🔥China released the Regulations of the State Council on Exit-Entry Administration on July 31. It takes effect on September 15. The regulation mainly does four things: • Border officers can actively discourage Chinese citizens from going to high-risk countries; • Applications to leave the country must be “true and legal” — fake materials can get you denied; • Chinese citizens can be banned from leaving for 6 months to 3 years for certain violations; foreigners can be banned from entering for 1 to 5 years; • All exit-entry intermediaries must register with the government. Non-compliance means fines or shutdown. It looks like stronger management and safety protection. But the real core is simple: The state is tightening its final say over whether you can leave the country. This is typical of a communist system. In this system, the individual is not a free person with natural rights. You are part of the state machine. The freedom to move, to choose where to live, is not something you naturally own — it is something the state grants or takes back according to its needs. The Soviet Union’s exit controls, East Germany’s Berlin Wall, China’s strict passport controls in the past, and these more detailed rules today all follow the same logic. Here is the real harm: Once the state can freely decide whether you may leave, then your personal freedom, property safety, and even the right to speak truth ultimately rest in the hands of power. On the surface it is “for your own good.” In reality it is “I control you.” Historically, this exact mindset — treating people as tools and freedom as a privilege the state can revoke — produced the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution, mass persecution, and decades of poverty. This regulation itself is not extreme. But it clearly reveals the root problem: under a communist system, power naturally expands upward, and individual rights are naturally compressed downward. A system that truly respects people does not treat the right to leave as something the state can take away whenever it wants.