Fang Lian Talks: New Entry and Exit Regulations Launched! China Enters an Era of Isolationism! Interpreting the New Entry and Exit Management Regulations: What Do They Say? Who Will Be Affected?

This video breaks down China's newly introduced entry and exit management regulations. The new rules increase the difficulty of applying for passports, allowing local governments to require applicants to provide and prove the authenticity of their reasons for going abroad, which is seen as a step backward. In addition, the new regulations expand customs authorities' powers to dissuade citizens traveling to "high-risk countries" from leaving, meaning future overseas travel may depend on the approval of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The video also points out that the new regulations will tighten control over specific groups, including technical talent and public servants, restricting their departure to prevent the brain drain and prevent "betrayal" against the party-state. The author believes this reflects Xi Jinping's trend toward totalitarianism, and the difficulty of applying for passports will continue to increase in the future, potentially affecting the emigration opportunities of the wealthy, civil servants, technical talent, and public servants, while overseas workers and international students may remain unaffected in the short term.

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Passports have always been a passport for Chinese people to step out into the world. Over the past two decades, applying for a passport has been a basic right for Chinese citizens. But just in the past couple of days, the new entry and exit management regulations have gone live, scheduled to officially take effect on September 15. Some say this new regulation is a precursor to a return to national isolation, while others say that hyping up national isolation is just alarmism. So what on earth do these new entry and exit regulations represent? Hello everyone, I am Toronto Fang Lian, and today let's analyze these new regulations. First, to understand these new regulations, we naturally need to look at what has changed this time. The first change is that it increases the difficulty for Chinese citizens to obtain passports.

Article 3 of this new regulation stipulates that when Chinese citizens apply for passports in the future, local government departments may require applicants to provide reasons for going abroad, and applicants need to prove their own innocence and the authenticity of the reasons provided. At first glance, this might seem the same as current laws, but in reality, it is not. This can be said to be the most regressive part of this regulatory amendment. In Chinese history, the management of passports has gone through several stages. The first stage is the Mao Zedong era. In the Mao Zedong era, it goes without saying—to put it bluntly, it was an era of self-imposed isolation. Who could go abroad in that era other than senior cadres? In fact, the vast majority of senior cadres in the CCP had never been abroad before Mao Zedong's death. At that time, those senior cadres even believed that Americans and British people were about to starve to death. Later, although Deng小平 came to power and brought China into reform and opening-up, the reform of entry and exit management had always been a very slow process. For a long time, free travel abroad remained an extravagant hope for Chinese people. In 1986, along with reform and opening-up, China began to conditionally allow people to go abroad. At that time, Chinese citizens could apply for passports, but the application process was extremely cumbersome. It required submitting a household registration booklet (hukou), proof of the reason for entry and exit, and an approval slip from one's work unit, followed by approval from the local Public Security Bureau before a passport could be obtained. Against this backdrop, very few people could pass through the layers of approval. From 1986 to 2001, the average number of newly approved passports in China was less than 10,000 per year, a thousandfold gap compared to the later 10 million per year. Then in 2001, to adapt to the new situation of joining the WTO, the CCP began to implement an "apply-on-demand" system. Under the apply-on-demand system, as long as the documents were not falsified during the passport application, the public security organs were supposed to issue passports and other travel documents to citizens. Finally, on January 1, 2007, the Passport Law was promulgated. This apply-on-demand model was rolled out from pilot cities to the entire country. At this point, Chinese people entered the state we take for granted—being able to apply for a passport whenever we want to. This also means that the time during which we actually achieved the freedom to travel abroad is only about 20 years.

