Posted On: Thursday - February 8th 2024 11:13AM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity China
We are trying to get all these China posts out of our system before the New Years resolution imposed deadline of ours. This post works as a contrast to all the posts on American Immigration Stupidity (yeah, or Evil) we've written lately. No matter what you think of the Orwellian and Totalitarian behavior of the Xi Regime or just the ways of the Chinese in general, at least the Chinese government is not running a Population Replacement Program. The situation is far from it.
Upon leaving China for America out of Shanghai Pudong airport, we went through the Chinese version of what’s is called Exit Tracking. I didn’t see it coming, as we’d already had our passports looked at by security (then, later on, BTW, 3, yes, THREE times by the departure gate).
The idea is to keep track of people leaving your country, China, in this case, by scanning passports, taking facial photos and even looking at the visas we had for entry. The point is, if it’s known who enters and who leaves, then the small amount of accumulation of non-immigrant entrants* can be determined. Your country can be considered a control volume, in the engineering sense, so ΔP = Pin - Pout + Pgeneration (births - deaths). In the case of people, they aren’t just numbers but specific individuals who can be found and deported for illegally overstaying their visas, with the likely threat of being banned from further entry in the future.
It took me a second, but when it came to me what this checkpoint of sorts was about, I remarked to people next to me in the short line, ”This is exit control*. This is what you do in a serious country.”
There was a little bit more involved. Though there was some sign with a QR code about the health app, I reckoned "we don't need no steeenking health code, Guanyuan!" I inserted a paragraph in the postscript of this post (one of the first coming out of this trip) regarding the pure silliness and uselessness of the Chinese health app for entering China. The Kung Flu stupidity had abated by Summer '23, so we shouldn't have needed this going to the US.
Well, see the guy in the picture above? That was approximately 2 seconds before he yelled at me. What exactly he yelled is lost to history, what with the face mask... and the fact that I hardly know any Chinese. What I figured he yelled was something along the lines of "go back and use the Kung Flu app, and what are you doing taking my picture?!!"
We came back, and, for the sake of my readers, I was worried enough about this guy's asking me to delete this picture that I deleted it knowing I had a month to recover it from the Deleted area. Faux pax aside, I give the Chinese credit for preventing the massive visa overstaying that is another source of illegal aliens for America.
Not only are they serious about who resides in their land of over a billion Han people, the Chinese have it good when it comes to rooting out visa overstayers once they easily determine who they are. Because they don’t have masses and masses of unassimilated foreigners, finding some ”White ghost” who was supposed to have left is much easier than it would be for American authorities, even if they made an effort, to root out some illegal Chinese guy working at a restaurant along with a million others in one of the New York Chinatowns, or even in Anytown, USA. (The number of Chinese illegal aliens in America is big.)
You can learn a lot from a pissed off Chinaman.
* Exit control is, I suppose, a step beyond this. This was tracking of foreigners, though I'm sure China also looks for Chinese citizens who were up to no good leaving the country. They probably encourage this and get the airlines to give them upgrades.
** And China doesn’t allow very many immigrant entries, best I can see.
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