Since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, “China has expanded the legal landscape for exit bans and increasingly used them” against many Chinese and foreigners, according to the rights organization Safeguard Defenders. In spite of the government’s declaration that the nation is open for business again after three years of harsh Covid-19 restrictions, China is progressively making it difficult for anyone to leave the country, especially foreign CEOs.
According to a recent report by the rights organization Safeguard Defenders, numerous Chinese and foreigners have been caught up in exit bans. A Reuters analysis revealed an apparent increase in court cases involving exit bans in recent years, and foreign business lobbies are raising concerns about the trend.
The Safeguard Defenders research states that China has “expanded the legal landscape for exit bans and increasingly used them, sometimes without legal justification,” since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012.
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According to Laura Harth, the campaign director for the organisation, “between 2018 and July of this year, no less than five new or amended (Chinese) laws provide for the use of exit bans, for a total of 15 laws today.”
According to the organization, “tens of thousands” of Chinese are prohibited from leaving at any one moment. Additionally, it references a 2022 academic study by Chris Carr and Jack Wroldsen that discovered 128 instances of foreigners being expelled between 1995 and 2019—29 Americans and 44 Canadians among them. As China-US tensions over economic and security issues have increased, attention has turned to the departure prohibitions. Contrast that with China’s narrative that it is removing some of the world’s strictest COvid controls and opening up to foreign business and tourism. There was an eight-fold rise in the number of cases citing restrictions between 2016 and 2022, according to Reuters’ review of records on departure bans from the Supreme Court of China’s database.
China this week strengthened its counter-espionage legislation, enabling departure restrictions to be placed on anybody who is under investigation, whether they are Chinese or international.
The majority of exit ban-related cases in the database are civil, not criminal. None that included foreigners, politically sensitive subversion, or concerns of national security were discovered by Reuters.
Comparatively, the US and EU prohibit certain criminal suspects from traveling, but often not for civil claims. Reuters’ requests for comment on departure restrictions, including questions about how many people, including foreigners, are subject to them, were unanswered by China’s Ministry of Public Security.
According to three persons with knowledge of the situation, one person barred from leaving China this year is a Singaporean executive at the US due diligence company Mintz Group.
Requests for response from the business, the CEO, and China’s Public Security Bureau went unanswered.
Mintz said that at the end of March, police had searched the company’s China branch and taken five local employees into custody. At the time, the foreign ministry said that Mintz was allegedly doing illegal commerce. According to the US management consulting firm, police questioned employees at Bain & Co.’s Shanghai branch.
Lester Ross, a seasoned attorney in China who has dealt with departure ban cases, said that the relevance of this (exit ban) issue has increased as a result of escalating tensions between the US and China.
According to Ross, the chair of the American Chamber of Commerce’s China policy committee, “I’ve seen a rise in companies and entities being concerned about this and asking for our advice on how to prepare and reduce risks” of departure prohibitions.Foreign companies are worried about the increased monitoring and the ambiguous language of the counter-espionage law, which states that individuals who do “harm to the national security or significant damage to national interests” may be subject to departure restrictions.
Jorg Wuttke, the chairman of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, said that “the uncertainty is enormous.” Will you do due diligence? Clarity is required.
In a statement to Reuters, the EU chamber said: “At a time when China is proactively trying to restore business confidence to attract foreign investment, the exit bans send a very mixed signal.”
According to the Safeguard Defenders study, those prohibited from leaving China include normal Chinese involved in financial disputes, rights activists, attorneys, and members of ethnic minorities like Uyghurs in China’s northwest Xinjiang province.
According to a Chinese judiciary study cited in the article, 34,000 individuals had their leave rights suspended between 2016 and 2018 because they owed money, a surge of 55% from the same time period three years before.
According to some activists, President Xi’s stricter security measures are reflected in the increased usage of departure prohibitions.
“They can find any reason to stop you from leaving the country,” said Xiang Li, a Chinese rights campaigner who was refused leave for two years before fleeing China in 2017 and subsequently obtaining asylum in the United States.
“China doesn’t have the rule of law,” she told Reuters over the phone when she was in California. “The Chinese Communist Party uses the law to further its objectives. It works extremely well.
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