China slaps travel restrictions on teachers, banking sector staff

Chinese authorities are extending travel restrictions to teachers, schoolchildren and bank staff ahead of summer vacation by requiring them to hand over their passports or ask permission before leaving the country, according to documents posted by social media users this week.

The fresh bans are the latest in a slew of travel restrictions on Chinese citizens that began after President Xi Jinping took power in 2012 and intensified during the three years of COVID-19 restrictions.

One notice received by a user working at a high school in the western city of Lanzhou asks class monitors to compile a list of students who have passports and hand it in to the school, according to a screenshot posted to WeChat.

A June 25 notice sent to staff in an unnamed county cited orders from the county education bureau as saying that all current teaching staff must hand over their passports to the school's party office, a new administrative office formed in a recent bid to install direct ruling Communist Party control over the country's universities.

"The party office will make a list ... and the county education bureau personnel department will hold this information," reads the notice, which was reposted by citizen journalist "Mr Li is not your teacher" to their X account. "Each department is requested to forward this information to all groups."

In another post also reposted by "Mr Li," a person holds a form that must be filled in and endorsed by their employer before they can apply for a passport.

Commentators said the flurry of notices appears to target teachers and students who may be thinking of leaving China to tour overseas universities or to settle into their new homes ahead of a course of overseas study.

An online search by Radio Free Asia on Friday found that rules restricting foreign travel have been publicly posted to the websites of several universities and education institutions across China.

Faculty at the computer science department of Wuhan University are required to hand over any passports within seven days of receiving them to university authorities “for safekeeping,” according to a notice dated April 2023.

At Zhejiang’s Taizhou University, faculty and staff wishing to travel overseas for personal reasons must first obtain approval from the personnel department, according to a notice dated October 2019. A similar notice on the website of the Shanghai University of Sport dates to April 2014. 

In 2018, RFA reported that teachers in Inner Mongolia, Shandong and Fujian provinces had been ordered to hand in their passports.

Travel bans

Xi's administration has long issued travel bans to rights activists, dissidents, human rights lawyers and their families, with similar policies seen in Tibet and Xinjiang in the wake of mass demonstrations and uprisings by disgruntled ethnic minority populations in 2008 and 2009.

But the practice of recalling passports intensified during the three years of Xi Jinping's zero-COVID policy, as online searches about how to emigrate to another country spiked on Chinese search engines.

In 2022, the National Immigration Administration held a news conference announcing "strict reviews" of travel documents and visas, and calling on Chinese nationals not to leave the country unless absolutely necessary, while border police started clipping the passports of returning Chinese citizens, rendering them invalid.

The bans haven't been applied consistently across the country, and hundreds of thousands of people have managed to leave China to start a new life overseas since pandemic restrictions ended in late 2022, in what has been dubbed the "run" movement.

But sources told RFA Mandarin that the de facto travel bans are continuing despite the end of pandemic restrictions, and don't just apply to those in education, either.

"Anyone working in the banking system now has to apply to leave the country at least 10 working days in advance," a banking sector employee from the southern province of Guangdong who gave only the surname Wang for fear of reprisals told RFA Mandarin. "There are restrictions on the number of times you can leave the country in any given year."

"Some cities only let you leave the country once a year, some twice," she said. "Basically, they now discourage people from leaving the country."

Several rounds of approvals

A resident of the central city of Wuhan with family ties to the education sector told RFA Mandarin that any trip to Hong Kong must go through several rounds of approvals and be reported to the local government's education bureau.

"The school has to approve it first, then the district education bureau, then finally it's sent to the municipal education bureau which must approve it before you can leave China," the resident, who gave only the surname Li for fear of reprisals, said.

"Some teachers may now be prevented from taking their kids overseas during summer vacation," she said.

Veteran rights activist and former teacher He Peirong, who now lives overseas, said the restrictions seem aimed at parents looking to send their children overseas to study as a first step towards emigration by the whole family.

"Sending their children overseas to study is the first step towards emigration," He said. "It's a very safe way to transfer assets, and to eventually emigrate."

She said some parents take their kids overseas in summer to get them accustomed to life in another country, or to help them settle in before their academic course starts in the fall.

Translated with additional reporting by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.