Project Exodus

出埃及记 2023-2024

In January 2023, shortly after China lifted its ‘Zero-Covid policy’ (another ruthless state’s strategy that effectively made its people poorer and poorer), I remotely collaborated with China’s online experimental art platform, Cell Phone Plays Me, to publish an advertisement titled Calling for the Artists Who Wish to Flee China. In the next three hours, the readership of this text reached thousands and hundreds of strangers requested to add me as their WeChat friend so that we could talk. Very soon, the text was censored and automatically erased, and the platform was at risk of being permanently suspended, again.

From time to time, I talked and listened to those strangers acting as a professional immigration consultant willing to provide one year of free service. I indeed collected many interesting stories (such as why they want to leave and through which way they think they can) and offered them sincere suggestions and helpful knowledge. Some of them — rich or middle class, with proper evidence to prove their artisitc talent according to the immigration criteria — then successfully obtained their US Green Cards despite the worsening US-China relation. Yet no one would really leave as they knew China would always be where they could make enough money. On the contrary, some talented but with poor financial statements were quickly rejected by the Australian Immigration Office when they submitted student or tourist visa applications. No potential illegal labourers are allowed, though the country is said to be always short of so-called low-end labourers.

Ai Weiwei, one of the world’s most famous and rich artists from China, once said, ‘Actually, we are all political refugees’. I agree with him on this sentence.

2023年1月初，我与中国的实验艺术平台“手机玩我”合作发布了一篇《想润的艺术家看过来》。

据艺术平台主理人的反馈，那篇文章发布3小时后点击率达到了几千，马上就被审查404了，原因不详。当然，这已不是新鲜事儿了。

自消息发布之后，上百位陌生人请求添加我为好友。接下来，我以提供“免费咨询”的方式，花一年时间零零碎碎地听了很多中国人的故事，了解了大家的好奇，关注点，以及”想润”的实际动力，需求，困惑和艰难。之后，我搭建了网站Dr YA: Immigration + Transcultural [https://doctorya.world]，主要给大家一个笼统的反馈，也提供一些实用可靠的信息。

因为我实在太忙，无法再打理网站，以下PDF文档汇集了网站里的所有内容，请直接点击，供免费下载和传阅。

💡Project Exodus 移民常识和深层逻辑汇总[via Academia]

0.1 移民第一问：你花那么多钱，究竟买了啥？