You're right, but also lumping every rich Chinese into a "part of a mob" is kinda funny. We talk about how we've outsources a buttloads of manufacturing to China, how they're making a killing out of their industrial policies and etc. Obviously there will be millions of people in China who are rich through their businesses. Just like in the states.
Dirty money will always exist, and currently exists in every single country. But in the past 20 years, there have been a rise in the amount of rich Chinese. Just like rich Japanese of 80s through their RE investments and etc.
You cannot as a private person legally move more than about 100K USD out of mainland CN per year. You have to resort to criminal elements. Only they have the network. It's one of those things everyone does but lives in fear of being used against them by an enemy down the line.
I mean, 50K/year limit is pretty trivial to overcome. Those controls exist in a lot of countries, and anyone who has a decent amount of money is aware of ways of getting around it legally.
It's a side effect of the currency controls Xi put in place in 2017-18.
Around that time, the Xi admin began limiting the amount of currency outflow from a single household to around $50-100k a year. That isn't enough for international tuition in most cases in the US, or moving abroad.
As such, anyone who wanted to move or pay tuition in the US began leveraging shadow banks.
It doesn't apply if you do direct bank to bank transfer to university, no? IIRC $50K limit per person is put on RMB <-> USD conversion, and that's is usually enough for yearly living expenses. I might be wrong, but that's how it was explained to me by my Chinese colleagues back in the day.
From what I heard from friends, a lot of programs didn't support bank-to-bank transfers with Chinese banks, and a lot of family money was grey (not necessarily due to corruption, but due to the nature of business in China, which changed rapidly in just 30 years).
There were much less invasive ways to nudge businesses to convert black/grey money into white money but the method the Xi admin began enforcing in the 17-18 period also helped with solidifying control.
Kinda sad tbh because a lot of these reforms are needed, but they became politicized.
Dirty money will always exist, and currently exists in every single country. But in the past 20 years, there have been a rise in the amount of rich Chinese. Just like rich Japanese of 80s through their RE investments and etc.