From the arrest of Maduro, Khamenei's death to Wuhan's laboratory: Beijing suddenly strengthened exit management, what is Xi Jinping preventing?

In addition to the establishment of the so-called "citizen exit safety risk prevention system", the immigration management authorities are also given the power to verify the application cause, request documents and electronic data, clarify a variety of non-exit circumstances, and implement registration supervision on immigration, visas and other exit entry intermediaries and practitioners.

Looking at these provisions separately, it seems to be just an administrative legislation aimed at exit security, illegal entry and intermediary industries.But looking at the introduction of time into the international situation in 2026, the question is not what procedures the State Council has added, but why did the Xi Jinping regime choose to further understand who is prepared to leave China, why, and through what channels to leave, as the external allies suffer from continuous heavy injuries and the new coronavirus responsibility investigation has risen sharply?

Beijing’s public explanation is to protect the safety of expatriate citizens, combat cross-border crime, maintain industrial and technological security and regulate the intermediary markets, however, the new regulation is much more than this: it incorporates the same administrative system of expatriate applications, border inquiries, electronic data verification, technical personnel withdrawal restrictions, intermediary agency records and reporting mechanisms, enabling Beijing to detect, identify more thoroughly and prevent specific persons from leaving China if necessary.

What really is worth asking is not how this system is explained on paper, but what Xi is most concerned about at this time.

Anti-U.S. allies are continuously missing, Beijing’s external barriers are breaking

On January 3, 2026, the U.S. military took a military operation in Venezuela to seize long-running President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, and to bring them to the United States for criminal trial.In July, U.S. courts had set a date for trial in 2027 for Maduro's allegations of drug terrorism and other allegations; Maduro denied the charges.

The Maduro regime has long been one of Beijing’s most important political partners in Latin America.China has established deep interests with Venezuela through loans, oil trade, infrastructure and diplomatic support.Maduro has ultimately failed to rely on strategic relations with Beijing, Moscow and Tehran to maintain his security, which is not just a remote Latin American regime replacement for Xi.

On 28 February, Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in an airstrike by the United States and Israel against Iran, and Iranian officials subsequently confirmed his death. Khamenei was not only a core figure in Iran's theoretical rule system, but also led Iran's long-term confrontation with the United States and influenced the Middle East through a network of Revolutionary Guards and regional agents.

From Maduro’s arrest to Khamenei’s death, Beijing’s two most representative anti-U.S. partners fell over the course of six months, sending a dangerous signal to Xi Jinping that China’s authoritative partners, backed by energy, loans, diplomatic asylum and political alliances, cannot form an unbreakable external line of defense.

Furthermore, Beijing is concerned that once the allied regime is lost, the original money exchanges, military-political cooperation, intelligence contacts, secret agreements and sanctions avoidance networks may fall into the hands of the new government or U.S. judicial organs.

Maduro’s arrest and Khamenei’s death hit not only Beijing’s diplomatic layout, but also Xi’s security fantasies that authoritarian regimes can protect each other and jointly resist Western responsibilities.

The Wuhan Laboratory issue is going beyond the stage of scientific controversy

If it is the external barriers of Beijing that weaken the allies, then the origin of the new coronavirus investigation is the Chinese regime itself.

The U.S. House Surveillance Committee’s page on the origin of the new coronavirus clearly states that increasing evidence suggests the virus may have originated from the Wuhan Virus Research Institute’s laboratory leakage.The committee has completed its two-year investigation and published more than 500 pages of reports, listing the lab leakage, U.S. agencies funded Wuhan-related research and information processing in the early stages of the outbreak as a focus.

The Trump administration has also tightened research on risks and benefits through administrative measures. The White House notes in relevant documents that such research, once out of control, could result in mass deaths, damage to public health systems, and economic and national security crises. The U.S. exit from the World Health Organization administrative documents also directly criticize the organization for its mismanagement of the new coronavirus originating in Wuhan, China, and are unduely politically influenced by member states.

