American Entreps Who Flocked to China Heading Home, Disillusioned

For years, American entrepreneurs saw a place in which they would start tech businesses, build restaurant chains and manage factories, making potentially vast sums in an exciting, newly dynamic economy. Many mastered Mandarin, hired and trained thousands in China, bought houses, met their spouses and raised bilingual children.

Now disillusion has set in, fed by soaring costs, creeping taxation, tightening political control and capricious regulation that makes it ever tougher to maneuver the market and fend off new domestic competitors. All these signal to expat business owners their best days were in the past.

The Trump administration is making a hard-nosed challenge to China using trade tariffs, investment controls and prosecution of technology thieves, and many in American business are cheering, if silently, having soured on the market after years of trying.

At a curry luncheon hosted a few times a year by Steven Bourne, a law professor and 13-year resident of Shanghai from Massachusetts, guests these days chew over shrimp samosas and exit plans. On a recent Friday, a Swedish maker of beauty products said he would move his family to Hong Kong, where regulations are clearer and taxes are lower. An American art dealer who suffered when his rich clients got pinched by currency controls was headed to California.

Another, Jack Tung, a 47-year-old who grew up near Philadelphia and had the costumes made for Hollywood movies like “The Painted Veil” and “The Great Wall,” said absorbing a sixfold rise in tailoring rates since 2003 changed China into a high-cost, low-profit, stressful hardship. He lost the feeling “it’s all happening” in Shanghai and will try Thailand.

Expats always ebb and flow, said Mr. Bourne, but for entrepreneurs “it’s harder for them to live here now.”