MCLC: passport politics

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: passport politics
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (2/22/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/world/asia/chinese-passports-seen-as-poli
tical-statement.html

No Exit: China Uses Passports as Political Cudgel
By ANDREW JACOBS

BEIJING — Flush with cash and eager to see the world, millions of
middle-class Chinese spent the 10-day Lunar New Year holiday that ended on
Monday in places like Paris, Bangkok and New York. Last year, Chinese made
a record 83 million trips abroad, 20 percent more than in 2011 and a
fivefold increase from a decade earlier.

Sun Wenguang, a retired economics professor from Shandong Province, was
not among those venturing overseas, however. And not by choice. An author
whose books offer a critical assessment of Communist Party rule, Mr. Sun,
79, has been repeatedly denied a passport without explanation.

“I’d love to visit my daughter in America and my 90-year-old brother in
Taiwan, but the authorities have other ideas,” he said. “I feel like I’m
living in a cage.”

Mr. Sun is among the legions of Chinese who have been barred from
traveling abroad by a government that is increasingly using decisions on
passports as a cudgel against perceived enemies — or as a carrot to
encourage academics whose writings have at times strayed from the party
line to return to the fold.

“It’s just another way to punish people they don’t like,” said Wu Zeheng,
a government critic and Buddhist spiritual leader from southern Guangdong
Province whose failed entreaties to obtain a passport have prevented him
from accepting at least a dozen speaking invitations in Europe and North
America.

China’s passport restrictions extend to low-level military personnel,
Tibetan monks and even the security personnel who process passport
applications. “I feel so jealous when I see all my friends taking
vacations in Singapore or Thailand but the only way I could join them is
to quit my job,” said a 28-year-old police detective in Beijing.

Lawyers and human rights advocates say the number of those affected has
soared in recent years, with Tibetans and Uighurs, the Turkic-speaking
minority from China’s far west, increasingly ineligible for overseas
fellowships, speaking engagements or the organized sightseeing groups that
have ferried planeloads of Chinese to foreign capitals.

Although the government does not release figures on those who have been
denied passports, human rights groups suggest that at least 14 million
people — mostly those officially categorized as ethnic Uighurs and
Tibetans — have been directly affected by the restrictions, as have
hundreds of religious and political dissidents. A representative of the
Exit-Entry Administration of the Public Security Bureau declined to
discuss the nation’s passport policies.

The seemingly arbitrary restrictions, not unlike those long employed by
the former Soviet Union, also affect overseas Chinese who had grown
accustomed to frequent visits home. Scores of Chinese expatriates have
been denied new passports by Chinese Embassies when their old ones expire,
while others say they are simply turned away after landing in Beijing,
Shanghai or Hong Kong.

Returnees whose names show up on a blacklist are escorted by border
control officers to the next outbound flight. Even if seldom given
explanations for their expulsions, many of those turned away suspect it is
punishment for their antigovernment activism abroad. “Compared to other
forms of political persecution, the denial of the right to return home
seems like a small evil,” said Hu Ping, the editor of a pro-democracy
journal in New York who has not been allowed to see family members in
China since 1987. “But it’s a blatant violation of human rights.”

Even those carrying valid passports are subject to the whims of the
authorities. On Feb. 6, Wang Zhongxia, 28, a Chinese activist who had
planned to meet the Burmese opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, was
barred from boarding a Myanmar-bound flight from the southern city of
Guangzhou. Four days earlier, Ilham Tohti, an academic and vocal advocate
for China’s ethnic Uighurs, was prevented from leaving for the United
States 
<http://scholarsatrisk.nyu.edu/Events-News/Article-Detail.php?art_uid=3880>
.

Mr. Tohti, who was set to begin a yearlong fellowship at Indiana
University, said he was interrogated at Beijing International Airport for
nearly 12 hours by officers who refused to explain his detention. Speaking
from his apartment in the capital, Mr. Tohti says that Uighurs have long
faced difficulties in obtaining passports but that the authorities have
made it nearly impossible in recent years.

“We feel like second-class citizens in our own country,” he said.

For decades after the Communists came to power in 1949, most Chinese could
only dream of traveling abroad; the handful who managed to leave often
escaped by evading border guards and swimming across shark-infested waters
to what was then British-ruled Hong Kong. As China opened up to the
outside world in the early 1980s, the government began providing passports
and exit visas to graduate students who had acceptance letters from
universities overseas.

All that changed in 1991, when Beijing issued new rules allowing Chinese
to join group tours to “approved destinations” in Southeast Asia, and two
years later, to the United States and Europe. These days, members of
China’s ethnic Han majority can generally obtain a passport in 15 days.

But the rules are more arduous for Tibetans and Uighurs, who must win
approvals from several layers of bureaucracy — including provincial
authorities; the applicant’s hometown public security bureau; and for
students, university administrators. Tsering Woeser, a Tibetan writer who
has tried and failed to get a passport since 2005, says the denials are
driven by fears that once abroad, minorities will speak out about China’s
repressive ethnic policies or link up with exile groups.

“For the Han, getting a passport is as easy as buying a bus ticket,” she
said. “But for Tibetans it’s harder than climbing to the sky.”

Since last April, the authorities have been confiscating passports from
Tibetans lucky enough to have them in the first place. According to
documents obtained by Human Rights Watch, the police in Tibet are also
required to interrogate returnees and determine whether they have broken a
signed pledge not to engage in activities that “harm state security and
interests” while outside the country.

The new procedures were introduced after thousands of Tibetans attended a
religious gathering in India that included an appearance by the Dalai
Lama, the spiritual leader whom Beijing considers a separatist. Tibetan
exiles say the restrictions also seek to limit information about the
recent spate of self-immolations from reaching the outside world.

The frustrations of those affected by the tightened rules received a rare
public airing after a 21-year-old Uighur college student blogged about her
unsuccessful attempt to get a passport. The student, Atikem Rozi, said the
repeated rejections had dashed her hopes to study abroad.

“Whenever the subject of a passport is mentioned, it brings me to tears,”
Ms. Rozi, a student at Minzu University in Beijing, wrote last month. “My
passport is still a riddle, a luxury.”

Widely forwarded, the blog posts prompted favorable coverage in one
Chinese publication. But they also drew unwanted attention from the
domestic security agents in Xinjiang, who during six hours of questioning
this month suggested that she was “politically unqualified” to go abroad
because she had used her microblog, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, to
complain about discrimination against Uighurs.

The inability to travel has driven many Chinese to take desperate
measures. In 2011, Liao Yiwu
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/11/world/asia/11iht-letter11.html?pagewante
d=all>, a poet and author from the southwest city of Chengdu, escaped
overland to Vietnam after the authorities rebuffed his passport
application more than a dozen times and then threatened him over plans to
publish a book overseas. He now lives in exile in Germany.

Wu’er Kaixi, who was No. 2 on the government’s most wanted list after he
organized student protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, has spent the last
several years trying to get himself arrested by the Chinese authorities in
an attempt to return home to see his aging parents. Mr. Kaixi, who lives
in Taiwan, has tried crashing through the gates of the Chinese Embassy in
Washington, and he once flew to Chinese-administered Macau and offered
himself up to the police. He was promptly put back on a plane and sent
home.

“It is unbearable to contemplate the idea that I may never see them
again,” he wrote last year of his parents, who have also been barred from
leaving China. “This is barbaric and cruel behavior by the Chinese
government.”

Patrick Zuo contributed research.