US lawmakers urge action on China law
Washington: A bipartisan group of 14 members of the US House of Representatives has urged Secretary of State Marco Rubio to publicly condemn China’s new Ethnic Unity Law, calling it a tool of “forced assimilation, ideological control, and transnational repression” targeting Tibetans, Uyghurs, Southern Mongolians and other ethnic minority communities.
The appeal, led by Congressmen Jim McGovern, Chris Smith and Indian-American Congressman Ro Khanna, comes a day before the law takes effect on July 1.
“Far from promoting genuine equality among ethnic groups, this law codifies and expands the Chinese Communist Party’s majoritarian campaign of forced assimilation against Tibetans, Uyghurs, Southern Mongolians, and other non-Han Chinese communities,” the lawmakers wrote in their letter to Rubio.
“We respectfully urge the Department of State to respond publicly and forcefully to this law before it goes into effect on July 1, 2026, and to make clear that the United States rejects the CCP’s attempt to disguise forced assimilation as ‘ethnic unity’,” they said.
According to the lawmakers, China’s Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, adopted by the National People’s Congress on March 12, contradicts the country’s own constitutional guarantees of regional ethnic autonomy while giving legal force to policies of assimilation against minority communities.
The letter argues that the legislation extends policies previously implemented in Tibet and Xinjiang across China, placing minority languages, cultures, religions and identities beneath what it describes as a Han Chinese-dominated national identity.
The lawmakers also expressed concern over the law’s extraterritorial provisions. They said Articles 10 and 63 could provide Chinese authorities with what they described as a legal basis to target Tibetans, Uyghurs, Southern Mongolians, Hong Kongers, democracy advocates and others living outside China, including in the United States.
“This language gives PRC authorities a claimed legal basis to target Tibetans, Uyghurs, Southern Mongolians, Hong Kongers, democracy advocates, and others living outside the PRC, including in the United States,” the letter said, adding that it should be understood as part of “the PRC government’s broader pattern of transnational repression”.
The lawmakers asked Rubio to publicly condemn the law, raise the issue directly with Chinese officials and coordinate with like-minded governments through bilateral dialogues, the UN Human Rights Council and other international mechanisms.
They also urged the State Department to prioritise protection of Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongolian and other minority-language education, religious freedom and cultural preservation, strengthen efforts to counter what they described as Chinese transnational repression, and reinforce enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act while encouraging allied countries to adopt similar measures.
Besides McGovern, Smith and Khanna, the letter was signed by Representatives Michael T. McCaul, Yassamin Ansari, Jim Costa, Veronica Escobar, Jonathan L. Jackson, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Johnny Olszewski Jr., Ilhan Omar, Suhas Subramanyam, Thomas R. Suozzi and James R. Walkinshaw.