Beijing’s Ethnic Unity Law Reaches into Europe

China’s new Ethnic Unity and Progress Promotion Law does not merely redefine who counts as part of the Chinese nation. With its extraterritorial provisions, it turns European Chinese diaspora communities, academics, and businesses into potential targets, confronting the EU with hard questions it has long been avoiding.

The Ethnic Unity and Progress Promotion Law took effect on July 1, 2026. Passed by the National People’s Congress in March, it formalizes what Xi Jinping has been pushing for years: folding the country’s 56 recognized ethnic groups into one “community of the Chinese nation.” Mandarin comes first in schools, religion is to be “Sinicized,” and authorities are expected to pursue ethnic integration even in regard to housing – the law tasks local governments with building “mutually embedded” neighborhoods and lists housing policy among the tools for achieving them. Sinologist James Leibold noted that Beijing has stopped treating ethnic unity as a slogan and turned the production of a single national identity into a binding task for schools, families, media, and security organs alike. As Amnesty International warned in June, “unity” in this context does not mean harmony between communities but “political and ideological alignment” with the CCP.

But the law does not apply only within China. Article 63 states that organizations and individuals outside PRC who “undermine ethnic unity” or “create ethnic division” can be held legally liable. Neither term is defined. Combined with Article 21, which names Taiwan alongside Hong Kong and Macau in the context of national unity, the provision extends the law’s conception of national unity into the politically sensitive question of Taiwan. The provision is not limited to Chinese citizens, or those Beijing counts as Chinese: it reaches “organizations and individuals outside the territory” of the PRC, with the only qualifier being that the conduct is “aimed” at China. Anyone who engages with the issue, anywhere in the world, potentially falls within its scope.

From Taipei’s Worry to Europe’s Problem

Taiwan reacted swiftly. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned the law as a basis for “long-arm jurisdiction” and cross-border repression, while Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council summarized the logic saying: “Whoever is not for unification is for independence.” President Lai Ching-te called it a law that “pursues assimilation and elimination in the name of unity.” These reactions matter for Europe not because they concern Taiwan, but because the mechanism the law creates is universal. That same vague duty of loyalty could potentially be invoked against a Uyghur scholar in Berlin or a think-tank analyst in Prague writing about Xinjiang, just as it could against a dissident in Shenzhen.

The law follows a familiar pattern. Hong Kong’s national security law already claimed, in Article 38, extraterritorial jurisdiction over conduct committed outside Hong Kong. In practice, it served mainly for intimidation and symbolic arrest warrants rather than actual prosecutions in democracies. But the new law goes further. Unlike the 2005 Anti-Secession Law, which targeted specific advocates of independence, the new law elevates maintaining national unity into a legal duty. The burden is reversed: under a prohibition, a person is safe until crossing a defined legal line; but under an obligation, a person remains suspect until proving loyalty. Article 60 requires organizations to “promptly stop” conduct within their own ranks that undermines ethnic unity, meaning a European firm operating in China is expected to police what its employees say and can be held responsible for failing to do so.

Europe’s Response Takes Shape

The European Parliament condemned the law on April 30 by vote of 439 to 52. The resolution demands repeal labels the extraterritorial provisions transnational repression and urges member states to suspend their extradition treaties with China. It also calls for targeted sanctions under the EU Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime against officials who drafted and are implementing the statute.

Individual governments followed. On June 29, the German Federal Foreign Office expressed “great concern,” with spokesperson Sebastian Hinterseher warning that the law’s provisions are “open to broad interpretation” and therefore pose a direct risk of transnational repression, including in Germany. Berlin reaffirmed that it “resolutely opposes any form of transnational repression, regardless of its origin.” In Belgium, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the federal parliament questioned Deputy Prime Minister Maxime Prévot in July about the law’s implications for diaspora communities in Belgium. And in Estonia, 51 of the Riigikogu’s 101 members signed a joint statement condemning the law, warning that Article 63 could be used against critics of Chinese government policies, Tibet supporters, and diaspora members abroad. In the streets, too, the response was visible: exiled Tibetans and Uyghurs protested in Swiss, Belgian, Dutch, and Spanish cities within days of the law taking effect.

The breadth of this reaction sets the law apart from previous episodes of EU-China friction. For years, Beijing’s extraterritorial legal claims produced little more than diplomatic boilerplate. This time, the response is concrete: repeal demands, sanctions calls, and protective measures for individuals at risk.

The Extradition Gap and the Legal Shield

The treaties in question are not hypothetical. Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Portugal, Romania, and Spain all have extradition agreements with Beijing. After the 2020 Hong Kong national security law was enacted, several Western states suspended their arrangements with Hong Kong, but none has done the same with mainland China.

European courts, however, have begun to build a legal shield. The European Court of Human Rights set an important precedent in Liu v. Poland in 2022, ruling that extraditing anyone to China would breach Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The court found the risk of ill-treatment in Chinese detention to be systemic. The applicant, a Taiwanese national detained in Poland on the basis of a Chinese Interpol notice, was therefore relieved of any need to show a specific personal risk. In M.A. and Others v. Bulgaria, the court applied the same logic to Uyghur applicants. As legal scholars at Opinio Juris have noted, the new ethnic unity law may itself provide evidence that those targeted belong to particularly vulnerable groups, further consolidating the non-refoulement protection they can claim before European courts.

What remains is a disconnect. The European Parliament wants extradition treaties suspended. European courts block individual extraditions on human rights grounds. But no coordinated policy exists to protect the broader range of people whom the law could target, from diaspora activists and academics to business people whose employees in China might post the wrong comment online.

A Test of the European Resolve

Uyghur exiles in the Netherlands say they are increasingly afraid to speak on the record. Some have pulled out of interviews, worried about reprisals against family members still in China. Uyghur-language schools have also disappeared entirely in Norway and Sweden, while enrollment in summer programs in Turkey has dropped by half. The law did not cause all of this on its own, but it has accelerated a process in which the cost of maintaining a distinct identity outside China keeps rising. Eight UN Special Rapporteurs warned Beijing that the law may breach at least 12 international human rights treaties the country has ratified. The silence is spreading to journalists, academics, and companies with business interests touching on ethnic policy, Xinjiang, or Taiwan.

Whether the EU member states actually suspend those treaties, impose sanctions, and put protections in place for Chinese diaspora communities is another matter. Beijing appears to be counting on the fact that strong words from the European Parliament rarely translate into coordinated action, and that self-censorship will fill the gap. Whether that bet pays off depends less on what the law says than on what Europe does about it.