China's increasing passport controls evoke Mao era.

You're referring to capital controls, and yes, China has strict controls on how much money you can move out of the country. I'm referring to people themselves. If you have a valid passport right now, you can still get yourself out legally. Most of your money may have to stay behind, but that could be worth it for many situations.

You can move it $10k at a time. It just takes a while if you have a lot to move.

This is also partially why buying real estate in the West is so popular. Paying a mortgage is a very easy way to move money off shore without the same level of scrutiny.

Because of the language barrier, people typically needs years of preparation to leave the country.

English is being taught as early as Kindergarten in China. source

"English is a required subject in China, and most students are taught their first lesson in the third grade, while others even start during kindergarten. Most reputable jobs ask for proof of English proficiency. A college English test certificate is acceptable."

So I would imagine most folks considering this aren't starting from zero with English skills.

Imagine finding a H1B job with zero connection in the U.S. and subpar English, that is literally impossible.

While the USA is a place many aspire to emigrate to, its not nearly the only country in the world. Here's a slightly older statistic:

"This statistic shows the number of immigrants from China into Canada from 2007 to 2017. In 2017, Canada received approximately 30 thousand immigrants from China, over 3,000 people more than in the previous year."

source

Not to mention, leaving China also means leaving everything they know behind, friends, family, way of life, and especially money, like the other post suggests.

Besides the money point, this is true of any emigration, yet millions do it from countries around the world. I'm in the USA, but if I saw the United States government revoking passports of its citizens arbitrarily I'd start considering emigrating myself. So far the only reason (besides actual crimes) is revocation for large sums of unpaid taxes, and even that list of people is pretty small.

In fact, confiscating public workers’ passport has been practiced for at least a decade; partly for control, partly for security. And that did not spark mass exodus, slightly expanding the program likely will not change much as well.

Citation needed. Are you saying the CCP has been revoking passports at this new scale and against the same targets for the same reasons for at least a decade?

English was mandatory in primary school for decades. It is only very recently that may not be true, but every single Chinese person with a university degree is at least proficient in English.

I'm not familiar with that term. What does that mean?

Oh, you're a person. My bad. I thought with so many posts in such a short time that it was a bot.

Edit: it's not a big deal. There's a setting to mark an account as a bot. So I was more looking for that.

Edit 2. Here's where I got the number from