China is increasingly barring people from leaving the country, including foreign executives, according to a new report by the rights group Safeguard Defenders.
“Since Xi Jinping took power in 2012, China has expanded the legal landscape for exit bans and increasingly used them, sometimes outside legal justification,” the Safeguard Defenders report reads.
“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 today of 15 laws,” said Laura Harth, the group’s campaign director.
The group estimates “tens of thousands” of Chinese are banned from exit at any one time. It also cites a 2022 academic paper by Chris Carr and Jack Wroldsen that found 128 cases of foreigners being exit-banned between 1995 and 2019, including 29 Americans and 44 Canadians.
China last week beefed up its counter-espionage law, allowing exit bans to be imposed on anyone, Chinese or foreign, who is under investigation.
Most of the cases in the database referring to exit bans are civil, not criminal. By comparison, the U.S. and European Union impose travel bans on some criminal suspects but generally not for civil claims.
One person prevented from leaving China this year is a Singaporean executive at the U.S. due-diligence firm Mintz Group, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Mintz said in late March the authorities had raided the firm’s China office and detained five local staff. The foreign ministry said at the time Mintz was suspected of engaging in unlawful business operations. Police visited Bain & Co’s office in Shanghai and questioned staff, the U.S. management consultancy said last week.
“Because of rising tensions between the U.S. and China, the salience of this (exit ban) risk has risen,” said Lester Ross, a veteran lawyer in China who has handled exit ban cases.
“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 exit bans, said Ross, the head of the American Chamber of Commerce’s China policy committee.
The vague wording of the counter-espionage legislation, which says exit bans can be imposed on those who cause “harm to the national security or significant damage to national interests” and the seemingly arbitrary manner in which they are imposed, is a worry for those individuals and companies working in China.
“The uncertainty is huge,” said Jorg Wuttke, head of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China.
The EU chamber told Reuters in a statement: “At a time when China is proactively trying to restore business confidence to attract foreign investment, the exit bans send a very mixed signal.”
People barred from leaving China include regular Chinese embroiled in financial disputes as well as rights defenders, activists and lawyers, and ethnic minorities such as Uyghurs in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region, according to the Safeguard Defenders report.
“They can find any reason to stop you from leaving the country,” said Xiang Li, a Chinese rights activist who was denied exit for two years before escaping from China in 2017 and later receiving asylum in the United States.
“China doesn’t have the rule of law,” she told Reuters by phone from California. “The law is used to serve the purposes of the Chinese Communist Party. It’s very effective.”
