Jinping.
Yet the space for even hidden defiance was shrinking. In 2018, Tao said, the police summoned him and showed him a post he had written that criticized Mr. Xi’s move that year to scrap presidential term limits. They fined him and made him promise in writing not to do it again, he said.
Soon after, he learned that he could get a visa to Japan by enrolling in a language school, so he paid more than $4,000, his life’s savings, to attend one in Tokyo, he said. For two years, he said, he thrilled to the sight of politicians campaigning on the streets. He posted more boldly on social media.
In 2022, his visa expired. Determined not to return to China, he began looking into a new option: the United States. Growing numbers of Chinese citizens were getting there through Ecuador, which at that time did not require visas for them. He joined WhatsApp groups that promised to show people how to make the journey.
That September, he set out.
A Harrowing Passage, Then a Crushing Rejection
When Tao left Japan, he had about $20,000, money he had saved from working after his language program, and through some support from his parents.
By the time he crossed into El Paso, Texas, two months later, he had less than $450.
In between, he had crossed the treacherous, at-times deadly stretch of Panamanian jungle known as the Darién Gap, where migrants must brave muddy hills, snakes and bandits. He had been extorted by officials in Colombia and swindled by a human smuggler in Honduras. He had been stranded in Mexico for three weeks, waiting for a permit to travel north, paying about $3 a night for a bed in a courtyard with a makeshift roof.
Still, he remained hopeful. He imagined enrolling in English classes in the United States and getting certified as an electrician. He was detained upon crossing a checkpoint in Texas, but he had expected that, and immediately applied for political asylum.
He was transferred to an immigration jail in Aurora, Colo., where an immigration officer conducted his asylum interview. During that interview, Tao said, he showed his social media posts and described being summoned by Chinese police. He said the asylum officer asked whether the police had ever beaten him, and that he was truthful and said no, assuming his interrogation experience was sufficient.
“They know what kind of country China is,” he thought.
Then, he waited. But in late December 2022, he was told he had not passed his asylum interview. Immigration records show that he petitioned a judge in Aurora to review his case. In early January, the judge rejected his claim, too, he said. He would be deported.
Tao was stunned. He pleaded with officials, saying he might be punished if he went back to China. He wrote letters to an immigration lawyer, the U.S. Justice Department and the United Nations, he said. He also wrote an eight-page letter to his parents detailing why he had wanted to leave China, what he had posted online. He was contemplating suicide, he said, and wanted his parents to know why.
Tao never got an explanation for the denial. Immigration lawyers say that poor translation, lack of legal representation or rushed decisions by overworked asylum officers can make it hard for migrants to make their cases. Chen Chuangchuang, a lawyer in California who has represented many Chinese asylum seekers, said he has seen strong cases denied and weak ones approved.
When officials attempted to put Tao on a deportation flight in March 2023, he said, he hurled himself down a flight of stairs. He said he was hospitalized and then returned to jail, this time in Texas.
“I felt that my fate wasn’t in my own hands,” Tao said, “like I was just drifting in the wind.”
(Zheng Cunzhu, a Chinese activist in the United States whom Tao contacted afterward, said that Tao had shared the same account of his ordeal with him, as did one of Tao’s cellmates in detention, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.)
In late 2023, Tao was again put on a plane. He was bound for China.
Deported, Watched and Worn Down
After his flight landed in northern China, things started going wrong immediately.
Customs officials rifled through his belongings and found photocopies he had made of his letters pleading for asylum, which he had not had time to destroy. When he tried to deny that they were his, an officer slapped him, he said.
The officers also grilled him about whether any Chinese smugglers had helped him get to the United States. They pressured him to frame a fellow deportee for illegally arranging his journey, Tao said, threatening to jail him if he did not comply.
He said he agreed to — a decision he still regrets.
The officers confiscated his passport and papers and then let him go.
