"Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country."

Let us be blunt: Xi Jinping, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), has transformed China into an enormous open-air prison where ordinary people can be arbitrarily denied the right to travel, relocate, or even return home. Take the countless petitioners who are routinely blocked from boarding trains or planes merely because they dared to complain about corrupt local officials. In 2015, investigative journalists documented blacklists—shadowy rosters of people flagged as "unstable elements". Once your name appeared, you could be barred from buying tickets, obtaining a passport, or crossing provincial borders. No trial, no appeal, no recourse. Your crime? Exercising the most basic civil right: the right to freedom of movement.

Under Xi's rule, exit bans have metastasized into a grotesque instrument of collective punishment. The CCP  has used them not only against dissidents but also against their family members — children, spouses, and elderly parents — held hostage to ensure silence. For example, entire families have been stopped at airports, passports seized, their lives reduced to bargaining chips in Xi's quest to extinguish dissent. Foreign nationals of Chinese descent have been caught in this dragnet, trapped inside China without charges or explanation, unable to leave for years. The regime does not even pretend to observe due process: the order comes down, and your freedom evaporates overnight.

Even more chilling is the CCP's systematic surveillance of internal movement. The so-called "grid management" system divides cities into micro-districts with neighborhood watchers, facial-recognition cameras, and digital checkpoints that track who goes where, when, and why. This sprawling apparatus does not exist for public safety; it exists to police thought, to ensure that no one dares step out of line. Every journey becomes an act of submission to the CCP.

Xi Jinping presides over this machinery of repression with the self-satisfaction of a modern emperor. He brandishes the rhetoric of "national rejuvenation", but his real project is national domestication: a society so cowed, so monitored, that even the right to walk out the door must be earned by ideological obedience. His obsession with control is not the sign of a confident leader but of a coward terrified of his own people.

In defiance of Article 13, Xi Jinping has elevated restriction of movement into a blunt political weapon, wielded to silence critics, intimidate the populace, and cement personal power. He has perfected a system in which no Chinese person can ever feel secure in the basic act of traveling, whether across a province or beyond the nation's borders.

Xi Jinping's autocracy is not merely an affront to Chinese people. It is an insult to the entire idea of human dignity.