Now, having discussed this developmental history, we can look at this new regulation. This new regulation has clearly changed things back. As for the extent of the rollback, although it did not instantly revert all the way back to the 1986 version, it effectively reverted to a 2001-style version. Under the new regulation, some people are required to provide reasons when applying for passports, which will only be issued after approval by the local government, while other people are not required to do so. This is no different from the entry and exit management measures of 2001. If we insist on finding a difference, the only difference might be the proportion of people falling into this category. Think about it; it is actually quite ridiculous. When the CCP introduced new regulations for reform in 2001 and implemented differential treatment, it was a process of slow progress and increasing openness, running pilot projects aimed at becoming more open. But this time, the new regulation is the complete opposite. Implementing differential treatment this time is running pilot projects aimed at becoming increasingly conservative. We always say that Xi Jinping is the Emperor of Reversal, and that reputation is truly well-deserved. Tightening passports is yet another new feat of my Emperor of Reversal. Of course, following the CCP's "boiling frog in warm water" reform model, this year being the year zero of the reversal, the difficulty of applying for a passport will certainly not increase drastically overnight. However, in the long run, the road of reversal will definitely go further and further, and as it goes further, the increasing difficulty of passport applications in the future is a constant trend. Therefore, the suggestion given to everyone here is that getting a passport doesn't cost much RMB anyway—just a few hundred yuan. If you have that spare money and plans to go abroad, even a very low probability, you should still take the time in the next couple of days to get your passport done. Having a passport in hand is always more reassuring than not having one. Just like when I previously taught everyone how to open Hong Kong stocks and Hong Kong bank accounts, having the conditions to open them is always better than not having them. You never know when the restrictions on capital outflow will comprehensively arrive.

In addition to the increasing difficulty of applying for passports, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has also added the possibility of closing the borders at any time, or rather, closing them selectively, within the new regulations. This is primarily addressed in the second article of the new rules. The second article mentions that for Chinese citizens traveling to high-risk countries, customs authorities can and should, when necessary, persuade them to return. This is an ultimate expansion of the power of Chinese customs. In the past, Chinese border customs only had the right to verify the authenticity of travel documents, but not the right to prevent you from leaving the country. As long as your documents were genuine and you were not restricted from exiting, customs had no authority to stop you from leaving. But now, it is clearly different. The new regulations stipulate that even if your documents are genuine and you have a visa, you may still be restricted from leaving. How might these new regulations be applied? Currently, it might still be limited to cases where you are traveling to genuinely high-risk places, such as Myanmar or Cambodia, and customs refuses to let you leave. However, it is very likely that in the future, if China-Japan relations deteriorate, the CCP won't need to cancel flights; they can simply define travel to Japan as 'non-essential' when you apply for a passport and refuse to issue one. For those who already have passports, they can simply define Japan as a high-risk area when you reach customs and persuade you to return, preventing you from traveling there. In the future, whether you can travel to a certain country will truly depend on the CCP's whim. You can only go if the CCP allows you to travel to that country.

Of course, in addition to the two aforementioned clauses that indiscriminately target all Chinese people, the CCP's actions have also strengthened control over specific groups. First, the CCP has expanded its border control powers. Ever since I began publicly opposing the Communist Party online and advocating for democracy and freedom in China, my parents, parents-in-law, and all my immediate family members in China have been restricted from leaving the country by the CCP. Of course, because my family members themselves are not anti-CCP and have not committed any crimes, this exit restriction—this border control—is actually lacking in legal basis. At the execution level, they confiscated my parents' passports to achieve the effect of border control. Clearly, this operation is no longer necessary now, as the scope of border control has been significantly expanded. Of course, this is not the focus this time, because whether it is relatives of dissidents like my parents or previous telecom fraud suspects, the CCP has used other means to achieve similar effects. This time, they have simply legalized the methods.

