Chinese authorities order 5 million residents to turn in their passports

The notice was published and displayed on April 30, written in both Chinese and the Uighur language spoken by China's largest ethnic minority. It gave the estimated 5 million residents of China's far west region of Xinjiang a little over two weeks to hand in their passports to the government, an unexplained mandate that has been criticized by human rights organizations as being discriminatory and racially motivated.

The notice, posted at local police stations, said, "Those who do not hand in their passports on time will be reported to the entry and exit bureau and, according to the relevant regulations, their passports will be cancelled."

The passport restrictions (and the refusal to issue any new passports in the near future) appear to target the Muslim Uighurs who live in the Xinjiang region and authorities have said that confiscating their passports (authorities have euphemistically described the confiscation as "safekeeping") is a way of preventing "incidents of instability" in the region, which, according to The Guardian, has seen incidents of "ethnic unrest" for at least 20 years.

A police officer in the region told Radio Free Asia that any passport holders who wished to travel abroad would have to undergo a background check. If the individual was deemed acceptable, the passport would be given back to him or her, but it would have to be returned to the government immediately upon returning.

Amnesty International's Nicholas Bequelin said:

These limitations on freedom of movement are part of a larger set of measures that aim at restricting the freedom of movements of ethnic Uighurs and goes a long way in explaining why so many Uighurs have to resort to clandestinely exit the country instead

And indeed, Beijing-based civil rights attorney Liu Xiaoyuan says that the government's passport seizure is unlawful:

There is no legal basis for this. Individual passports should definitely be in the keeping of the individual, just like ID cards. This is in breach of the laws and regulations.

According to the Associated Press, international travel for Chinese citizens was allowed beginning in the late 1990s and an increasing number of people took advantage of their new travel opportunities beginning in 2004, when it became easier (comparatively speaking) for them to apply for and receive a passport(China's passport is currently ranked No. 45 on the "powerful" passport index "based on the number of places the bearer can go without first applying for a visa."). More than 107 million Chinese reportedly traveled outside the country in 2014.

But passport restrictions on minorities – especially Tibetans – are nothing new. Tibetans have had their own passports confiscated since 2012 and, in 2014, the government issued further restrictions on travel to "religious ceremonies and sacred sites." The Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy has "expressed concern" over these constraints. "Revoking all passports [...] is not necessary to fulfilling any government objective," the Centre said in a statement.

Yet the government continues – and will continue – to do that very thing.