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It happens, it can be more annoying than one thinks since people with wealth to exfiltrate correlated with other family members who also have wealth to exfiltrate, graft is family business. Nephew/niece studying abroad? That's 100k gone per year for next 4-5 years. Meanwhile living well is expensive, annoying to be dependant on personal capital flight group. And post crackdown, it's more risky to drag family/friends into pooling. Especially if they're public sector/public sector adjacent. Frequently, it's easier to pay someone commission to move money for you.

In my experience, middle class aren't buying million+ RE, they pool together savings to send kids abroad, and maybe put a down payment on a condo that the kid pays off once they get decent job in west. And by middle class we really mean upper flat out highincome top %5-10 relative to all PRC house holds who are middle class tier1/2 regions.

But agreed, domestic non gov investment ecosystem pretty trash, hard to beat investing in your kid(s) and saving for retirement until a mature system develops. Which IMO hard goal since focus isn't to further wide wealth disparity by giving that 5-10% more consumption/investment abilities but to bring up the next quantiles of households - the actual middle class. This is where my assessment departs from most, I think "common prosperity" for PRC is getting more households richer, but at PRC development levels, that diminishes the households with enough savings to retire and surplus to invest. And this has all sorts of implications on inflation/FX rate.