In the entire set of new regulations, the part that really deserves attention is this paragraph. To put it bluntly, this paragraph means that if a Chinese citizen possesses certain technologies related to national security, industrial security, or technological security, the Ministry of Commerce can prohibit that person from leaving the country. If we translate this into plain language, what does it mean? It means that in the past, I only restricted certain so-called lawbreakers from leaving, but it will be different in the future. In the future, if you are a technical talent and you want to 'run' (flee), causing a loss of technology for China, then you cannot go abroad. In the future, high-end technical talents will no longer be independent individuals, but rather assets owned by the CCP. If you, as an asset, want to run, you must first obtain the CCP's consent. Although the scope of application seems narrow for now, and I estimate that when it goes into effect on September 15, it will initially only apply to top AI technical talents, I believe it is only a matter of time before this covers all high-end talents in China, including doctoral students, researchers, and those high-end technical talents returning from overseas. To these people: your political alarm bells should start ringing now. Those high-end technical talents who are still thinking of returning to China to make a fortune should be thinking about whether they will still be able to leave after they go back to work as university professors.

Of course, these restrictions are not limited to technical talents; there is another group of concern, which is public officials. However, the method of restriction for this group is different from that for technical personnel. The restriction for these people comes from the intermediary side. The new regulations state that if public officials and military personnel entrust intermediary agencies to handle immigration in violation of regulations, the immigration companies must not handle it for them and have an obligation to report them. This provision is actually quite subtle. What constitutes 'violation of regulations'? Does a public official's normal application for immigration count as a violation? Who are considered public officials and military personnel? Those currently in office certainly count, but what about retirees? Do state-owned enterprise employees count? These discretionary powers are actually in the hands of the CCP. Similarly, I believe that when the new regulations appear on September 15, perhaps it will only be high-ranking officials who cannot immigrate, senior cadres who cannot immigrate, and active military personnel who cannot immigrate. But soon, I believe this will cover all grassroots bureaucrats.

With the current poor economic environment, many young people are choosing to take the civil service exams. In China, not only has the number of applicants for civil service exams increased significantly, but the admission scores for police academies and military academies have also risen sharply. Now that the new regulations have been issued, everyone should realize one thing: while being a civil servant is good and stable, applying to these schools may mean completely giving up any chance of emigrating abroad in the future. In the future, on one hand, Western countries like Canada and the United States will increase security vetting for Chinese public officials. Just like in Canada now, due to the prevalence of CCP spies, background checks for the immigration of certain public officials can take several years. On the other hand, the CCP is also tightening restrictions on the emigration of public officials in these new regulations. Caught in this pincer movement, in about two to three years, staff in sensitive industries may completely lose the possibility of emigration. In five years, I estimate that all public staff will lose the possibility of conventional emigration. Against the backdrop of the confrontation between China and the West, and between democracy and dictatorship, in many cases, one really has to choose a side. But some might say, why are you so certain that the future will deteriorate to this extent? The regulations clearly don't state that much; you are maliciously speculating about the CCP and maliciously interpreting the CCP's regulations. In fact, in current China, I think everyone has a required course, which is that we must learn to understand Xi Jinping and the logic of how the CCP operates. Only in this way can we predict China's trends and manage to avoid harm and seek benefits.

