[SenHeng]

Better passport for their kids, better and more reputable, internationally connected banking system to store their wealth. The latter bit is particularly important as China limits the amount of money one can send out of the country.

[decafninja]

How would this give a passport to their kids? Isn’t Japanese citizenship notoriously difficult to obtain?

[SenHeng]

It was always ridiculously easy to get Japanese citizenship. 5 years of residency, don’t break any laws including traffic, pay your bills on time. Done.

It has recently been changed so that you now require 10 years of residency.

https://www.turning-japanese.info/p/misinfo.html

[daneel_w]

So is it 5 or 10 years? Another person responding in this same branch says it used to be 10 but is now 5.

[alephnerd]

5 years. It's fairly easy to get. Sometimes it feels like half of the Beijing intelligentsia is in Tokyo now.

Lots of Chinese academics, engineers, investment bankers, and others shifted to Tokyo in the past few years. Even the kinds of salons and meetups you used to see at Tsinghua or Peking have almost entirely transplanted in Jimbocho based on my friends account.

[SenHeng]

It used to be 5, it’s now 10. It’s a very recent [0] and sudden change.

O: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20260327_11/

[TimorousBestie]

I think it’s probably easier and safer for a Chinese national to obtain Japanese citizenship than American citizenship.

If you’ve got ten years (or until recently, five) of residence and can pass the interview process, the acceptance rate for Japanese citizenship is something like 95%+.

On the other hand the process of getting American citizenship can run up to twenty years or more, it’s very expensive, and throughout the process the immigrant has few rights and can be deported for basically no reason, up to the moments before the naturalization ceremony.

If I were a freshman at Fudan thinking about my exit strategy, I know which one I would pick.

[SenHeng]

20 years ago Singapore was handing out PRs and citizenships to Chinese students like candy. All of my classmates got PR a few years out of school, then citizenship again 2 years later.

And so many of them immediately moved on to the US.