Personal Flight

In February of 2020, the news of the death of Dr. Li Wenliang reverberated like an earthquake through the Chinese social web. His death affected millions of people in China. Among them was my future wife @yunnie, who resolved to leave the country as soon as she could. Later that year she did so, during the height of a global pandemic, but it was possibly her last chance before it would become extremely difficult to leave China at all for years. You can read another Hiver's experience of remaining in China after this time here:

https://hive.blog/hive-174578/@mobbs/life-in-chinese-lockdown-part-1-civilization-has-fallen
https://hive.blog/covid19/@mobbs/life-in-chinese-lockdown-part-2-the-new-normal

She was left with a problem though - her apartment and all of her belongings were still in China. She had to leave with just a little money and what items could fit in her suitcase. It was possible to get her family to sell her belongings on her behalf, but with a limit of merely $50,000* per year per person, how could she possibly get her savings and the proceeds from selling her apartment out of the country? She had worked for several years to pay the mortgage - it is not something to give up lightly.

* Incidentally this limit has sharply dropped recently, and it is now even harder to get money out of China. Also note that you will see different figures online. The $50,000 limit was technically a limit on purchasing foreign currency with CNY. If you already have foreign currency, you can transfer more out per year, but most Chinese nationals will have their money in CNY and this is the practical limit.

Capital Flight

Through our research, we found 3 basic options that people can use to get large sums of money out of China

1. Leveraging Family

While one person could only transfer up to $50,000, a person may have family members who can assist. If you transfer $100,000 each to several trusted family members, they can each make a $50,000 transfer out to a Western bank account in December, and then a second transfer in January, each using up their limit for the 2 year period.

There are several problems with this approach. If you only have a couple of family members who can do this for you, for example your parents in a one child family, you still can only send up to $300,000 this way. Another issue is that it exhausts your family members ability to get money out as well - even if they want to stay in China they may for example want to have foreign investments. And perhaps most importantly, this approach will raise so many anti-money-laundering flags when you do get the money out. Indeed it almost is a form of money laundering, though there are no proceeds of a crime. Good luck buying a house abroad if you use this approach.

2. Peer to Peer Matching

This is where you find someone who is in the opposite situation as you - they want to get money into China (for example, proceeds of a foreign investment) while avoiding capital controls. Once you find someone who is an ideal match, you transfer money to their bank in China and they transfer western currency to your bank in a western country.

This requires a very high level of trust - for most people it is simply not an option as they do not have a sufficiently trustworthy contact in the opposite circumstances. For those who attempt to use this route with strangers - there is a very high risk of being scammed. They may simply renege on their part of the deal, or perhaps find a way to reverse it.

3. Crypto

Finally, the crypto approach. First you buy crypto in China with CNY. Then you sell the crypto in a western country. Realistically the crypto of choice will be Bitcoin, because buying anything else in large quantities is difficult. You could also try Ethereum, but it doesn't offer an advantage for this use case, and USDT is possible but I wouldn't touch that with a 30 foot pole.

I won't pretend that this is super simple or without its own problems. Firstly you will likely pay a high premium since buying cryptocurrency is illegal in China. Secondly you may need to do it in multiple steps or you may take on volatility risk if you attempt to transfer it all at once. Thirdly, it may only be an option for those with sufficient technical knowledge and awareness. If you do know what you're doing, it's quite easy to avoid the risk of being scammed while buying Bitcoin - however without that level of knowledge it should be considered risky.

Life Changing Value

Cryptocurrency opens up the possibility of getting money out of China and other totalitarian states for potentially millions of people for whom it is otherwise impossible or an extreme challenge.

Does this justify $400 billion in market cap for the Bitcoin network? No, absolutely not. Does it justify the scams and the grift and the multitude of worthless meme tokens and projects without substance? No. The environmental damage of proof of work? Nope.

For most people, crypto may not offer any value at all, at least not in a way that is obvious to them today. But for some people, in some not so rare circumstances - crypto provides literally life changing value. My wife is proof of that.