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The U.S. gov­ern­ment has banned Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment per­son­nel in Chi­na, as well as fam­i­ly mem­bers and con­trac­tors with se­cu­ri­ty clear­ances, from any ro­man­tic or sex­u­al re­la­tion­ships with Chi­nese cit­i­zens, The As­so­ci­at­ed Press has learned.

Four peo­ple with di­rect knowl­edge of the mat­ter told the AP about the pol­i­cy, which was put in­to ef­fect by de­part­ing U.S. Am­bas­sador Nicholas Burns in Jan­u­ary short­ly be­fore he left Chi­na. The peo­ple would speak on­ly on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to dis­cuss de­tails of a con­fi­den­tial new di­rec­tive.

Though some U.S. agen­cies al­ready had strict rules on such re­la­tion­ships, a blan­ket “non-frat­er­niza­tion” pol­i­cy, as it is known, has been un­heard of pub­licly since the Cold War. It’s not un­com­mon for Amer­i­can diplo­mats in oth­er coun­tries to date lo­cals and even mar­ry them.