Is it inevitable that Xi Jinping would introduce such new regulations today? In fact, it is inevitable. We all say that Xi Jinping is more like Mao Zedong, deviating from the reform and opening-up of the Jiang and Hu eras. But how exactly is Xi Jinping more like Mao Zedong? And where exactly is the gap between him and the Jiang-Hu era? The gap does not lie in the one-man rule or the lifelong tenure, but in the government's definition of its own power. In political science, there are two technical terms: authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Both are used to describe dictators, but there is a significant difference between them. Authoritarianism refers to a dictator or a dictatorial regime that only exercises dictatorship in the political and ideological spheres, while tending toward liberalization in the economy and other aspects. This is the state of most dictators currently. Examples include Park Chung-hee of South Korea, Chiang Ching-kuo of Taiwan, and Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore. Totalitarianism, the English term for which is totalism, refers to a government that acts like an omnipotent god, controlling everything. Beyond ideology, it controls the economy, and even your daily life, eating, drinking, and marriage. The typical examples are Mao Zedong and the Kim dynasty in North Korea. Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao actually led China through a process from totalitarianism to authoritarianism. Throughout the Deng, Jiang, and Hu eras, the government was gradually relaxing control over residents. While China in the Xi Jinping era has not yet entered totalitarianism, it is clear that what Xi Jinping is doing is leading China toward the pit of totalitarianism. Of course, this totalitarianism of Xi Jinping is still a crippled totalitarianism. It is omnipotent in wanting to control others, but when problems arise, it actually wants to manage them too. Take the Soviet Union, for example; although it controlled a lot and its welfare was not good, the government did take responsibility for your birth, aging, sickness, and death. And Xi Jinping? Obviously, he only wants to control, but does not want to bear such responsibilities. On one hand, he wants everyone's entry and exit to be controlled by the CCP; on the other hand, if something really happens overseas, Uncle Wu Jing can only exist in dreams. Demanding power without providing obligations is typical of a 'scumbag' style government. Of course, returning to the issue of the trend toward totalitarianism, as long as this trend exists in China, the CCP and Xi Jinping's strengthening of entry and exit controls is an inevitable result. Because how could the CCP, which wants to control everything, not control entry and exit? It is only a matter of time before it is controlled. And as long as it follows this path of strengthening totalitarianism, the loss of control over the law is also only a matter of time.

Although the spontaneous trend of centralization was initiated by Xi Jinping, it will not manifest solely in Xi himself; it will also appear among grassroots bureaucrats. The entire society spontaneously expands its own power, which is the so-called "using a chicken feather as an arrow" (exaggerating authority). We can think about it: under the current trend, how will this new regulation develop? When this new regulation first comes out—such as reviewing passport applications—there might be a state where 1 out of 100 applications needs review, while 90 do not. Indeed, the controls might not be very strict at first, and the ones being reviewed are mostly people with fraud risks. However, as one or two telecommunication fraudsters appear in certain regions, causing negative impacts and increasing the difficulty for local civil servants to handle cases, it is very likely that the public security leadership in that place will drastically increase the difficulty of applying for passports and never turn back. Just like subway security checks nowadays: a city's subway security check becomes stricter perhaps because of some large sports event or special incident. But once this security check is implemented, it will never disappear. This is the inevitable result of lazy administration and the expansion of power under a centralized system. In China's current civil servant system, as long as a law has a lower limit, it will eventually slide to that lower limit. This can basically be used as a law of physics. Seven years from now, Chinese passports will become increasingly difficult to obtain; civil servants and technical talents will be unable to travel abroad without approval; and preventing you from traveling to a certain country will become a political weapon. All of these will certainly be staged. If we don't talk about it now, we can wait and see in the future.

However, having such a trend does not mean that everyone is unable to leave the country. There is also a part here that needs to be treated differently, because Xi Jinping's era has another characteristic: Xi's governance has a very strong utilitarian nature and a strong tendency to treat Chinese people as expendable materials. Therefore, when you think about the future trajectory of Xi Jinping's policies, you must also consider one thing: does doing this conform to Xi Jinping's grand view and view of interests? Why are civil servants and technical personnel the ones Xi Jinping is unwilling to let go abroad, making them the primary targets of tightened immigration restrictions? In fact, it is because Xi Jinping believes that these types of people should not go abroad. For civil servants, Xi clearly feels that these people are enjoying the benefits of the party-state. If they emigrate abroad, it is obviously a betrayal of the Communist Party and of himself! Although Xi Jinping's sister Qi Qiaoqiao emigrated to Ghana and his younger brother Xi Yuanping emigrated to Australia—an operation by Xi Jinping that is a classic case of "magistrates are allowed to burn down houses while common people are forbidden even to light lamps"—our Chairman Xi cannot care about that much. You guys just must not emigrate.

