MEXICO – Despite her well-paid job in the tech industry, Li Daijing didn’t hesitate when her cousin asked her to help run a restaurant in Mexico City. She packed up and left China last year for Mexico City, dreaming of a new adventure.

The 30-year-old woman from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, dreams of one day starting an online business importing furniture from her home country.

“I want more,” Li said. “I want to be a strong woman. I want independence.”

Li is part of a new wave of Chinese migrants leaving their country in search of opportunity, greater freedom or better financial prospects at a time when China’s economy is slowing, youth unemployment remains high and relations with the United States and its allies have deteriorated.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of “China’s New Migrants,” in which The Associated Press takes a look at the lives of the latest wave of Chinese migrants settling abroad.

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While U.S. border patrol has arrested tens of thousands of Chinese at the U.S.-Mexico border over the past year, thousands of them are choosing the Latin American country as their final destination. Many hope to start their own businesses, taking advantage of Mexico’s proximity to the U.S.

Last year, the Mexican government issued 5,070 temporary resident visas to Chinese migrants, twice as many as the previous year, making China the third largest source of migrants granted such permits (behind the United States and Colombia).

A deep-rooted diaspora that has nurtured strong family and business ties over decades makes Mexico attractive to new arrivals from China, as does the growing presence of Chinese multinationals in Mexico that want to be close to markets in the Americas.

“Two years ago, a lot of Chinese people started coming here — and those people have to eat,” said Duan Fan, owner of Nueve y Media, a restaurant in Mexico City’s stylish Roma Sur neighborhood that serves spicy food from Sichuan, his home province.

“I opened a Chinese restaurant so people could come here and eat like they did at home,” he said.

Duan, 27, came to Mexico in 2017 to work with his uncle, who owns a wholesale business in Tepito, near the capital’s historic center. He was later joined by his parents.

Unlike previous generations of Chinese who came to northern Mexico from China’s southern province of Guangdong, the new arrivals are likely to come from all over China.

Data from the latest 2020 census conducted by Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography shows that Chinese immigrants are mostly concentrated in Mexico City. A decade ago, the census recorded the highest concentration of Chinese in the northernmost state of Baja California, on the U.S.-Mexico border across from California.

The arrival of Chinese multinationals is bringing in “people from eastern China who are better educated and have broader global experience,” said Andrei Guerrero, academic coordinator of the Center for China and Baja California Studies.

In Mexico City’s middle-class neighborhood of Viaducto-Piedad, near the city’s historic Chinatown, a new Chinese community has been growing since the late 1990s. Chinese immigrants are not only opening businesses but also creating community spaces for religious events and children’s recreation.

As Monica Cinco, a specialist in Chinese migration and CEO of the EDUCA Mexico Foundation, said, the Chinese themselves consider Viaducto-Piedad to be Mexico City’s true “Chinatown.”

“When I asked them why, they said it was because we live here. We have Chinese-only stores, beauty salons and Chinese-only restaurants,” she said. “They live there, there’s a community there, and several of the public schools in the area have a significant Chinese population.”

In downtown Mexico City, Chinese entrepreneurs have not only opened new wholesale stores but also taken over dozens of buildings. At times, they have become a source of tension with local businesses and residents who say the expansion of Chinese companies is pushing them out.

At a mini-market in a bustling downtown district selling Chinese products such as dried ear mushrooms and vacuum-packed spicy duck wings, Dong Shengli, 33, said he moved to Mexico from Beijing a few months ago to help manage the store for friends.

Dong, who later found work at a wholesaler importing counterfeit branded sports shoes and clothing, said he had been working at the China National Energy Commission but was persuaded by friends to come here.

He plans to explore business opportunities in Mexico, but China still appeals to him. “My wife and my parents are in China. My mother is elderly, she needs me,” he said.

Others are leaving China for greater freedom. That’s the case with Tan, 50, who gave only his last name out of concern for the safety of his family back home. He arrived in Mexico this year from the southern province of Guangdong and got a job at Sam’s Club for a few months. At home, he’s been getting by by working odd jobs, including at a chemical plant and writing for magazines during the pandemic.

However, he was irritated by the atmosphere of repression prevailing in China.

“It’s not just oppression in the workplace, it’s a mentality,” he said. “I feel a political regression, a regression of freedom and democracy. The effects of this really make people feel twisted and sick. So life is very painful.”

In Mexico City, he was drawn to the protests that often gathered on the city’s main streets, proof, he said, that the freedom of speech he yearns for exists in the country.

At the restaurant where she still helps out in the trendy Juarez neighborhood, Li said Mexico stands out as a land of opportunity for her and other Chinese who don’t have relatives in the U.S. who could help them settle there. She said she left China in part because of its competitive work culture and high housing prices.

“In China, everyone is saving money to buy a house, but buying a house is really expensive,” she said.

Confident and with an infectious smile, Li said she hopes the skills she gained as a sales promoter at Chinese tech giant Tencent Games will help her succeed in Mexico.

She says she didn’t meet many Chinese women like herself in Mexico City: newcomers, young and single.

Most of them got married and moved to Mexico to reunite with their husbands.

“Coming here means facing the unknown,” she said.

Li doesn’t know when she’ll be able to realize her ambitious business plans, but she has ideas: For example, she imagines buying chairs, tables and other furniture at a good price in Henan Province. In the meantime, she sells furniture imported to Mexico by a Chinese friend on the e-commerce platform Mercado Libre.

“I’m not married, I don’t have a boyfriend, I’m single,” she said, “so I’m going to work hard and struggle.”

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