Months after “zero-Covid” policies disappeared around China, many colleges and universities still have yet to lift campus entry restrictions
Months after China lifted its “zero-Covid” policies in December 2022, marking a sudden end to three years of mandatory testing to enter public spaces and other strict measures, one space has yet to return to normal—university campuses.
To keep their campuses virus-free, colleges and universities across the country set up restrictions on who can enter or leave the school gates early in the pandemic. Barricades, checkpoints, and security guards were placed at campus perimeters to enforce these policies, and many still remain today.
Zhang Mingli, a middle-aged manager of a grocery store he doesn’t want to name in Beijing, found this out the hard way. When he relocated to the capital two years ago, he tried to realize a long-cherished dream of visiting the campus of Tsinghua, one of China’s top universities. “Tsinghua University has a special place in many Chinese citizens’ hearts, including mine,” Zhang tells TWOC. But after scrolling over two years’ worth of outdated policies on the search engine Baidu, short-video platform Douyin, and even the university’s official website, he was still unable to find out how to apply for a visitor permit to get on campus.
Visitor restrictions at university campuses are not a new development out of the pandemic. Previously, the public could freely roam around Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, but from 2017 the university began requiring students, faculty, alumni, and the public to show valid ID cards upon entering and exiting campus. Similar policies had existed for years (though were not always strictly enforced) on other campuses, such as Peking University in Beijing.
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