The U.S. government is warning Americans not to travel to China over laws and practice there allowing for arbitrary detention for political reasons, and for prosecution over the contents of private emails.
New legislation went into effect July 1 allowing the government to take “countermeasures or restrictive measures against acts that…harm the sovereignty, security, and developmental interests of the People’s Republic of China.”
And in particular foreigners in China “shall comply with Chinese law and must not endanger China’s national security, harm the societal public interest, or undermine societal public order.”
According to the U.S. Department of State,
- Enforcement of law against foreigners is arbitrary
- You can be banned from leaving, without due process
- There’s a “risk of wrongful detention of U.S. nationals by the PRC government…without..information about their alleged crime.”
Foreigners in the PRC, including but not limited to businesspeople, former foreign-government personnel, academics, relatives of PRC citizens involved in legal disputes, and journalists have been interrogated and detained by PRC officials for alleged violations of PRC national security laws. The PRC has also interrogated, detained, and expelled U.S. citizens living and working in the PRC.
PRC authorities appear to have broad discretion to deem a wide range of documents, data, statistics, or materials as state secrets and to detain and prosecute foreign nationals for alleged espionage. …Security personnel could detain U.S. citizens or subject them to prosecution for conducting research or accessing publicly available material inside the PRC.
Your e-mail critical of the mainland, Hong Kong, or Macau governments is sufficient reason to be detained, under the State Department’s warning. When I’ve traveled there use of a VPN and even cell phone roaming made it possible to circumvent the Great Firewall but I assume that any electronic devices brought into the country are compromised.
Tensions between the U.S. and China have risen markedly over the past few years. China has taken full control of Hong Kong, and made belligerent moves towards Taiwan. Meanwhile, the U.S. threatens to ban TikTok and purge individuals suspected of industrial espionage for the Chinese Communist Party.
I’ve enjoyed numerous trips to China very much. However with the two countries appearing to enter a period of cold hostility, and since I’ve been openly critical of the President Xi and his regime – over human rights, including in both Xinjiang and Hong Kong, as well as handling of Covid-19 and for a free Taiwan. I see myself as taking a risk if I travel there.
A few years ago one nationally-prominent journalist told me he wouldn’t connect in China. Air China first class award space was readily available for a trip he was working on, but he wouldn’t take it. That makes some sense for a journalist, I think, especially one that has covered pro-democracy protests around the world.
What about the rest of us? China has openly threated to detain Americans in retaliation for the U.S. prosecuting Chinese scholars. For the average person the risk may be low? But it’s a new area of uncertainty. Maybe you share things to social media from the Falun Gong’s Epoch Times? That alone could create risk.
I think the other question is, what about Hong Kong? I’ve been vocal about my concerns over the end of freedoms there. “China wants to keep Hong Kong. They just want to get rid of the Hongkongers” through its National Security Law and crackdown on democracy (and LGBT rights) in the city. I’m not sure I’ll spend time in Hong Kong, but I doubt I’m important enough of a concern to be detained in transit there.
My formative years saw David Hasselhoff singing “Looking for Freedom” atop the Berlin Wall (1989) and Scorpions singing “Winds of Change” (1991) as the Soviet Union prepared to fall. It was an optimistic time filled with hope for the future of people around the world who would be able to write their own destinies as they saw fit, and a time when it seemed the U.S. itself might even be inspired by it.
Frank Fukuyama wrote about “The End of History” first as an article (1989) and then a book (1992) speculating that we had reached a point of victory for humanity where liberal democracy had triumphed for good.
Yet 1989 wasn’t entirely triumphant. It’s been 34 years since ‘Tank Man’ stood athwart the People’s Liberation Army of China, in what seemed like an historical moment for that nation. We’ve seen much economic liberalization yet personal liberty has remained restricted.
Looking back the hopefulness of this era seems so naive. In both security policy and economics we’ve forgotten which direction traffic flowed over the Berlin Wall. Tell me you can watch this from summer 2019 – while Hongkongers sought to hang onto their grasp on freedom – without tearing up?
