Taichung, Taiwan – Before he vanished in mid-February, Bao Fan, one of China’s best-known investment bankers, had reportedly been looking for a safe place to park his wealth.
Bao, the founder of China Renaissance, was in the process of establishing a private wealth management company in Singapore to transfer money out of China and Hong Kong, the Financial Times reported last month, citing four people familiar with the plans.
Bao, who has joined a long list of influential businessmen to suddenly disappear in China, is just one of a growing number of wealthy Chinese businesspeople who have looked to Singapore — dubbed the “Switzerland of Asia” — to escape Beijing’s crackdowns on private industry and corruption.
“Wealth has flooded into Singapore from China and Hong Kong in recent years,” a wealth manager at a Singaporean bank with a large number of Chinese clientele, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Al Jazeera.
“In confidential conversations, many of them have named the disappearances of Chinese business people along with uncertain economic times as primary reasons for moving money out of China,” the wealth manager said.
Singapore, named the world’s best place to do business by the Economist Intelligence Unit, has for years been building a reputation as a haven for high-worth Chinese, particularly since the rise of Xi Jinping, China’s most powerful leader in decades, who has led his country in an increasingly authoritarian and nationalistic direction.
During the first five years of an anticorruption drive led by Xi, more than 100 high-ranking officials within the Chinese Communist Party and tens of thousands of lower-level officials and business people were prosecuted for white-collar crimes.
More recently, a regulatory crackdown on private industry that has touched on sectors from tech to education and real estate has sent money fleeing out of China.
“My clients have told me that in the current political climate in China is less tolerant towards affluent people compared to before, and therefore they wanted to get their assets out,” a supervisor at a large international bank with branches in Singapore, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Al Jazeera.
“Previously, Chinese investors would then have looked to Hong Kong, but the city is not as attractive…