On July 31, 2026, U.S. Secretary of Health and Public Services Robert Kennedy once again publicly stated that Fox knew the new coronavirus was developed as a biological weapon in the Wuhan Laboratory. This was a political accusation made by Kennedy and is not currently equivalent to a court ruling or a unified conclusion reached by the international scientific community; but the importance is that this claim has been made publicly by the current U.S. Cabinet Secretary, and is no longer limited to civilian researchers or individual members of Congress.

Meanwhile, congressional investigations around the Fuchs Diaries, Wuhan Research Funding, Functional Improvement Research and the origin of the epidemic are still ongoing.Fuchs cited the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution during a Senate hearing on July 29 and refused to answer the questions; AP reports that the hearing was heavily debated around its diaries, the possibility of laboratory leaks and early internal discussions with scientists.

These developments indicate that the issue of the origin of the new coronavirus is changing in nature.

It is no longer just a scientific debate about whether the virus comes from nature or from a laboratory accident, but is gradually entering the intersection of U.S. Congressional investigation, administrative policy, criminal liability, decoding government documents and national security censorship.

Once the new crown responsibility is upgraded, the counter will not only point to Wuhan Laboratory

The new coronavirus has killed millions of people worldwide and has caused long-term trauma to the healthcare system, the global economy, and ordinary households.According to data cited by the U.S. House Supervisory Committee, there are more than six million deaths worldwide and more than one million in the U.S.

Therefore, once there is more evidence in the future that the virus is directly related to Wuhan laboratory accidents, high-risk research, or man-made hiding, the scope of prosecution cannot be limited to a single laboratory or a few researchers.

The international community may ask:

What research was done by the Wuhan Virus Research Institute; whether the Chinese military, academia and health systems were in possession of relevant information; when the highest level in Beijing was informed of the outbreak between the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020; why doctors were suppressed, information was controlled and international early warnings were delayed; whether the information provided to the World Health Organization was complete; and why laboratory records and early virus samples were long unable to be independently verified.

Once these issues are linked by evidence, responsibility may extend from scientific research management to the Party government decision-making system, ultimately touching on Xi's own responsibility for information control, decision-making command and disclosure to the outside during the early period of the epidemic.

At that time, the new coronavirus would no longer be a mere loss of international image, but could include diplomatic isolation, interruptions in research cooperation, technical and financial sanctions, overseas asset tracking, victim lawsuits, and national claims for compensation.

The so-called “China’s Xi Jinping regime may be viewed as a public enemy of mankind” is currently not an official definition made by international organizations.But if future evidence proves that a regime still hides facts, suppresses warnings and obstructs international investigations after taking over major public health risks, the moral and political pressure of millions of people killed and their families around the world is likely to push Beijing into unprecedented international hostility and accountability.

This is where the New Crown issue is the most destructive for the Xi Jinping regime: it is able to concentrate scientific responsibility, political concealment, global deaths, economic losses, and international security into the same framework of accountability.

At this time, the exit is tightened, whom does Beijing want to prevent?

The new rules of the State Council stipulate that the immigration management agency may require the parties to submit documents, information and electronic data when verifying the identity of the applicant and the origin of the entry; the applicant may be refused to issue documents or prohibited from leaving the country when providing false statements.

The new regulations also implement the record management of the entrance and exit intermediary agencies and persons. The institutions that have carried out business must complete the record within the prescribed period, so that the competent authorities can grasp the subjects of the industry, practitioners and the scope of business; without the recording or assistance to provide false materials may face confiscation of illegal income, fines or even revocation of business license.

These provisions are on the surface targeting illegal immigration, fraud, material counterfeiting and technology outflows, but in fact set up a complete set of mechanisms that can identify intentions to leave, track service channels, scan electronic data and prevent specific people from leaving.

When a regime anticipates an escalation in external accountability, it often fears the most not about ordinary tourists, but about those who are in charge of the internal situation leaving first.

