A recent report by the human rights organization Safeguard Defenders, based in Spain, reveals that China, under the leadership of Xi Jinping, has been using exit bans to stop millions of people from leaving the country. The NGO further stated in an interview that these exit bans are also preventing Tibetans from obtaining passports and visiting the Dalai Lama in India.
According to the report by Safeguard Defenders, the use of exit bans is frequently aimed at oppressed ethnic groups, including Uyghur Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists.
“Acquiring a passport if you are Tibetan or Uyghur is almost impossible and has been difficult for many years,” Dinah Gardner, Research Director at the Taiwan Office of Safeguard Defenders
The passport control on Tibetans
From at least since 2012, China has actively tried to prevent Tibetans inside China from visiting the Dalai Lama in India,” Gardner told WION.
“Tibetans who follow the Dalai Lama are seen as a risk to the Chinese Communist Party’s monopoly on power,” Gardner added while referring to Beijing’s territorial assertion about Tibet being part of China.
Tibet was India’s actual neighbor for generations, as India’s contentious borders with China along the 3500 km Line of Actual Control are with the Tibetan Autonomous Region in the states of Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim, and Arunachal Pradesh. In 1954, four years after China completed its territorial invasion of Tibet, New Delhi signed an agreement with Peking (now Beijing) recognizing Tibet as the “Tibet region of China. (Xanax) ”
Following the Tibetan uprising in 1959, the Dalai Lama (Tibetan spiritual leader) and many of his followers fled to India.
The Tibetan government-in-exile is based in Dharamsala, Himachal Pradesh, India.
What the Safeguard Defenders study says about exit restrictions
Beijing often enforces leave bans “through passport denial and confiscation,” Gardner added, alluding to Beijing’s use of ethnicity-based controls.
According to the organization, “tens of thousands” of Chinese are barred from leaving at any given moment. It also cites a 2022 academic study by Chris Carr and Jack Wroldsen, who discovered 128 incidents of foreigners being barred from leaving the country between 1995 and 2019, including 29 Americans and 44 Canadians.
According to the research, human rights organizations estimated that exit bans in China affected at least 14 million people in 2015.
How China keeps ethnic minorities from Fleeing the country
Since 2002, China has used a two-tier system for issuing passports.
The fast-track passport system is mostly used in Han-majority areas and is tasked with processing passport applications and renewals within 15 days of submission.
For issuing passports in so-called autonomous territories, including Buddhist-populated Tibet and Uyghur-populated Xinjiang, a far slower system with at least seven tiers of gatekeeping is used.
“In this much more cumbersome system, passport applications could take years, that is if they are approved at all,” the Safeguard Defenders report said.
Why does China make it difficult for Tibetans and Uyghurs to leave the country?
According to the Safeguard Defenders study, the discriminatory regulation was intended in part to deter religious travelers from traveling.
“For example, stopping Tibetan Buddhists from attending teachings of the Dalai Lama in India and Muslims, such as Uyghurs and Hui, from making pilgrimages to Mecca in Saudi Arabia,” the report said.