In a sleepy Bosnian town, barely five miles from the border with the European Union, a crumbling old water tower is falling into ruin. Inside, piles of rubbish, used cigarette butts and a portable wood-fired stove offer glimpses into the daily life of the people who briefly called the building home. Glued on to the walls is another clue: on pieces of A4 paper, the same message is printed out, again and again: “If you would like to travel to Europe (Italy, Germany, France, etc) we can help you. Please add this number on WhatsApp”. The message is printed in the languages of often desperate people: Somali, Nepali, Turkish, the list goes on. The last translation on the list indicates a newcomer to this unlucky club. It is written in Chinese.

Bihać water tower was once used to replenish steam trains travelling across the former Yugoslavia. Now it provides shelter to a different kind of person on the move: migrants making the perilous journey through the Balkans, with the hope of crossing into Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s neighbour in the EU.

Zhang* arrived in Bosnia in April with two young children in tow. The journey he describes as walking “towards the path of freedom” started months earlier in Langfang, a city in north China’s Hebei province. So far it has taken them through four countries, cost thousands of pounds, led to run-ins with the aggressive Croatian border police, and has paused, for now, in a temporary reception centre for migrants on the outskirts of Sarajevo.

The camp, which is home to more than 200 people, is specifically for families, vulnerable people and unaccompanied minors. As well as the rows of dormitories set among the rolling Balkan hills, there is a playground with children skipping rope and an education centre. But it is a lonely life. It’s rare to meet another Chinese speaker. To pass the time, Zhang occasionally helps out in the canteen.

“Staying here is not a very good option,” Zhang says, as his son and daughter chase after each other in the courtyard. But “if I go back to China, what awaits me is either being sent to a mental hospital or a prison.”

The fear of what the future held for him and his children propelled the 39-year-old from Shandong province on a journey so difficult and dangerous that many struggle to understand why someone from China would embark on it. Most of Zhang’s new neighbours come from war-torn countries in the Middle East. Until recently, Zhang had a stable job working for a private company in the world’s second-biggest economy, earning an above average salary. But the political environment in China left him feeling that he had no choice other than to leave.

In September, the Guardian travelled to Bosnia to meet some of the Chinese migrants attempting the dangerous Balkan route, to reveal the personal and political factors behind the new migrant population on the frontier of Europe.

‘No one wants to leave his country if they are safe’

Zhang is one of a small but growing number of Chinese people who are travelling to the Balkans with the hope of getting into the EU by whatever means necessary.

He and his children were apprehended four times as they tried to cross into Europe. Armed with little more than some vague tips he’d seen on the messaging app Telegram, and the map on his smartphone, he headed to various towns on the Bosnia-Croatia border to try his luck. But every time they were caught. Most recently, he tried to cross into Metković, a small town in the south of Croatia where the border is fortified mainly by a small ridge of forested mountains. But after camping overnight in the wilderness with sinister-looking brown snakes, the family were caught once again by the notoriously tough Croatian border police, and hauled back into Bosnia.

“Going into other countries in this way is not very honourable for me, to be honest,” Zhang says. “We know that there are many countries where people hate people like us … but no one wants to leave his country if they are safe”. He says he only made the journey because of his family. “My children are very young,” Zhang says, referring to his 10-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter. “I couldn’t explain to them what’s really happening. I just told the children that I wanted to give them a better life … they have no future [in China] at all”.

In 2022, of the more than 14,000 people caught trying to illegally cross Bosnia’s borders, two were Chinese. In 2023, that number had increased to 148. The majority of them were caught trying to cross into Croatia, according to the border police of Bosnia. They said that more than 70 Chinese people were apprehended in the first half of this year.

And under a bilateral agreement, the Croatia can deport people without the right to remain in the EU country back to Bosnia. In 2021, three Chinese people were admitted to Bosnia and Herzegovina in this way. In 2023, it was 260.

In recent years, the surging numbers of Chinese people trying to cross into the US via the treacherous southern border has become a political talking point in Washington, with US authorities deporting more than 100 migrants on a charter flight earlier this year and working with neighbouring countries to try to deter further arrivals.

David Stroup, a lecturer of Chinese politics at the University of Manchester, says that the rapid expansion of China’s surveillance state during the pandemic combined with a gloomy economic outlook were some of the driving forces for this new wave of Chinese migrants.

“The lockdowns created a sense that ordinary people who were just living their lives could somehow find themselves under heavy observation of the state or subjected to long arbitrary periods of lockdown and confinement,” Stroup said.

Part of the reason that Bosnia is an attractive staging post for Chinese migrants, is that like its neighbour Serbia, it offers visa-free travel. Aleksandra Kovačević, spokesperson for Bosnia’s Service for Foreigner’s Affairs, a government department, said that Chinese people were “gaining statistical significance as persons who increasingly violate migration regulations of Bosnia and Herzegovina”. She said that along with Turkish citizens, Chinese people were trying to use legal entry into Bosnia as a way to “illegally continue their journey to the countries of western Europe”.

But why?

Zhang’s ‘first awakening’

Zhang’s winding path to Bosnia started more than a decade ago. In 2012, thousands of people across China participated in anti-Japanese protests, triggered by an escalation in the dispute between China and Japan over contested islets in the East China Sea. But Zhang publicly questioned the official narrative that the archipelago was an undisputed part of Chinese territory. He was arrested and accused of inciting the subversion of state power. “That was my first awakening,” he says.