These may include researchers at Wuhan and related laboratories, health system officials, local cadres with early data on the outbreak, researchers involved in international cooperation projects, military and technical personnel, and officials and corporate leaders who have access to decision-making within the party, funding flows and overseas relations.

Once they enter a free society, they may provide testimonies and documents to foreign congresses, judiciary, media or intelligence agencies. Individual escapes are thus transformed from the general sense of population flows into regime secrets and sources of evidence for international accountability.

From this perspective, Beijing’s intensifying verification of exit applications, technical personnel restrictions on departure and intermediary records could have a triple role to play: mastering who is arranging migration or long-term departure, identifying who is transferring families, assets and information, and preventing critical people from leaving the country when the risk is found to be unacceptable.

Officials interpreted these measures as safeguarding the security of citizens and national interests, but once the system is established, how the scope of application will eventually be expanded depends on the administrative authorities who master the list, the level of risk and the interpretation of national security.

"Closed country" does not suddenly appear in a paper full ban

Beijing will not necessarily publicly announce a ban on national residents from leaving the country.This is too costly for a regime that still relies on foreign trade, international investment and technological exchanges and can immediately trigger social panic.

More likely to occur is selective, gradual tightening.

Beijing can continue to maintain the surface openness of tourism, study and business exits, while gradually increasing the difficulty for specific groups to leave China through centralized passport management, border inspection inquiries, electronic data verification, deterrence in risk areas, national security scrutiny, technical personnel restrictions on departure and immigration intermediary records.

In order to judge whether the new regulation is evolving into the "Gate Control Law" during the regime crisis, it is necessary to observe several signals: whether public officials and state-owned employees have expanded the scope of passports; whether research, military and high-tech practitioners are more frequently intercepted by border inspections; whether immigration intermediaries are required to submit their customer identities and applications; whether the heads of foreign enterprises are restricted to leave because of the so-called technical security; whether the identities and assets of family members of Party cadres are centralized.

Once these phenomena occur simultaneously, it shows that the objects of the new rules are no longer the general administrative administration, but the security of the regime.

The new coronavirus could become a general reference to the Xi Jinping regime

Maduro’s arrest shows that Beijing is unable to secure its key allies from direct U.S. pursuit; Khamenei’s death shows that the long-standing anti-U.S. theoretical regime is equally unable to rely on regional agency networks and China-Russia relations to maintain leadership security.

These events weakened Xi’s international strategic space.

The new coronavirus responsibility investigation is different: it could put pressure directly on Wuhan laboratories, the Chinese Communist Party’s health system, the military’s research system, the information blockade at the beginning of the outbreak, and Xi Jinping’s own highest decision-making responsibility.

China’s economic downturn, capital outflows, youth unemployment, local financial hardships, and party-wide power struggles have already consumed the internal stability of the Xi Jinping regime; allied losses are weakening its external support; and the previously dispersed crisis could be linked if new coronavirus investigations further form judicial evidence, international sanctions and global claims.

The new coronavirus could therefore be the last rush to overthrow Xi’s regime.

It does not necessarily lead to the collapse of the Communist Party alone, but it may become a general switch to triggering other crises: transforming economic issues into compensation and sanction pressure, transforming diplomatic troubles into international isolation, transforming internal contradictions into responsibility cuts, losing the elite of the system’s confidence in the future and accelerating its search for a way back.

In this context, the political significance of the provisions of the State Council on Exit and Entry Management is becoming increasingly clear.

Beijing, on the surface, is managing how Chinese citizens leave, how foreigners enter, and how intermediaries operate; the deeper issue is that as external allies collapse and Wuhan’s laboratory continues to pursue responsibilities, the Xi Jinping regime is pre-establishing who wants to go, who has the ability to go, and who should never be allowed to go.

In the past, the Communist Party was most concerned about the people standing up against it. Today, it is more concerned about possibly possessing secrets, money, and power relationships, leaving before the global pursuit really comes.

What China is tightening is not just the gateway, but the last escape gateway for the Xi Jinping regime in the face of future crises.