In addition, why doesn't Xi Jinping let high-level technical talents emigrate? It is because these people have started to become useful in Xi Jinping's eyes. Especially in the past two years, along with various aspects of confrontation between China and the United States including AI, China's AI has made certain breakthroughs and is now able to wrestle with Europe and the United States. After this, Xi Jinping is even less likely to let these people emigrate. If they couldn't wrestle, then the probability is that technical talents leaving the country would not be restricted. Now that they can wrestle, it is definitely impossible to let you go anymore. Being too useful is sometimes not a good thing, especially to a rogue. Therefore, for the first time, we can actually predict that in the near future, the wealthy will likely be added to this list very soon, and the rich will soon become the next group hit by immigration restrictions. The loss of the wealthy is actually the loss of assets for Xi Jinping. In addition, against the backdrop of current sluggish consumption, traveling abroad will likely be restricted in the future. Aside from using the card of outbound tourism to confront foreign countries and blackmailing those countries, another aspect is Xi Jinping's idea of boosting domestic consumption. If you don't even consume domestically and still want to go abroad to consume, contributing your purchasing power to foreign countries, that is disloyalty to Chairman Xi. You should keep all your consumption power in China right now. Isn't China big enough for you to play around in?

Of course, based on this logic, there are also two categories of people who may temporarily not be affected by leaving the country: overseas workers and international students. Why? First of all, for Chinese citizens working overseas, from the perspective of Xi Jinping, they can still generate foreign exchange for him. Now Xi's strategy is also to pursue the Belt and Road, building factories in third-world countries. Building factories overseas naturally requires Chinese cattle-and-horse employees to go there, which means overseas labor will likely not be restricted in the short term. In addition, the same applies to international students, especially those in science and engineering. Although Xi believes that China can already go toe-to-toe with the United States in certain areas, I believe Xi is still clearly aware of the technological gap between China and the US. As long as this technological gap exists, Xi still has the motivation to send international students abroad to learn technology! Of course, you could also call it stealing technology. Therefore, in the short term, Chinese studying abroad will not be hit. Since study-abroad immigration and work immigration serve as the main immigration methods for China's middle class in the long run, it can also be inferred that middle-class immigration will not be hit too hard by China within a certain period. Although the CCP has recently increased the difficulty of leaving the country, it is still mainly concentrated on the wealthy, civil servants, and tourism. The main pressure for middle-class immigrants still comes from the global rightward shift. However, although the iron fist will not hit these people for now, opportunities are actually running out for these two groups of people. Because going abroad may be useful to Xi now, it might not necessarily be useful in the future. The turning point of this change probably depends mainly on two things.

One is when China will be completely besieged by the whole world? If the world launches a trade war against China, completely restricting enterprises like BYD from going overseas, then China might lose the significance of sending laborers overseas. At that time, the CCP would no longer have any need to let Chinese laborers go out. Overseas laborers would also enjoy the treatment of ordinary people and face restrictions. On the other hand, if one day Xi feels that China no longer needs to learn foreign technology and has achieved leadership in many aspects, or if foreign universities simply stop admitting Chinese international students, then studying abroad may also be restricted. At that time, China might completely regress to the state of 1986, and most people's immigration would be restricted. Actually, a ridiculous result is: fortunately, China is not successful enough yet. The more successful China is, the lower the possibility of Chinese people leaving the country. Of course, what is even more ridiculous is that, already in 2026, whether a Chinese person can leave China still depends on whether your act of leaving has value in the eyes of Xi Jinping. In 1966, the United Nations promulgated the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Article 12 of the Covenant stipulates that everyone shall be free to leave any country, including his own. That is to say, Chinese people leaving China is a basic human right that Chinese people ought to enjoy. But unfortunately, Chinese people do not have this right, and for a very long period since the founding of the PRC, Chinese people had only a brief twenty years of freedom to leave China, and for most of the time they were unable to leave China. Chinese people still live in a country devoid of human rights, which is truly very pathetic. Finally, thank you all for watching today's program. I am Toronto Fang Lian. I hope you will like and support my video, as this can increase the weight of YouTube recommending me. See you in the next program.