Many ordinary Chinese occasionally feel the rough end of the government’s tight control over public speech. Most learn to keep their head down and, begrudgingly or not, quietly navigate the invisible red lines that dictate what can be freely talked about. But Zhang couldn’t bear it.

Over the years, rumours about his political views rippled throughout his community. A teacher at his son’s school accused Zhang of being unpatriotic, in front of the whole class. He and his wife quarrelled and ultimately separated, in part because she “couldn’t stand that kind of gossip”.

Things truly came to a head in the pandemic, three years in which “the government locked people up in their homes like animals”. In November 2022, a fire in an apartment building in Urumqi, a city in far west China, killed 10 people, with many blaming strict public health controls for preventing the victims from escaping. Anger spread online and in the streets, as hundreds of people in cities across China participated in the first mass anti-government protests since Xi Jinping came to power. Zhang was one of them. In the following days, several of his friends were arrested. Zhang thinks that the only reason he was spared was because he didn’t bring his phone with him, making it harder for the police to trace his movements. But the disappearance of his friends convinced him that he had to leave.

“China’s control over speech is getting tighter and tighter. They don’t allow people to talk about political parties, and no matter if the government is doing a good or bad job, they don’t allow people to talk about it. It is limiting people’s freedom of speech tremendously, and that’s the most important thing I can’t accept,” Zhang says. “The economy is secondary”.

Since China’s zero-Covid regime was abruptly lifted, shortly after the 2022 protests, hordes of people have been leaving the country. Some are fed up with the political repression, which has spread far and wide under the current regime. Others feel hopeless about the economy, which has struggled to recover since the pandemic, with high youth unemployment rates and stagnant wages. For many, the bargain between the party and the people, that living standards will continue to improve so long as you keep your head down, no longer holds water. So scores of people are finding ways out through the cracks.

Some are using student or work visas to relocate to places where they can live and talk more freely, with new diaspora communities emerging in cities such as Bangkok, Tokyo, and Amsterdam. But others, often lower middle class people who don’t have the funds or the qualifications to emigrate by official means, are choosing more dangerous escape routes. The phenomenon has become so widely discussed online that it has it’s own buzzword: runxue, or run philosophy, a coded term for emigration. Exact numbers are hard to come by as many people do not formally register their intention to leave, especially if they are planning on entering another country illegally. But in 2023, there were 137,143 asylum seekers from China, according to the UN’s refugee agency. That is more than five times the number registered a decade earlier, when Xi’s rule had just started.

Stuck at the border

One potential pathway is the deadly Darién Gap, part of the migrant corridor that connects south and Central America with the southern border of the United States. Better known for attracting desperate Latin Americans, in recent years the number of Chinese people making that journey has surged. In the six months to April 2024, 24,367 Chinese nationals were apprehended by the US border police at the border with Mexico. That is more than the number of Chinese people who were apprehended in the whole of the previous financial year. In March alone, the number of times that the US border police encountered Chinese nationals increased by 8,500% compared with March 2021.

The Darién Gap route has been popular among Chinese migrants in part because they could start the journey in Ecuador, which allowed Chinese people to visit visa-free. In June, Ecuador suspended the visa waiver agreement, citing a “worrying increase” in arrivals from China.

Immigration officials describe the flow of migrants as being like a living organism. Its size swells and morphs, but it rarely shrinks. So when one door closes, the people on the move don’t stop moving, they just find another window.

For Zhang, the door to America, his first choice, closed when he was already en route. He had booked tickets to Ecuador via Singapore and Madrid early in the new year. But in Singapore the family was blocked from boarding the Spain-bound flight, with airline staff saying that the Spanish authorities had refused them entry. He was stranded, with no plan B. It was a kindly Czech couple who found him crying in the airport who suggested he try Europe, he says. So he booked a flight to Belgrade.

His hope is to find a way to northern Europe, where there is freedom of speech and employment opportunities. Other Chinese people have had the same idea. In the first eight months of this year, there were 569 new asylum applications from Chinese nationals in Germany, more than double the total number for 2022. In the Netherlands, 409 Chinese people applied for asylum last year, up from 151 the year before.

Some staff at the migrant reception centres gently encourage people to apply for asylum in Bosnia rather than continuing on into Europe.

But with high unemployment and a byzantine application process, most people would rather keep moving. Jing* a Chinese man living at another migrant centre near Sarajevo, tried to enter across the border into Croatia “six or seven times”. Now he has applied for asylum in Bosnia, “but I don’t think anything will come of it,” he says. He fled China after completing an eight-month prison sentence for anti-government comments he posted on X. Now he has run out of money and luck.

In the corner of a cemetery on the outskirts of Bihać, another unlikely journey from China to Bosnia has ended. Kai Zhu is buried here. Little is known about him, other than his year of birth, 1964, and the fact that he had expressed an intention to apply for asylum in Bosnia. Staff at the migrant reception centre where he died say that he had mental as well as physical health problems, and that his only acquaintance was another Chinese man in the camp, who soon moved on.

On 31 August, Asim Karabegović, a volunteer with SOS Balkanroute, an NGO, buried him in a corner of Humci cemetery that since 2019 has been reserved for migrants who have died on the EU’s doorstep. In the distance behind the rows of tombstones, the mountains that mark the border with Croatia form an imposing horizon. Karabegović says that the lonely traveller is the first Chinese person he has buried. His wooden tombstone reads only, “Kai Zhu, 1964 – 2024”.

Additional research by Chi-hui Lin and Džemal Ćatić

*Names have been changed