‘Today, I received terrible news that our dream of reunion has once again been dashed.’
On 22 May 2023, Jin Bianling learnt that her husband Jiang Tianyong’s applications for a passport and a travel pass for Hong Kong and Macau had been turned down again. It had been ten years since the disbarred award-winning human rights lawyer was separated from his wife and daughter.
Being blocked from leaving China by the authorities has become common under Xi Jinping’s rule. Some have had their passport applications or renewals turned down, others have been stopped at the airport by police, such as the exiled activist Lin Shengliang’s 12-year-old daughter, while still others have had their boarding passes torn up by airport security guards. In the case of 80-year-old historian and writer Zhang Yihe, just a word from one of the government departments was enough to bar her from leaving China. She revealed on 8 June 2023 that she had become ‘a prisoner of the state’ as of the day before, unable to travel abroad.
A report by Safeguard Defenders studies in depth the use of exit bans in China, including the most notable ethnicity-based exit bans imposed on Tibetans, Uyghurs and other Turkic ethnic groups in Xinjiang. As the writer Murong Xuecun commented, ‘There are almost no avenues of redress. It is almost impossible for you to sue them, and you do not even know whom to sue.’
There are innumerable stories we could tell of those who have been forcibly separated from their loved ones in Xi’s new era. Here are two:
A wife’s dying wish
Nothing is worse than being robbed of the chance to say goodbye when a loved one is critically ill.
Leading human rights campaigner Guo Feixiong (aka Yang Maodong) refused to go into exile after he was released from prison for the second time in 2019. However, since his wife Zhang Qing was diagnosed with terminal cancer in the US in early 2021, he attempted several times to visit her, but the Chinese authorities blocked his departure from China. Why? Apparently, if he leaves China to be with his family, he might ‘endanger national security’.
On 28 January 2021, Guo staged a hunger strike at Shanghai’s Pudong airport after the Chinese authorities prevented him from boarding a flight to visit his wife and children after 15 years of separation.
In November 2021, Ms Zhang, who had always been supportive of her husband’s work, wrote him a letter from her sickbed:
‘I’ve been through numerous challenges all these years, but this time I can’t stand the pain and suffering, I just can’t hold out any longer. Even if [the cancer] is incurable, I still want to see you one last time. I dream of seeing you one last time, one last time… I waited for ten whole months for you to come over to accompany me while I receive treatment. Why don’t you come over? Do you know how desperate and sad I am now?’
The US government denounced ‘politically motivated exit bans’ by the Chinese authorities and said Guo was ‘denied foreign travel for his peaceful advocacy on behalf of the Chinese people’ in a statement following Zhang Qing’s death on 10 January 2022. By then, Guo had been criminally detained by the authorities on suspicion of ‘inciting subversion of state power’.
In May 2023, Guo was jailed for eight years. He has been on a hunger strike and forcibly fed by officials since December 2021. The heart-broken husband has been robbed of the opportunity to grieve together with his children, who he has not seen since 2006.
From his prison cell, Guo wrote a will asking to be buried together with the remains of his wife.
‘Your tragic call that lasted a year,
An excerpt from Guo Feixiong’s poem ‘‘To my eternally living wife‘
Long ago tore my heart apart.
While you were being pushed step by step to the edge of the precipice,
No matter how hard I fought, I could not
Break the chains.
I could not come to your rescue.
At the end of your life,
I could not embrace your trembling shoulders.
My hot tears
could not warm your pale, cold face…’
A father’s journey to reach his ill daughter
Another disbarred human rights lawyer Tang Jitian has also been subject to an exit ban for years. Government harassment is normal daily life for the veteran lawyer. However, his worst nightmare came true when his 25-year daughter fell gravely ill in Japan in May 2023.
Scholars and legal professionals from around the world signed an open letter calling on the Chinese government to allow Tang Jitian to travel to Japan to visit his daughter on humanitarian grounds and to respect its human rights obligations. Tang himself visited the Ministry of Public Security and other government departments several times. However, he received no official response to his request of having the travel ban lifted.
On 2 June 2021, the desperate father attempted to try leaving China for Japan but was stopped at an airport in Fujian. Officials gave the same excuse: his departure from China might ‘endanger national security’. By then, his daughter had been in a coma for a month due to complications from tuberculosis.
Tang’s efforts to leave China to visit his daughter in Japan halted abruptly on 10 December 2021, when he was taken by Beijing police. He had been due to attend an event hosted by the Delegation of the European Union to China on Human Rights Day. He was held incommunicado without charge for over a year and was released in January 2023.
To this day, Miss Tang is still on life support; her father is still waiting to be permitted to travel to Japan to be with her.
Both cases of Tang and Guo were raised by UN human rights experts in a communication with China in February 2022.
‘This exit ban is worse than the surveillance, enforced disappearance or physical torture [I have experienced].’
Tang Jitian
A mental torture that is worse than physical pain
‘Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country’, states Article 12 (2) of Universal Declaration of Human Rights. ‘National security’ should not be used to undermine families, professional lives, universal values, and the rule of law. Sadly, the Chinese authorities even used a national security law to successfully subvert the constitutional principle of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ in Hong Kong.
Compared with imprisonment and detention, for so many, being deprived of their right to be with their families is a more cruel, long-term punishment. This is why human rights lawyer Lu Siwei and activist Dong Guangping decided to take the risks and flee China, and both became victims of China’s transnational repression.
The CCP regime has deliberately inflicted this deep pain on families to coerce, control or retaliate against China’s most courageous human rights defenders by these exit bans. To reiterate the words of writer Murong Xuecun, ‘There are almost no avenues of redress.’
The United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), which China ratified in 1988, defines torture as an act which causes severe physical pain or mental suffering, done intentionally, for the purpose of coercion or punishment, by a state official or with state consent. It is apparent that China’s travel ban policy meets these criteria, and the world must call on the Chinese Communist Party to end this terrible injustice.
By CSW’s China Team
