China demands schoolteachers hand in their passports

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Chinese authorities are demanding that a growing number of schoolteachers and other public sector employees hand in their passports as President Xi Jinping tightens his grip on society.

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.

“All teachers and public sector employees were told to hand in our passports,” said a primary school teacher in a major city in the western province of Sichuan.

“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.

Teachers in Yichang in the central province of Hubei and in another city in neighbouring Anhui province told the Financial Times they had also been told to hand in their travel documents. This summer, in the weeks ahead of the school year start, educators in Guangdong, Jiangsu and Henan provinces complained on social media of being forced to hand in their travel documents.

“I was an English major, my life-long dream is to visit an English-speaking country, but it feels like that is about to be shattered,” posted one Henan teacher to social media site Xiaohongshu.

The passport collection appears to be based on national regulations from 2003 that established a system to restrict travel for key personnel such as mid- to high-level officials and allowed local authorities to set rules for all state employees’ international travel.

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.

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.

Educators travelling abroad must not have contact with the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement or other “hostile foreign forces”, according to instructions published by Wenzhou’s Ouhai district education bureau in March on the district’s website along with the new teacher travel restrictions.

The district demanded that all public pre-school, primary school and secondary school teachers hand in their passports and said their names would be registered with the public security bureau’s border control unit.

To travel abroad, teachers must file applications with their schools and would generally be restricted to a single trip of less than 20 days each year, the district notice said.

Teachers who refused to hand in their passports or who travelled abroad without permission would be subject to “criticism and education” or referred to China’s anti-corruption authority, depending on the severity of their case, the notice said. Offenders would also be barred from travel for two to five years.

The restrictions on staff at state-owned enterprises appear to be connected to a growing campaign to root out foreign espionage.

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. 

“No one would tell me what exactly was needed to get my passport back,” he said.

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.

“I have no access to sensitive information and I am a patriot,” he said. “My former employer has no reason to keep me from visiting my grandson.”

China’s foreign ministry said it was not aware of the situation and referred questions to the relevant authorities. The education bureaus in Sichuan, Yichang, Anhui, Wenzhou, Guangdong, Jiangsu and Henan did not respond to requests for comment.

Additional reporting by Tina Hu in Beijing