More than thousand HKers sing Les Miserables' 'Do you hear the people sing?' at HK international airport with their calls for free election and democracy. Here is the Ground Zero in the war against authoritarian rule. That's the reason for us never surrender. pic.twitter.com/1MkTp4BkVg
— Joshua Wong 黃之鋒 (@joshuawongcf) August 10, 2019
“Do You hear the people sing,” by the way, is banned in China.
It’s quite sad, but I no longer feel safe going to Hong Kong. And Hong Kong’s role as a free city and a center of business and finance is over. The rule of law is suspect and China is free to remove people to the PRC to prosecute them there.
Until Xi is replaced I don’t see anything change. And it’s not at all clear what will happen if Xi is replaced.
I expect that Hong Kong and the PRC will be suffering a brain drain as the people who want to be able to communicate freely and think freely figure out how to leave. Much as Russia has suffered a brain drain.
PS: China did not keep its promises they made to the UK as part of the Hong Kong handover.
I already passed on connecting through Hong Kong last year with their Covid rules and potentially separating families if a child tests positive and parents don’t. Instead of business class seats for 4 on Cathay through Hong Kong (award travel booked about a year ago) we switched to coach on Japan Airlines. Giving up luxury but avoiding a small but not zero catastrophic risk of having my 9 year old in a covid jail.
It is not only government policies that deter me from going to China. Some restaurants have posted signs on doors stating that foreigners are not welcome. In a tightly controlled environment this rare behavior obviously has government approval. China thought leadership is controlled by relatively few people whose behavior is unpredictable. I would not want to plan a trip only to be caught up in a momentary temper flare up.
Now I’ve heard everything!! Too many Americans are so provincial that they just might believe nonsense like this, and scaring them from traveling to China and finding out the truth for themselves will keep them that way.
An American is vastly more likely to have an encounter with police – and a negative one – inside the United States than almost any other place in the world, and far more likely than in China in which the average tourist is at absolutely no risk of experiencing either police brutality, unfair treatment, and infinitesimal risk of experiencing crime. Of course the opposite is true for Chinese visiting the USA, where Chinese are openly discriminated against and have been since the time of Yick Wo.
Gary, can you enlighten us on your stance on Xinjiang and Hong Kong? Actually, I have my own thoughts on Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and Texas.. they need to be free from the “Union” and the United States’ tyrannical rule must be stop!
Nothing good comes out of government controlled countries like China. So sad to see what they are doing. No American should be going there. Chinas take over of Hong Kong is one of the worst things to happen in the Pacific in the 21st century.
@SMR I wonder if you’ve ever been to modern China? I can’t imagine that anybody who has seen the wonders of Shanghai, Hangzhou, Chongqing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, etc., and the quality of life there today – in a country that was dirt poor, truly unfree, and backwards less than 40 years ago – would bemoan “what they are doing” in China, except to have a tinge of envy that we can’t have such nice things in the USA.
You and I are on the same page, but the US State Dept is not saying “Do not travel”–that’s Level 4. It’s now Level 3 “Reconsider Travel”. Although for you (equivalent to a journalist in CCP’s eyes) and many Americans it’s Level 4.
@Mak, and I wonder if you’ve lived in China between the years 2020 and 2022. I surely envy a lifestyle of being told when to lock myself at home arbitrarily. And surely loved the experience of being sent on a wonderful month long vacation to quarantine camp (a real 5 star resort!) thanks to a single case of a famous infection in my apartment complex!
You all else are truly oppressed in USA!
@Carl, how distant do you have to be from business and finance to think that Hong Kong’s role as a center of business and finance is over?
You must be very important to feel in danger in China – or at least harbor delusions to that affect – such that the Chinese care at all about you. In any case, I’m wondering if you go to places like Dubai, Maldives, or Egypt where people have no human rights against arbitrary abuse by authorities and which occurs as a matter of course, or if you go to other common tourist destinations like India, Kenya, South Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, Jamaica, etc., which are thought of as “free societies” but actually offer far fewer protections against arbitrary seizure and abuse by authorities than does China? Even Japan is infamous for it’s lack of a fair criminal judicial system.
If you would go to any of these places, but not China, I think you are a hypocrite.
I want to fly Cathay Pacific for the first time. Is Hong Kong transit my only option on Cathay Pacific? I feel so sorry for Honh Kong.
