China’s Ethnic Unity Law extends legal reach to Taiwan, diaspora

Taiwan’s government and overseas ethnic groups have raised concerns after China implemented the Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress this month, warning it forces Taiwanese people to accept Beijing’s political framework and threatens minority communities well beyond China’s borders. Passed by the National People’s Congress on March 12, the law took effect on July 1. It includes several sweeping provisions: - Article 14: All levels of government are required to promote Chinese cultural symbols and the image of the Chinese nation in public facilities, urban planning, place names and public activities. - Article 20: Parents and guardians must educate children to love the Communist Party, the country and the Chinese nation, and are barred from instilling ideas deemed unfavorable to ethnic unity. - Article 31: Internet platforms are encouraged to produce and spread content that promotes ethnic unity and must remove and report any material found to incite ethnic hatred or discrimination. - Article 53: No organization or individual may use ethnicity, customs or religious belief as a pretext to provoke conflict or disrupt public order. - Article 63: Organizations and individuals outside China’s territory may be held legally responsible for acts that undermine ethnic unity or promote ethnic division. On July 2, Cho Jung-tai, premier of Taiwan’s Executive Yuan, warned that Beijing has built an expanding network of laws with extraterritorial reach, including the Anti-Secession Law, the Counter-Espionage Law, and the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law, aimed at forcing Taiwanese people to accept Beijing’s political framework. Cho said the Ethnic Unity Law extends that network farther. He announced the Executive Yuan would set up a cross-agency platform to counter transnational repression while expanding cooperation with allied democracies. “When law becomes a tool of authoritarian rule, democracy must become the front line of freedom,” he said. Hung Pu-chao, deputy head of Tunghai University’s Center for Mainland China, says in an article that Beijing has now built three interlocking laws aimed at Taiwan, each operating at a different level: - The Anti-Secession Law, passed in 2005, addresses national unification and opposes secession, operating at the national strategic level. - The Opinions on Punishing Crimes of Separatism and Inciting Separatism by “Taiwan independence” Die-hards in Accordance with Law, issued in 2024, targets criminal accountability for specific individuals and operates at the law enforcement level. - The Ethnic Unity Law codifies the concept of a unified Chinese nation, operating at the level of state governance. “Those most immediately affected are people who travel frequently between Taiwan and China, invest or have family ties there, or work as academics, journalists, civil society figures or public commentators. As long as people adjust what they say or do out of fear of being named or barred from entering China, the goal of Beijing’s political campaign has been achieved,” he says. Saying that Article 63 does not define what counts as undermining ethnic unity or promoting division, leaving broad room for interpretation, he adds that Chinese authorities will ultimately decide which acts are illegal. Chang Ching-ju, an attorney and executive committee member of the Judicial Reform Foundation (JRF), said in a media briefing in Taipei on Monday that Article 21 makes strengthening Taiwanese people’s identification with the “Chinese nation” a state objective, while Article 10 requires Taiwanese people to safeguard national unity. “Article 63 allows Chinese authorities to pursue legal responsibility against overseas organizations or individuals accused of undermining ‘ethnic unity,'” Chang told Taiwan’s Central News Agency. “We are studying whether Taiwan’s existing laws adequately protect citizens from cross-border jurisdiction or enforcement, and expect to complete a report by the end of the year.” The Chinese nation The concept of the Chinese nation, or Zhonghua minzu in Mandarin, was coined by Liang Qichao, a political theorist who fled to Yokohama in the early 20th century. The phrase initially applied only to Han people, distinguishing them from the Manchus, who had founded the Qing empire in 1636. Yang Du, a friend of Liang’s, later proposed the concept of “Five races under one union,” which combined the Han, Manchus, Mongols, Huis (Xinjiang people) and Tibetans into a single modern nation-state. Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Kuomintang (KMT) and the revolutionary who overthrew the Qing empire in 1911, adopted both ideas, defining Zhonghua minzu as a unified Chinese nationality encompassing all five groups. After the KMT retreated to Taiwan in 1949 as the Communist Party took control of the mainland, both sides kept “China” or “Zhonghua” in their official names. Tensions between Beijing and Taipei deepened after the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) replaced the KMT in power in 2016. Surveys since then have shown that many young Taiwanese identify as Taiwanese rather than Chinese, even as their KMT-linked parents and grandparents continue to do business and travel freely on the mainland. Under the newly implemented Ethnic Unity Law, these KMT-linked businesspeople on the mainland are now responsible for pressuring their Taiwan-based children to identify as Chinese and refrain from openly supporting the DPP. In June last year, Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te delivered a speech promoting the idea that Taiwanese people do not originate from China. He said that before the Dutch occupied Taiwan in 1624, the island’s indigenous inhabitants were Austronesian peoples, and that it was later ruled by the Southern Ming and Qing empires, with the Qing ceding Taiwan to Japan in 1895. Lai stressed that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has never owned Taiwan, even after the Japanese left the island. An opinion piece in Beijing Daily said the Lai administration was trying to smear the Ethnic Unity Law and Beijing’s united front work, which it described as an effort to build ties with Taiwanese people and unite the island’s population. The commentary said Lai only wanted to create and amplify the idea of a “China threat” to disrupt normal exchanges between Taiwan and the mainland. Taiwan will hold local elections on November 28, a vote widely seen as a bellwether for the presidential election two years later. Transnational repression Since Beijing passed the Ethnic Unity Law in March, the West has warned that China will strengthen its transnational repression against overseas Uyghurs, Tibetans, Mongols and political dissidents. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said in a post on X in March that the law’s provisions “could overly restrict freedoms of expression, belief and assembly” and cautioned that it risked penalizing the peaceful exercise of minority rights. On April 30, the European Parliament, in a resolution, strongly condemned China’s repressive assimilation policies and consequent violations of universal human rights, including in Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. It also expressed grave concern over the new law, which openly promotes assimilation policies and restricts the cultural, religious and linguistic freedoms of various groups within China and beyond. A spokesperson of the US State Department told the media that the Ethnic Unity Law was “problematic” because it imposes “sweeping obligations” on individuals, institutions, and organizations, including those outside China. On July 2, Tibetan exile Pawo Lobga Rangzen died after self-immolating outside the United Nations Headquarters in New York in protest against the law. On Monday, dozens of Hong Kong diasporic and civil society groups issued a joint statement condemning the law’s extraterritorial reach, comparing it to Hong Kong’s 2020 National Security Law and 2024 Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, which they said have already been used to pursue and intimidate Hong Kongers and ethnic minorities living in exile from China. The groups urged governments to strengthen protections against transnational repression. Read: Nvidia chips, soybean orders signal thaw before Xi-Trump summit Follow Jeff Pao on X at @jeffpao3