When Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives in Washington on September 24, the agenda will be crowded: trade, technology, fentanyl, Taiwan, and global security. But there is another issue that the United States cannot afford to leave out: China’s newly adopted Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress.
U.S. President Donald Trump should raise a question that goes to the heart of American sovereignty: Why are Uyghur Americans being forced to choose between exercising their freedoms here and protecting their relatives from retaliation in China?
The Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress was passed by China’s National People’s Congress in March and took effect July 1. Beijing presents it as a measure to promote harmony among China’s ethnic groups. Uyghurs, Tibetans, Southern Mongolians, and others know better. The law does not protect unity; it codifies the forced assimilation campaigns our communities have long experienced.
Since 2017, the Chinese government has waged a systematic campaign to extinguish Uyghur national identity, religion, and cultural life. With the ethnic unity law, Beijing has codified and expanded this assault.
Americans must pay particular attention to the law’s reach beyond China’s borders. Article 63 of the law says organizations and individuals outside China can be held legally responsible for actions deemed to “undermine ethnic unity and progress or create ethnic division.” China’s vice justice minister openly defended this overseas provision as “legitimate, lawful, necessary, and feasible.”
Article 10 asserts that foreign entities “using excuses such as ethnicity, religion, or human rights to insult and disparage, contain and suppress, or infiltrate and undermine the PRC are to be resolutely opposed.”
That is an unmistakable message to Uyghurs, Tibetans, Hong Kongers, and other communities: Beijing claims the right to police our identities even outside its borders.
But it is also a threat to all Americans, even those without family ties in China. Any person who expresses a view China deems as contrary to ethnic unity can be targeted under the new law.
These risks are not hypothetical. As I wrote last month, Uyghurs abroad already feel its impact. Since the law went into effect, families have stopped sending their children to Uyghur language schools out of fear of retaliation by Chinese authorities. People who live thousands of miles from China are asking whether a speech, a social media post, a cultural event, or even a private act of faith could put family members back home in danger.
This is how transnational repression works. The Chinese government does not need to arrest every Uyghur activist living in the United States or Europe. It only needs to create an atmosphere of fear. It only needs people to believe that what they do abroad may have consequences for themselves or their loved ones.
That is why this law is not only a human rights issue, it is an immediate challenge to U.S. sovereignty.
Other governments have spoken out. Australia reportedly raised concerns with Beijing. Members of the European Parliament called for the law’s repeal. U.N. experts warned that it risks entrenching forced assimilation and expanding transnational repression. But the United States, which formally recognized China’s treatment of Uyghurs as genocide and is home to several prominent Uyghur civil society organizations, has not clearly condemned the law.
Trump should raise the ethnic unity law directly with Xi and make clear that attempts to enforce it against people in the United States will not be tolerated.
No foreign government has the right to determine what people living in America or in any democratic societies say, believe, teach their children, or advocate for. Washington should say clearly that China’s “ethnic unity” law stops at America’s borders.