@Mak – there has absolutely been a relative shift in some business from Hong Kong to Singapore, though that is not the same as saying Hong Kong’s role is “over.”
I’m amazed how ignorant and uneducated some of the so called leaders and experts can be. HK was never UKs Sovereign Territory. There was a99 year lease, and the landlord has every right to take back.
At this point, any American who needs to be TOLD not to go to China is just dumb.
Lee Kuan Yew once said UK never treated HKers as equals. It was one governor after another. There words and wishes were the law.
Gary what you said could happen, happened to Chinese Citizen Meng Wan Zhou in Vancouver Canada on US extradition.
@Mike –
1) Hong Kongers were far more free under British rule.
2) That was decades ago.
3) Limitations on Democracy in the past hardly justify that now, in fact it demonstrates how successively Hong Kongers have been denied full rights. Shame on the CCP.
Gary. You didn’t comment about Meng Wanzhou’s bogus case?
HKers are just as free as before. Only Westerners are not as free to criticize and causing troubles to China in HK like before under British.
@Mak When you choose to resort to ad hominem attacks, you lose your credibiity.
When China and the CCP choose to prosecute people who do due diligence for investment decisions or publish thoughtful analysis, they forfeit their role as a business center for anything but attempting to service China itself. Hong Kong is being relegated to the role of serving China only, and no longer a hub for Asia. No one will establish an Asia HQ there and instead they will shift elsewhere to Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo, and even Taipei, as the news organizations have had to do.
@Mike How can you see that HKers are just as free as before when the free press has been shut down, when journalists have been arrested, and when the right to protest in the streets has been terminated? You may not like the impact, but protests in the street have been fundamental expressions of the people and fundamental to demand change of their governments. To a great extent PRC & CCP brought on the HK protest movement by abridging the rights of HKers.
@Mike – what I said ‘could’ happen has also *already* happened to US citizens.
And I am consistently opposed to the expansion of the U.S. security state, to extraterritorial applications of its laws. The violations of freedom engaged in by the U.S. government in no way justify egregious violations by China.
As for Meng Wan Zhou this was not ‘detention based on secret evidence where the detainee isn’t even informed of charges’ – she was detained *by Canada* in response to a formal extradition request by the United States. She was charged with bank and wire fraud in relation to circumventing sanctions against Iran. And she availed herself of formal legal procedures, entering into a deferred prosecution agreement and admitting the underlying facts of making false statements regarding her company’s relationship to Skycom, that Skycom cleared transactions through the United States, and that this supported her company’s work in Iran in violation of U.S. law.
So I’m not sure what your point is here?
If it’s just whataboutism, you’ll find plenty of examples of complaints about U.S. abuse of power on this very blog. That doesn’t mean Americans who hold pro-freedom opinions and express those openly are safe traveling.
@Gary, there has certainly been a relative shift in the fortunes between Hong Kong and Singapore – the same could be said of the relative fortunes of Singapore vis a vis Zurich, New York, London, Geneva, San Francisco, etc. – but that has much more to do with the remarkable competence of Singapore’s focussed and disciplined market based administration and the disappointing incompetence of Hong Kong vis a vis Covid, than any tiny loss of liberty – as anti-government media is no more allowed in Singapore than in Hong Kong, and is arguably more restrictive in various other ways. Businesses that left for Singapore from Hong Kong were vastly more likely to be doing it to get away from violent demonstrations than the government’s crackdown on them.
In any case we agree that it is an absurdity to suggest that Hong Kong is no longer a regional center of banking, finance, law, etc., etc.
@Mike: Hong Kong Island and Kowloon peninsula were perpetually ceded to the United Kingdom. There was no lease to expire.
@Carl You demonstrate a lack of awareness of the harsh US Judicial system and the Federal government’s extraterritorial enforcement of US statutory laws regarding all sorts of things that foreigners are often surprised to be arrested for when landing or transiting in the US and suddenly find themselves on the wrong side of the US criminal justice system. There is indeed a fine line between legitimate research and corporate espionage, but the US has an exceptionally poor record of drawing that line fairly and in a manner which the PRC hasn’t begun to match. There are few professions as perilous as being an ethnically Chinese academic in the USA doing research in cooperation with colleagues in China, and being falsely accused of espionage.
