China Says It Has the Right to Target People Overseas Under New Ethnic Unity Law
China’s government said this week that it has the right to pursue legal action against people living outside the country under a new ethnic unity law set to take effect on July 1, asserting jurisdiction over foreign individuals and organisations whose actions are deemed to undermine ethnic unity within the People’s Republic of China. The defence of the law’s extraterritorial reach comes as international criticism mounts over a measure that rights groups and Western governments have described as a vehicle for transnational repression.
The Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress was passed by China’s National People’s Congress on March 12, 2026, and signed by President Xi Jinping the same day. Under Article 63 of the law, Beijing asserts jurisdiction over foreign organisations or individuals who “commit acts targeting the PRC that undermine ethnic unity and progress or create ethnic division” — a provision that legal scholars say empowers Chinese authorities to pursue people who have never set foot in mainland China.
What the Law Does
The legislation codifies what Chinese officials describe as General Secretary Xi Jinping’s “Important Thinking on Improving and Strengthening Ethnic Work,” a doctrine that scholars have referred to as China’s “Second-Generation Ethnic Policies.” The law declares “a sense of community for the Chinese nation” to be the foundation of ethnic unity and mobilises a wide range of public and private actors — including public employees, schools, enterprises, religious institutions, neighbourhood committees, and the military — to advance that goal.
The statute codifies the predominance of Standard Chinese, or Putonghua, in public life, setting a goal of preschool-age children achieving proficiency in the language and requiring that Chinese characters be displayed more prominently than minority scripts wherever both must appear in public settings. It tasks China’s Ministry of Education and National Ethnic Affairs Commission with developing textbooks centred on “the community of the Chinese nation” and requires all schools to integrate that concept into their curricula. Parents are separately required to provide what the law calls lawful family education and are prohibited from “instilling in minors ideas detrimental to ethnic unity and progress.”
The law’s enforcement provisions allow citizens to report conduct that “undermines ethnic unity and progress” and to lodge formal complaints against government agencies and employees who fail to meet their obligations under the statute. Procuratorates may initiate public interest litigation where such conduct is found to also undermine national or public interests. The law itself does not prescribe criminal penalties directly, instead deferring to other statutes — inciting ethnic hatred or discrimination, for instance, can be punished with up to 15 days of detention under public order law or as much as 10 years in prison under China’s criminal code, depending on severity.
Beijing’s Defence
Chinese officials have defended the measure as a tool for promoting common prosperity, modernisation, and lawful governance of ethnic affairs, framing it as reinforcing the legal foundation for national cohesion among China’s 55 officially recognised ethnic minority groups and the Han majority. China has separately built a broader legal architecture asserting the right to take countermeasures against what it characterises as unlawful foreign extraterritorial jurisdiction, including a 2021 law on countering foreign sanctions and an April 2026 set of State Council rules establishing a “malicious entity list” targeting foreign organisations and individuals deemed to be enforcing improper jurisdiction against Chinese interests.
Hu, an expert cited by China’s state-run Global Times in coverage of the broader extraterritorial jurisdiction rules, said the measures constitute “a legal tool for proactive defense and countermeasures, which serves as a deterrent against foreign governments or entities enforcing unjustified extraterritorial jurisdiction.” Chinese state media has characterised the country’s posture as fundamentally defensive, contrasting it with what Beijing describes as the “abusive long-arm jurisdiction” practised by Western governments, including the United States.
International Criticism
The ethnic unity law’s reach beyond China’s borders has drawn sustained criticism from rights groups, foreign governments, and former United Nations officials. Yalkun Uluyol of Human Rights Watch said of the law’s extraterritorial provisions: “That is what you call transnational repression.” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said the law “could restrict freedom of religion and culture.”
In April 2026, eight former United Nations special rapporteurs for human rights wrote a letter stating that the law could violate at least 12 international human rights treaties China has ratified, including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The European Parliament adopted a resolution on April 30, 2026, condemning the law and warning that it “would intensify the systematic suppression of ethnic identities and further worsen relations between the European Union and Beijing.”
Rayhan Asat, a Uyghur human rights lawyer, said the new law could give Chinese authorities a broader legal pretext to target minority communities, citing the case of her brother, Ekpar Asat — a Uyghur entrepreneur detained after returning from a 2016 US exchange programme and later sentenced to 15 years in prison — as an example of the kind of action the law’s framework could be used to justify on a wider scale.
Academic analysts have echoed those concerns. Neil Thomas of the Asia Society said the law expands “the legal basis for restricting religious, cultural and political activities among minority groups.” James Leibold of La Trobe University said that “by folding ethnic affairs into national security, the law expands the scope for surveillance and intervention in domains previously treated as social or cultural.”
Diaspora Mobilisation
The law’s passage has prompted organised resistance among diaspora communities abroad. Representatives of Uyghur, Tibetan, Southern Mongolian, and Hong Kong human rights organisations formed the “HR in China and Inner Asia Coalition,” which met with members of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Dutch parliament’s House of Representatives on June 9, 2026, seeking to build the kind of cross-community political pressure that helped drive the European Parliament’s April resolution.
Regional and Global Impact
The law’s extraterritorial assertion places it within a broader pattern of Chinese legal instruments designed to project domestic authority beyond its borders, a trend Western governments have increasingly characterised as transnational repression targeting diaspora critics, including Uyghurs, Tibetans, Hong Kongers, and ethnic Mongolians living abroad. For governments hosting large diaspora communities from these groups — including the United States, Canada, Australia, and several European Union member states — the law raises practical questions about how Chinese authorities might attempt to enforce its provisions against individuals who hold no Chinese citizenship or legal obligation to Chinese law, and what diplomatic or legal responses host governments might mount in response.
The law also intersects directly with the long-running international debate over Xinjiang, where the US government has formally characterised treatment of Uyghurs as genocide and crimes against humanity. Critics argue the ethnic unity law provides a domestic legal architecture that could be used to extend pressure on Uyghur, Tibetan, and other minority communities and their advocates well beyond China’s physical borders, intensifying diplomatic friction between Beijing and Western capitals that have already imposed sanctions related to Xinjiang policies.
Background
China officially recognises 56 ethnic groups, including the Han majority, which comprises more than 90 percent of the population, and 55 minority groups including Uyghurs, Tibetans, Mongolians, and others. Xi Jinping has gradually moved Chinese ethnic policy since taking power in 2012 toward a more assimilationist framework, departing from the system of regional ethnic autonomy that characterised earlier decades of Communist Party governance. The new law was introduced by the National People’s Congress’s Ethnic Affairs Committee in September 2025 following years of policy development around what scholars term “Second-Generation Ethnic Policies,” an approach aimed at diluting distinct ethnic group consciousness in favour of a unified supraethnic Chinese national identity, referred to in the law as “zhonghua minzu.” The policy direction has already produced significant changes in regional governance, including the 2020 replacement of Mongolian with Mandarin as the primary language of instruction for core subjects in Inner Mongolia’s schools.
What Happens Next
The Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress is scheduled to take effect on July 1, 2026. Chinese ministries, including the Ministry of Education and the National Ethnic Affairs Commission, are expected to begin implementing the law’s curriculum and public-signage requirements following that date. Diaspora rights coalitions, including the newly formed HR in China and Inner Asia Coalition, are expected to continue lobbying foreign legislatures for formal responses to the law’s extraterritorial provisions, following the model that produced the European Parliament’s April 2026 resolution. Western governments are likely to face continued pressure from rights organisations to clarify how they intend to respond if Chinese authorities attempt to enforce the law’s provisions against diaspora individuals or organisations operating outside Chinese jurisdiction.
