The public legal change is not in dispute. Premier Li Qiang signed State Council Order No. 841, the Regulations of the State Council on Exit and Entry Administration, adopted on June 29, published on July 31, and effective Sept. 15, 2026. The 19-article rule is posted on the Chinese government website. It tightens the grounds for refusing exit, requires travel purposes to be “true and lawful,” and puts exit-entry intermediaries under filing and penalty rules.
What the regulation does not publish is the internal personnel sweep now described by people still working inside the system. Those accounts come from interviews given to The Epoch Times on Sept. 14. The survey forms and notices, the sources said, were circulated only inside work units, not through public channels.
Sweep Began Months Before the Law Took Effect
A source inside the system who used the alias Huang Bin told The Epoch Times that for the past two months, departments under the State Council and related enterprises and public institutions have already been compiling lists of staff passport holdings. The same exercise, he said, asked whether spouses, parents and children hold Chinese passports, foreign passports or overseas residence documents.
A second round, Huang said, has reached government agencies, financial institutions, state-owned enterprises, hospitals and schools. Staff were told to fill in whether they and their family members hold foreign passports, which country issued them, and how many. Units are using internal forms to map the exit documents of employees and their households.
Until now, centralized custody of private travel documents was aimed mainly at people in secret-related posts or cadres at the deputy-division (fu chu) level and above. The present survey, Huang said, has been stretched to ordinary employees and their relatives.
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