China’s mysterious ‘Bian Kong’ system that can bar anyone from entering or leaving the country

It is public knowledge that China, like many other sovereign countries, has a blacklist as part of its border control system, barring people from entering or even leaving the country.

A lack of details about how the system works, such as what infractions cause a person to be placed on the list, has raised concerns that it is growing rapidly and that decisions are subject to political overreach. The US Department of State warned its citizens in January that Chinese authorities have asserted that they have broad authority to prohibit US citizens from leaving China.

Bian Kong, or border control, is now a buzzword in reports about travel restrictions on Chinese tycoons and prominent political dissidents. The debate about the system heated up in July after Chinese magazine Caixin reported that Justin Sun, a 29-year-old billionaire who amassed wealth via a questionable cryptocurrency, was placed on China’s border control list in June 2018 but still somehow managed to leave China and travel to the US in October.

Sun’s case was the latest in a series of prominent Chinese figures reportedly prohibited from leaving the country.

China’s Ministry of Public Security and the National Immigration Administration have not released the number of people on the list, let alone their identities. But since the threshold is believed to be relatively low, the number of people on the list could be in the hundreds of thousands or even millions, according to estimates by lawyers and researchers.