@Luke I will not defend China’s insane response to Covid which was concededly inhumane and counterproductive. But this was true of many other places like Australia, Italy, Spain, New Zealand, California, etc., and isn’t a reason to avoid China today any more than it is to avoid Australia or Spain, etc. We can also observe that China was more responsive to dissent regarding its Covid policies than many other places.
Funny because flights to China continue to be full of OPM flyers going for work….
I’m a Texan who just returned from two months (May and June) vacation/family visit in China. We visited Hong Kong, Shanghai, Qingdao, Shouguang, Weifang, Sanya, Guangzhou, Xinxiang, Zhongzhou, and my favorite Chinese city by far, Dalian.
Never once did I feel in danger that I was at risk as an American. In large crowds, I literally breathed a sigh of relief knowing that my family and I would not be shot up by some random, distraught or deluded individual with an AK-47, which is a real fear for us in the U.S. given that we live five minutes from Allen, Texas which had a mass shooting by an alleged white supremacist that killed five Americans shortly before we departed for our trip to China.
We went at least three weeks in China without seeing another Western foreigner at all. My reflection in the mirror was it. I experienced no negative discrimination from Chinese people or government officials during my visit. If anything, I experienced positive discrimination whereby I was frequently asked by Chinese folks on the street or in shopping malls for photographs so that they could post on their social media accounts that they had encountered a real-life, blue-eyed blonde foreigner. More than a handful of Chinese women lingered nearby and stared at me agog, thinking I was a Hollywood movie star or something. Many went head over heels for my beautiful, racially-mixed 3-year old daughter as they had never seen a mixed kid in person before, only in photos. In Weifang, a crowd formed around our family at the train station, peppering my (also beautiful) Chinese wife with all kinds of friendly questions about our life in America. We only heard positive things about Mĕiguó (“Beautiful Country”, as they call America in Chinese Mandarin) from the locals.
The only hiccup? We were on Cathay Pacific flight CX880 that experienced an aborted takeoff at Hong Kong International Airport where 11 passengers were injured: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/eleven-injured-hong-kong-cathay-pacific-flight-incident-2023-06-24/. Thankfully, my family was unharmed, safely escaping down the emergency slides after a tire exploded.
All in all it was a great trip and at this time I have no fears about returning again next year as a traveler to China with a U.S. passport on my 10-year visitor visa. Is it a risk? Perhaps, but often in life, calculated risks bring great rewards.
I won’t go to China because of Tibet. Richard Gere got through to me. We really as a world gave up on those poor people. Tibet is China’s nuclear waste dumping ground and Tibetan nuns are tortured. Get a grip. The CCP sux.
It’s Wall Streets fault that China is now rich enough to cause problems.
They stabbed American workers in the back and decimated whole communities to make a buck.
Where do you think a lot of our billionaires came from?
And politicians on both sides of the aisle went right along.
Thanks Wall Street!
https://twitter.com/AnnaKwokFY/status/1675893116195184642/photo/1
On my recent visit to HKG, I was held up for 30 mins by immigration, and the rest of my family was allowed to go. They didn’t tell me why, but I was scared. I did tweet/retweet things during the whole HKG revolution, but no idea what it was. It wasn’t my first visit to HKG also.
@Mak:
> An American is vastly more likely to have an encounter with police – and a negative one – inside the United States than almost any other place in the world, and far more likely than in China in which the average tourist is at absolutely no risk of experiencing either police brutality, unfair treatment, and infinitesimal risk of experiencing crime.
We spend far more time at home, of course we are more likely to have an encounter with our own police. I have had only one encounter with the Chinese police and it definitely was unfair–the driver was pulled over because he didn’t appear Chinese and I was in the other front seat and clearly am not Chinese. Purely racial profiling–no traffic offense was even alleged, it was simply to see if he was allowed to drive.
As for the risk of crime–I have relatives over there, we sometimes visit. There have been many occasions where they want me to conceal exactly what unit I’m going to (things like get off on the wrong floor and take the stairs) and to conceal the degree of connection (pretend that my wife is simply someone I know.) They aren’t afraid of anything happening to me, they’re afraid of crime directed at them because they presumably have money because they have a relative in America.
