[A new law in China] may become a tool of genocide and a weapon of transnational repression. The Orwellian-sounding “Ethnic Unity and Progress Law” will achieve the very antithesis of its name. It amounts to one of the most dangerous and draconian in a long line of repressive laws imposed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
For a start, it is an explicit mandate for Beijing to pursue critics of Chinese policy wherever they live. Article 10 states that “matters of ethnic unity and progress are not to be interfered with by foreign forces. All acts using excuses such as ethnicity, religion, or human rights to insult or disparage, contain and suppress, or infiltrate and undermine the PRC are to be resolutely opposed”.
More ominously, according to Article 63: “organizations and individuals outside the [mainland] territory of the PRC that commit acts aimed at the PRC that undermine ethnic unity and progress or create ethnic division are to be pursued for legal responsibility in accordance with the law”.
In other words, the reach of China’s criminal justice system will extend around the globe. Tibetan, Uyghur, Hong Kong and Chinese dissident diaspora communities abroad will likely be first to be targeted.
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The new law will turbo-charge the repression which Xi Jinping has unleashed throughout China over the past decade, and spread it well beyond China’s borders.
This week we had news that China’s controversial new London embassy – in the historic old Royal Mint, opposite the Tower of London – may have cells in its basement to imprison dissidents. If the new embassy plans – currently under judicial review – proceed, Beijing could well point to the new law as justification for holding critics in its dungeons.
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