This time we have a guest post by Reza Hasmath, Professor in Political Science at the University of Alberta, about a chilling new development in PRC lawfare that a wider audience needs to notice, and to which policymakers and legislators should respond. The article was originally published on The Conversation and appears here under Creative Commons license.
By Reza Hasmath
On July 1, China brought into force its Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, converting a decade of Xi Jinping’s doctrine of “forging a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation” into binding law.
Most attention has gone to its domestic machinery: entrenching Mandarin over minority languages, unified state textbooks and “inter-embedded” neighbourhoods engineered to dilute concentrations of Uyghurs and Tibetans among the Han majority. In other words, this is an assimilationist project that’s already far advanced.
The provision that matters most to the world outside China is buried near the end. Article 63 declares that organizations and individuals outside Chinese territory who “undermine ethnic unity” or “create ethnic division” shall be pursued for legal liability.
The Chinese government is therefore asserting, in statute, that its authority follows its critics across oceans into other countries, including Canada, home to some of the world’s largest Chinese, Uyghur and Tibetan diaspora communities. The danger is not that the law reaches across borders. It is what it criminalizes, whom it targets and how it’s enforced.
The reflexive response is to call this legal imperialism. The conclusion is right, but the usual reasoning is lazy. That matters, because extraterritorial jurisdiction is neither a Chinese invention nor a monopoly. Get the objection wrong, and China will swat it away as hypocrisy.
Democracies reach across borders constantly. Europe’s data protection rules bind firms anywhere on Earth that handle Europeans’ data. The United States prosecutes bribery committed entirely overseas. And a German court convicted a former Syrian intelligence officer in 2022 of crimes against humanity committed in Damascus, with no German victim at all.
What separates Article 63 from these precedents comes down to three differences:
The offence. Every western example rests on a defined wrong: bribery, mishandled data, torture. “Undermining ethnic unity” is not a crime defined anywhere in law. It is an elastic political judgment, rendered by the very authority accused of the underlying abuses. The vagueness is by design. A law that lets the state decide, case by case, who has offended the nation is attempting to export censorship.
The target. Universal jurisdiction prosecutes the perpetrators of atrocities to vindicate the victims. Article 63 runs the other way. Its targets are the victims’ advocates: the Uyghur who testifies before a foreign legislature, the Tibetan who organizes a vigil, the scholar who documents the camps. A government credibly accused of abusing an ethnic minority is claiming the right to punish the people who describe the accusation.
Enforcement. Western extraterritorial law, for all its overreach, runs through courts. Article 63 attaches no procedure at all. Its real instrument is the leverage China already holds: the passport of a sibling still inside China, an exit ban on an aging parent, security officers at a relative’s door. This is the documented machinery of transnational repression, now given a statutory label.
None of this is an aberration. Article 63’s clearest precedent is Article 38 of the 2020 Hong Kong national security law that had Beijing’s blessing. It claimed to cover offences committed outside Hong Kong by people who were not its residents.
The new law extends that logic into the vaguer terrain of “ethnic unity.”
It also tracks a documented trend: China runs the world’s most extensive campaign of transnational repression, operating through informal “overseas police stations” (several identified in Canada) and coercion by proxy. What Article 63 adds is legal form, and an invitation to every other authoritarian government to do the same.
The response should be narrow, firm and co-ordinated. Host governments, Canada among them, should declare plainly that Article 63 has no legal effect in their countries, and treat its enforcement as the crime that it is.
The intimidation inherent in the new law already violates many domestic harassment and foreign interference laws in jurisdictions around the world. Prosecutors, here, should use them against the agents carrying out the coercion, not the exiles who are its victims.
Governments should shut the unlicensed “police stations,” and press Interpol to reject politically motivated notices aimed at diaspora activists.
Governments can also build dedicated channels for those targeted: a clear law enforcement contact, protective guidance for Chinese and minority diaspora communities and training for officers who could mistake transnational repression for an ordinary domestic dispute.
Finally, asylum systems should treat Article 63 as evidence: a statute in which China announces that diaspora advocacy invites retaliation is close to proof of persecution for those seeking to flee.
China has every right to legislate for its own territory and citizens. What it cannot legitimately do, however warmly it speaks of unity, is disregard borders. The task for all nations, Canada included, is to insist, in law and in practice, that borders still exist.
A closing note from Michael:
For more on Xi Jinping’s Han-supremacist assimilationist policies, read a new essay by James Leibold and Tenzin Dorjee, “The Next Phase of China’s Minority Crackdown: Forced Assimilation Is Now the Law”, in Foreign Affairs. (Archived version here.)
Meanwhile, Canada’s RCMP still won’t release the full cooperation agreement it signed with China’s Ministry of Public Security in January without Beijing’s agreement, despite demands from opposition parties. The RCMP’s argument that such agreements are “a very common practice between national law enforcement agencies” and that it has many MOUs with other policing organizations around the world is nonsense: many of the other MOUs are public, most other police forces don’t engage in the sort of human rights and sovereignty violations that the MPS conducts, and they aren’t controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. I don’t think Canadians should accept that kind of secrecy given the potential for abuse. Canada’s allies should also be asking questions.
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