@Mak:
> @SMR I wonder if you’ve ever been to modern China? I can’t imagine that anybody who has seen the wonders of Shanghai, Hangzhou, Chongqing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, etc., and the quality of life there today – in a country that was dirt poor, truly unfree, and backwards less than 40 years ago – would bemoan “what they are doing” in China, except to have a tinge of envy that we can’t have such nice things in the USA.
I do not believe he’s referring to what’s happened in the last 40 years, but rather what’s happened recently.
@Mak:
> or if you go to other common tourist destinations like India, Kenya, South Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, Jamaica, etc., which are thought of as “free societies” but actually offer far fewer protections against arbitrary seizure and abuse by authorities than does China? Even Japan is infamous for it’s lack of a fair criminal judicial system.
While there certainly are big problems with the justice system in the places you list it’s rarely going to matter to tourists. They don’t want the bad publicity of being unfair to tourists. A simple illustration from China, a while back: Airport security saw something in SIL’s bag, searched it, removed the offending item (liquid ban, it wasn’t actually anything evil). My bag also drew interest but instead of searching it they showed me what they were questioning and had me dig it out for eyeball inspection (box of batteries in my camera gear.)
Now, however, China is pretty openly kidnapping highly placed foreigners to trade for their spies who are caught. If I were more than a tiny fish I would be very afraid of getting caught up in their hostage taking.
Garry and others, dont ypu get it?
Mak is jist Wumao.
Propaganda (from all sides) is used specifically to elicit an emotional response.
“Propaganda plays on human emotions—fear, hope, anger, frustration, sympathy—to direct audiences toward the desired goal. In the deepest sense, propaganda is a mind game—the skillful propagandist exploits people’s fears and prejudices. Successful propagandists understand how to psychologically tailor messages to people’s emotions in order to create a sense of excitement and arousal that suppresses critical thinking.
By activating emotions, the recipient is emotionally moved by the message of the propagandist. Labeling is another weapon of choice for the propagandist. What emotions are important for those who create propaganda? Fear, pity, anger, arousal, compassion, hatred, resentment – all these emotions can be intensified by using the right labels.” (linked below)
Try not to fall victim to propaganda before at least *attempting to think logically
China Fact Chasers is a very insightful YouTube channel. These guys have know first hand what it’s really like on the ground in China as apposed to what the Chinese government and their Wumaos want you to believe.
Given what China is doing to the Uyghurs, Tibetans, the people of Hong Kong and others in its own backyard, what China is threatening to do to Taiwan, China’s support of Russia, and a litany of other things, all I can say is the State Department advisory is a bit too late and then some for me as I had already stopped traveling to China even before the pandemic hit.
That said, I am also not a fan of what China’s neighbor India is doing; however, at least there is still some lingering (but diminishing) hope that maybe India won’t end up being more like Putin’s Russia and with Hinduism as the official state religion.
I have visited China and I would like to go back, but unfortunately, it has been on my list of places to avoid since around 2019 (due primarily to the crackdowns in Hong Kong, crackdowns on religious groups, arbitrary detainment of foreigners, and other such human rights regressions, not because of Covid.) Through the 90s and early 2000s, it seemed like real progress towards freedom (both economic and otherwise) was being made in both China and Russia. Unfortunately, it seems like the 2010s started seeing more regression on those fronts and that has only accelerated in the 2020s, particularly under Putin and Xi.
I certainly hold nothing against the Chinese people and I hope to visit their country again someday, but, unfortunately, I don’t see that happening any time soon.
It seems like the Chinese government is really shooting its own country in the foot with its increasingly hostile statements and actions both towards dissent within its borders and towards its neighbors over the last decade. So much of the Chinese economy has relied on export over the last ~30 years and average standard of living in both China and around the world improved significantly as a result. Isolating itself from most of the wealthiest countries on Earth again will ultimately serve to decimate that progress and harm nearly everyone – both inside and outside of China – with the exception of maybe some CCP bosses and their cronies. It takes a lot longer to build trust back up than it does to tear it down.
My upcoming Year-end Asian Escapade(TM) will include a stop in PRC, a country I visited every year since 2004 (except since the start of the pandemic) and never felt threatened in any way.
Besides, why waste my 10-year PRC visa, which is due to expire in 2025?