Tens of thousands of Chinese are banned from leaving the country. Now it has hit the famous sociologist Guo Yuhua.
Beijing. The traumatic history of the People’s Republic of China seems to be repeating itself these days: during her fieldwork, sociologist Guo Yuhua (66) once collected stories of farmers who were not allowed to flee their villages during great famines. 60 years later, the retired teacher herself is at the border crossing from Shenzhen to the former British colony of Hong Kong – and is turned away. An exit ban was imposed on them, she said.
Time and again, the central government holds critical voices hostage within its own borders. In a study, the human rights NGO “Safeguard Defenders” determined how the head of state Xi Jinping systematically expanded the practice: since 2019 alone, five additional laws have been passed or amended that provide for such travel bans. The NGO estimates that tens of thousands of Chinese are currently under such a ban. Guo Yuhua is considered one of the country’s leading sociologists. She rose to prominence in the mid-1990s for her ‘Communist Civilization’ project, in which a team uncovered the history of various village communities since the start of the collectivist land reforms of the 1950s. people is an incomplete story and not the real story either,” Guo Yuhua once said in an interview.