cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11407651
The Government of Canada advises Canadians to “exercise a high degree of caution” while in China and for those planning to visit the country due to the countries new rules that could prevent visitors from leaving. This has been stated in Canada’s latest update to China’s travel advisory.
China’s latest exit-and-entry rules came into effect on September 15, 2026.
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Chinese authorities may place an exit ban on specific individuals.
“An exit ban may prevent you from leaving the country if you, your family or your employer and/or business associates are involved in any open civil or criminal investigations, including business disputes,” the government writes.
You may only learn that authorities have placed an exit ban on you as you go through customs and immigration controls when trying to leave China. It is difficult to obtain information on bans from Chinese authorities, the advisory says.
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Being involved with, or in, a business, or business agreement, that is currently under investigation, or litigation, and not being allowed to leave the country isn’t controversial, as most places do this in some way. Including incidental relationships, and keeping it secret is shit, though. However this reads like a pretty normal law otherwise. China is heavy handed authoritarian so it is throwing some extras, like the secrecy, and including people who are only tangentially related to someone associated, with a legal problem, but authoritarians gonna authoritarian. In the US your ability to leave the country, while involved in civil litigation over a company, or contracts, etc. is at the discretion of the judge, and you, and all your assets, and anyone who may have access to, or legal powers over, your assets, or involving the legal situation, can be blocked from leaving the country, state, or county, as well.
Meh.
The section of the US code dealing with this is 8 CFR 215.3, in case anyone is interested.
You’re absolutely right that these laws in china and every western country I looked up (before I admittedly got bored) are largely the same, with the only major differences being the scope (there’s no requirement that you are directly materially relevant to an investigaton or court case before an exit ban in china, unlike every other country I looked at including the US (Side note: in the US the law does not appear to include civil court cases as justification. The prosecution could maybe appeal for an injunction from the court? But I could find no record of that happening or case law surrounding it - most likely due to search engines being murdered rather than it having never happened)) and now the requirement for notification and right to a hearing (US requires written notification and right to an appeal hearing within 15 days (assuming laws still matter…), china now allows for exit bans without notification and as far as I can find no right to appeal).
In practice that change in scope (affiliations or incidental relationships being a valid reason for an exit ban) is a very important difference, and is the reason Canada issued this warning. China has been repeatedly accused of things like preventing family members of persons they are interested in from leaving china in order to force their family member to return (while the US is no paragon of human rights, this at least textually would be illegal), a practice that potentially now has been codified. When combined with the lack of notification or appeal process, it’s hard to couch in a non-sinister light.
Yeah, so the shit part being the secrecy and being able to rope people just tangentially related to be people being pursued. That is unsurprising for a government with similar philosophy to China’s. Point being this isn’t really this crazy thing China is alone in doing. Yes, China has outright used these laws to negotiate with other countries similarly to international hostage situations. However so do many other states, though often they are not clear encoded laws, and instead round about powers of various departments of authority within governments.
While there isn’t such a formal thing in the US, we have, instead, a litany of ways to effectively ban exits, or disallow citizens to return, through systems that need no court approval. Secret lists maintained by the various Federal authorities are often abused to control where people can, and can not go. They have also been used to pressure foreign powers to comply with desires before lifting one, or another, that is effectively trapping someone in the US, or somewhere foreign to their citizenship. They have also been used to punish citizens, and legal residents, over political reasons. Such as trapping Yemeni origin Americans in Yemen due to their familial connections to “terrorists”. There are a lot of cases of this, so I am just listing the first one on the long rundown I saw searching for information on this.
I guess, point being, every country practices some sort of exit ban system. Everyone I have awareness of abuses it, and has secretive ways of going about it. Also, they are are all under countries I would consider authoritarian (US, UK, China, Russia, mostly as that is what I end up seeing the most news for naturally).