cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/3597863
The passport collection drive, carried out under what is known as “personal travel abroad management,” allows local government officials to control and monitor who can travel abroad, how often and to where.
It comes as Xi steps up state involvement in everyday life and clamps down on official corruption. China’s powerful state security apparatus has also intensified its campaign against foreign espionage.
Interviews with more than a dozen Chinese public sector workers and notices from education bureaus in half a dozen cities show restrictions on international travel have been greatly expanded from last year to include rank-and-file employees of schools, universities, local governments and state-owned groups.
[…]
“If we want to travel abroad, we have to apply to the city education bureau and I don’t think it will be approved,” said the teacher, asking that they and their city not be named.
[…]
Residents of restive regions such as Tibet lost their freedom to travel more than a decade ago. Starting in the mid-2010s, some areas applied “personal travel abroad management” rules to local teachers. Last year, after pandemic-era travel restrictions were lifted, more education bureaus began to introduce teacher travel restrictions and stepped them up this summer.
[…]
An entry-level salesperson at a bank in Nanjing said she was told to hand in her passport when she joined the state-owned group last year. After quitting in March, she had to wait six months for a “de-secrecy process” before she was able to retrieve it.
In central Hunan province, a mid-level official at a local government investment fund said he gained approval from nine different departments for a holiday abroad but still could not retrieve his passport.
[…]
The restrictions are hitting retirees as well. A 76-year-old who retired from a state-owned aircraft maker more than 10 years ago said his former employer took his passport back this year for “security reasons” and barred him from visiting family abroad.
[…]
China’s foreign ministry said it was not aware of the situation and referred questions to the relevant authorities.
China’s ruling Communist party has long prioritised instilling loyalty in students and has made the political education of teachers central to those efforts. Pre-travel instructions for teachers in the eastern city of Wenzhou indicates local authorities are concerned about the ideas they would encounter outside the country.
lemmy.ml: But how dare you call China an open-air prison!!!
“Shucks, you know I simply cannot remember where I left it.”
you can think about it in a cold prison cell
It’s been that way since 3 or 4 years ago. The way it works is that you’ll hand in the passport and if you want to use it, you’d have to apply for it. The party branch (党委) usually has quotas for each year and therefore will seek excuses to reject the application.
I think it has been like this for close to a decade at this point…
It really is like that. I found a report on People.cn from 2015. I guess it’s just the impact range is expanding. Personally I only heard of people experiencing this post-covid.
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For people not in public sectors, application for passports are okay-ish.
For others, I can only speculate. Most of the public sector workers already have passports from years ago. I don’t know if they have any kind of restrictions on new applications. To me, the Immigration Administration of the Ministry of Public Safety (who issues passports) feels more like a “routine” type of branch of the central government, but I could be wrong.
Financial Post - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report)
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MBFC: Right-Center - Credibility: High - Factual Reporting: Mostly Factual - Canada
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MBFC: Least Biased - Credibility: High - Factual Reporting: High - United Kingdom
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MBFC: Left-Center - Credibility: High - Factual Reporting: Mostly Factual - United States of America
Wikipedia about this sourceWhy do people hate this fuckin bot so much?
Because the metric it uses (MBFC) follows a skewed-right Overton window. This means it tends to label fact-based material as “left-leaning” rather than center.
The bot itself is not the problem. MBFC’s shitty labelling imbalance is the problem.
It’s not only their faulty Overton window, imo the big problem is that their “methodology” of determining bias/credibility is very poor. It’s basically 1 volunteer scoring a few metrics of the site being reviewed, which has lead to some very questionable credibility scores in the past, probably caused by the bias and/or amateurism of the volunteers. When those odd scores caused enough controversy, then those scores got arbitrarily adjusted, but only those scores. In particular the owner + volunteer staff of mbfc appears to be very pro Israel, so Zionist propaganda outlets like unwatch get given high scores, while media outlets like the guardian were given the same mixed credibility rating as fox news, for no other reason than that the reviewing volunteer happened to be extremely biased.
If a biased organisation uses a weak process to assign bias ratings, then the output is going to be nonsense. After numerous controversies, they probably have corrected ratings for all large news and propaganda organizations, but smaller ones will not have caused the same controversies and since those ratings are a product of the same process, they’re going to be just as faulty. We just don’t know it because there have been no public controversies about those yet.
Basically you can’t trust their credibility scores. If you know the site being reviewed, then you can make an assessment yourself if the rating is actually credible, in which case you also actually didn’t need the bot to tell you that. And if it’s a small unknown site, then there is no way to know that that credibility rating can be trusted, making the bot useless. And if people were to start trusting the bot, it would be worse than useless.
I had wondered about this. This was useful to know, thanks for the explanation!
Not to mention it’s extremely biased and dings anything not pro-israel for credibility and bias, as well as the laughable concept of BBC being considered unbiased
I like it.
Holy shit
Seems like preparations for war
Cultural révolution pt 2?
It’s hard to understand the absoluteness of the stranglehold that the government has there without visiting. Cameras everywhere tracking everything. Little police booths everywhere to remind you. Even inter-city travel by high speed train requires an ID check. You cannot own your own car in the larger cities without a car license that you must apply for annually. All messaging apps are unencrypted and monitored. etc etc
Do they pretend that it benefits them somehow?
What a shit hole.
More reasons to never live in China.
Fuckin yikes
This is obviously very concerning and unfortunate for the people affected by this. What I dont understand though, is why they have to collect the physical passport and not just put them on a no country exit list?
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Isn’t this more of a local government thing than a national government thing, as the national government already requires exit visas to leave the country?
If the local government takes your passport, they’re ensuring that you can’t go to the national government and get an exit visa, presumably to protect their labor supply or something.
Too bad the Chinese national government has no control over its local governments, unlike pretty much every other functional nation, isn’t it?
Xi Jinping and his cronies aren’t exactly champions of human rights so I imagine they wouldn’t care either way. They would probably only step in if they were taking passports from party members or there were massive protests like during covid.
The national government is probably not able to do more than a very basic check on would be international travellers. Local government on the other hand is capable to scrutinize individual teachers much more thoroughly.
Ah, makes sense.
I want to go back to Hong Kong so badly, and then I keep seeing shit like this which reminds me I never want to visit China.
Not a huge city lover because I find a lot of them very samey but New York and Hong Kong are incredible places.
Last time I was there was before COVID and I wonder how much of it’s vibrance has been sucked out since. 40 minutes north, Shenzhen is drab and lifeless by comparison.
Funny enough, I’m the opposite. You’ve seen a few different countrysides you’ve seen them all. But cities are bustling, vibrant and unique with all different cultures coming together, and Hong Kong (like you said about New York) was at the top of them. I’m really disappointed about how you describe Shenzhen because that’s my worry that will happen to Hong Kong
Yeah I can see that perspective. It depends a lot on the city I suppose.
You gave me pause for thought and I suppose I just like being in nature more. :)
Oh, Berlin and Amsterdam are also stand out cities. Yeah maybe I like them more than I think I do.
This is gonna be a tough one for the tankies to defend…
They will probably just ignore the post completely.
No it won’t, they legitimately believe that the only thing in the world which matters is blindly opposing US hegemony. Absolutely anything is justified to this end, and in the grand scheme of things this is a pretty mild “anything.”
Remember, these are people who actually defend China’s broad censorship of daily life, media and the internet, because freedom of expression is freedom to entertain western values and that is the worst thing a person can possibly do.
lemmy.ml: autistic screeching
You have been permanently banned from lemmy.ml
Promise?
Can you throw in a /latestagecapitalism ban too?
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Total joke of a government
