On 1 July, the so-called ‘Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress’ comes into force in China.
A reassuring name for a legal instrument that claims the right to prosecute anyone, anywhere, who speaks of Tibet, Xinjiang or Taiwan in a manner unwelcome to the Chinese Communist Party.
From a free continent that still seems unable to grasp this, a few words must be spoken loud and clear.

Please note

What follows takes the form of a simple demonstration.

Premise: on 1 July 2026, a law comes into force in China that removes the boundaries of criminal jurisdiction.

Thesis: Speaking out about Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang is no longer an option; it is a duty.

What lies between the premise and the thesis is the logical step that is worth demonstrating.
C.V.D. at the end — if the reasoning holds up.

Timing is never random

In international politics, dates are rarely chosen at random. The date chosen by Beijing is particularly telling: on 1 July 2026 — exactly 105 years after the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in July 1921 — the so-called ‘Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress’ will officially come into force — a law approved on 12 March this year by the National People’s Congress with 2,756 votes in favour, 3 against and 3 abstentions.
A majority which, in genuine democracies, simply does not exist. And that alone should set off some alarm bells.

The name of the measure is designed not to cause alarm. It sounds almost educational: it refers to ‘unity’, ‘progress’ and ‘harmony amongst the 56 ethnic groups of the Chinese nation’. At first glance, it looks like a law on cultural diversity.
That is exactly how Beijing wants it to appear.
The reality, however, is quite different.

What the text actually says, in simple terms

Once you look beyond the language, the text does two things.

Firstly, it enshrines in law the policy of Sinicisation championed by Xi Jinping: the idea that the 55 recognised ethnic minorities — Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongols, Kazakhs, Hui and many others — should be progressively absorbed into a single, state-defined Chinese identity.

Xi uses the metaphor of a tree: there is a trunk (the dominant Han identity) and there are branches (the minority cultures).
According to this view, the branches can grow ‘only if the trunk is strong’. In other words: language, religion, education, family and traditions must conform to the central model.
Anything that falls outside this framework is cut away; therefore, it is not acceptable.

Secondly — and this is where it concerns us directly — the law contains a clause on extraterritorial application: it explicitly asserts China’s right to “prosecute foreign organisations or individuals who carry out acts deemed detrimental to Chinese ethnic unity and progress, or who incite ethnic separatism”.

If an Italian journalist writes about re-education camps in Xinjiang, if, for example, a French academic publishes an essay on Tibet, or if a Taiwanese activist in Berlin gives a talk on the identity of their island — all these individuals, according to Beijing, may be subject to a Chinese criminal investigation, with the consequent possibility of a Red Notice via Interpol, personal economic sanctions, a travel ban, and — let us not underestimate this — pressure on family members living in China.

Eight former UN special rapporteurs, in a joint letter in April, wrote that the law could violate at least twelve international human rights treaties that China itself has ratified.
The UN High Commissioner, Volker Türk, warned that the legislation risks “restricting religious and cultural freedoms”. On 30 April, the European Parliament effectively condemned it in a formal resolution.

Beijing’s response, delivered by Deputy Minister of Justice Hu Weilie, was that Western criticism “distorts and misinterprets” the text, and that the law is “legitimate, lawful, necessary and feasible”. Four adjectives, one doctrine.

This is where Taiwan comes in

This development concerns us, but it concerns Taiwan in particular.
This is because the concept of ‘ethnic separatism’ can , at the discretion of the Party-State, also be applied to those who support the island’s self-determination.

A Taiwanese national security official told the Central News Agency that issues relating to Taiwan’s sovereignty and human rights in Xinjiang and Tibet can all be regarded as acts that “undermine ethnic unity”. The first to be affected, writes the Taipei Times, will be Taiwanese people working or doing business in China: stopped at the border, detained, or ‘invited’ to provide explanations.

And this is where we enter territory which the European continent – accustomed to regarding freedom of expression as an inalienable right and criminal jurisdiction as a territorial matter – ought, by definition, to find intolerable.
Beijing seems not to have taken on board a single one of these ideas.

Xi Jinping’s regime behaves as if international law were a menu from which one helps oneself only when it suits. It ratifies and then violates. It signs and then reneges. It promises religious tolerance and then razes monasteries to the ground. It declares that it respects the sovereignty of others and then claims the right to put foreign nationals on trial for opinions expressed in foreign countries.

The necessary deduction

Now, let’s get to the point. In this scenario, Taiwan is the test case.
It is the freest country in East Asia, ranked as the twelfth-freest democracy in the world according tothe Economist Intelligence Unit, the first Asian nation to have legalised same-sex marriage, and home to the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturer (TSMC), without which the computers on which we are reading this article would not work.

It is a country of 23 million people who live every day under the threat of invasion and who, despite this, go out to vote, demonstrate, write and make choices. Everything that Beijing would like to see disappear over the next four decades.

Talking about Taiwan today is not about taking sides in favour of one flag over another. It means defending the principle that a people has the right to determine its own destiny, even when its neighbour is large, rich and armed. It means rejecting the idea that the strongest is, by definition, in the right. It means remembering that our freedom — the freedom to write, read, think and even criticise our own governments — is a fragile freedom, one that erodes when we stop exercising it for the benefit of others. And the same applies to Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

From 1 July, every academic, every journalist, every politician and every European activist who speaks about Taiwan, Tibet or Xinjiang with the necessary candour will be — formally or informally — blacklisted by Beijing as a ‘problem individual’. The economic and diplomatic pressure that will follow will be enormous.

The Chinese regime’s calculation is simple and cynical: who would be willing to pay a personal price for speaking out on a distant cause?

If the demonstration was successful, there is only one answer: all of us.

Not because Taiwan, Tibet or the Uyghurs need our charity — quite the opposite: it is we who need their steadfastness to remind us what it means to be free.
But because a world in which a regime uses the law to impose its right to prosecute anyone, anywhere, is not a democratic world. It is a world in which democracy has already been stripped of key elements, in which people begin to censor themselves even before they are censored, in which the word ‘prudence’ silently replaces the word ‘truth’.

From that day onwards, Beijing will tell the world: those who speak out will pay the price. It is up to us to respond: those who remain silent are already complicit. And those who wish to silence us will still find someone willing to speak out. Louder than before, if necessary.

Quod erat demonstrandum.