Tao shared a customs document with The New York Times showing that his passport had been seized. Chinese immigration officials did not respond to faxed questions about how they handle repatriated migrants.
In interviews, other people recently deported back to China from the United States said they had been questioned by officials but not abused or threatened. Experts say the government generally does not mistreat deportees, because it tends to see them as economic migrants, not political threats.
Tao left the airport with only his cash, his phone and some clothes. His parents bought him a train ticket to a coastal city in southern China, where they were working. When his mother saw him, she begged him, tearfully, not to leave again.
Just like that, Tao was back in the life he had tried to leave. He found a job driving a forklift at an auto parts factory, earning about $960 a month. He tried to ignore his festering resentment.
Then, about a month after his return, he received a phone call, he said. The caller, who identified himself as a state security officer, summoned him to a meeting.
There, he said, two officers showed him the letter that he had mailed to his parents — which his parents had never received. They told him that he had violated China’s national security law, internet law and anti-secession law, he said. They asked if he knew others who opposed the government or wanted to leave China. Could he provide their contacts?
Tao was terrified. “No matter what they say, I have to cooperate,” he thought.
Over the next months, the officers messaged him regularly, asking for information on other migrants, Tao said. (He said he made up answers.) They met in person twice more, once at a KFC and once at a teahouse.
The pressure was not just political. China’s economic slowdown meant that workers were being pushed harder than ever. Tao’s boss frequently asked him to work overtime. His brother, who worked in an auto body shop, worried about being laid off.
“Everyone is desperate,” Tao said. “The boss is desperately exploiting the employees, and the employees are desperately trying to perform.”
Tao also resented his co-workers, who he said were nationalistic, talking excitedly about the prospect of China and the United States going to war.
Seven months after his return, he decided to apply for a new passport. But when a worker at the local government office tried to process his application, the system flagged that he was on an exit ban list, Tao said. He was rejected.
A Fragile Freedom and an Uncertain Future
After his passport application was rejected, Tao refused to give up. He wrote to the authorities in the northern Chinese city where his passport was confiscated, to ask them to revoke the restrictions, arguing that he had cooperated with the customs officials’ requests. He also tried his luck in a different city, traveling to Shanghai to apply again. To his surprise, this time he succeeded.
He then contacted a job agency that places Chinese workers in a Southeast Asian country. In October of last year, he said goodbye to his parents again.
As he once again passed through Chinese customs, this time outward bound, his heart pounded. He wondered if he would be pulled aside.
The officer waved him through.
We met Tao in person for the first time not long after he arrived there, after he finished a 12-hour shift at work. We walked to an outdoor seating area in his housing complex, where for the next several hours he recounted his story.
He spoke eagerly, without concern about being overheard.
His new life was not a total escape from what he had chafed at in China. His work, at an electronics factory, was still tiring and low paying. He had tried talking to some of his co-workers, mostly fellow Chinese, about his distaste for China’s government, but they disagreed.
The state security officers still sent him messages checking in, he said, and he did not know if they knew he had left. Just a few days before we met, one had asked him what he had meant by a post on WeChat in which he called India’s prime minister authoritarian.
Still, he now felt safe ignoring the officers’ messages. His contract allowed him to stay in the country for two years. Afterward, he hoped to go to Europe or Mexico.
As for what he would do then, he was not sure. Sometimes, he spoke in sweeping terms about awakening other Chinese to what he called the evils of the Communist Party. He had reached out to the owner of an anti-government blog living in the Netherlands, asking if he could join his efforts. He dreamed of protesting in front of Chinese embassies.
Other times, his goals were humbler: to find a job that was fulfilling, maybe send money home.
What mattered, he said, was having the freedom to choose.
“Posting on Twitter, protesting, those of course are important,” he said. “But they’re not everything. I just want to be a normal person.”
Vivian Wang is a China correspondent based in Beijing, where she writes about how the country’s global rise and ambitions are shaping the daily lives of its people.
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