China Commission Urges Action on Transnational Repression

The theme of this year’s report, issued on International Human Rights Day, is “China breaks its promises, Americans pay the price” in an apparent effort to align with President Donald Trump’s America First agenda. The lengthy review chronicles years of China’s broken human rights promises to the U.S. and international community along with recent examples, and stresses the impact of Beijing’s abuses on U.S. citizens and the broader national security interests.

The annual report comes at a delicate time in U.S.-China relations. After a November summit between Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Trump in South Korea, China’s ambassador to the U.S., Xie Feng, reiterated that its record on democracy and humans rights is one of several “red lines” the U.S. should avoid crossing to maintain stable relations. The U.S. reportedly has halted plans to impose sanctions on China’s Ministry of State Security over a massive cyber espionage campaign in order to avoid the trade truce he and President Xi struck this fall.

Any slip in the trade détente could harm Trump’s efforts to focus on affordability and bringing down the costs of goods ahead of the 2026 midterms. 

In recent weeks, the administration has tasked White House Deputy Chief of Staff  Stephen Miller with ensuring that other federal agencies don’t take actions that could derail the trade truce and other agreements struck at the late October Busan summit, the Financial Times reported last week. Tougher enforcement of U.S. sanctions against China’s persecution of its Uyghur Muslim minorities and tougher actions against Chinese products manufactured with tainted forced labor could easily anger Beijing.

At the same time, the Trump administration’s recently released 2025 National Security Strategy signals a significant pivot, heavily stressing reciprocity when tackling trade imbalances and Beijing’s economic coercion and malign influence.

China hawks, including Michael Sobolik of the Hudson Institute, are warning Trump that Xi has a history of breaking promises to American presidents, and the CCP has a history of “exploiting negotiations to buy time strategically.”

“President Trump needs to look out for this trap,” he told the Financial Times.

Despite the commission’s emphasis on China’s human rights abuses and their impact on Americans, its report doesn’t pull punches.

The Chinese Communist Party’s transnational repression includes tactics ranging from verbal and online harassment to lawfare, as well as physical intimidation through overseas “service stations,” including several discovered and shut down in the United States, the report states. Over the last year, prominent cases of China’s transnational repression include Beijing’s issuance of $129,000 bounties on six overseas activists, passport cancellations for activists with existing bounties, threats against Uyghurs attending an international conference, and harassment of Falun Gong practitioners.

U.S. federal authorities prosecuted several perpetrators, including two prominent leaders in U.S.-based pro-democracy groups, as well as a dozen Chinese nationals responsible for a vast cyber-hacking campaign targeting critics of the CCP, the report noted. The outcomes, however, varied with three people sentenced for acting as illegal Chinese agents, while a separate jury acquitted a man accused of spying on members of a Chinese community in Boston.

“No one should ever have to look over their shoulder for fear of a foreign security service agent on U.S. soil,” Sullivan and Smith argued in the report. “Beijing will try to divide allies with threats and incentives; democracies must be diligent in closing ranks around our shared interests and values.”

The Chinese government also is continuing to wrongfully detain American citizens who work, study, or travel in China, the report warns. The Chinese Communist Party regularly threatens the personal privacy of individuals around the world with its national security and intelligence laws that allow sweeping access to data held by companies in China with Chinese-owned apps, such as TikTok, along with cloud services and artificial intelligence tools collecting sensitive personal information.

When it comes to the use of technology to promote propaganda, U.S. artificial intelligence company OpenAI located accounts it said appear to originate in China that used AI to write news articles criticizing the U.S. in Latin American media outlets and to generate posts denouncing CCP critics, the report found.

The commission’s report urged Congress to pass a bill expanding authorities for U.S. law enforcement and the State Department to counter acts of transnational repression on U.S. soil. It also pressed the Trump administration to form a joint effort by the State Department, the attorney general and other federal agencies to evaluate U.S. efforts to thwart China’s efforts to intimidate and repress critics overseas. The panel recommended that U.S. agencies better coordinate with G7 allies to exchange real-time intelligence on coercive tactics and identify key actors engaged in intimidation that crosses country lines.

Specifically, the commission recommended coordinated sanctions and visa bans, joint prosecutions of illegal agents, the shuttering of “overseas police” outposts, aligned export controls on China’s surveillance technology, and shared early-warning systems to protect Chinese diaspora communities from harassment and cyberattacks.

Ultimately, those most harmed by China’s constant flouting of international human rights treaties are Chinese citizens, the report stresses. Even though Chinese labor law purportedly guarantees the right of the Chinese people to choose their employment and prohibits discrimination based on racial backgrounds, Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims continue to be transferred into forced labor camps, often from “rural areas to factories and other industrial work,” the report states.

Additionally, all companies – U.S., Chinese, and all others doing business in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China’s more rural northwest area – are still “at risk of complicity in human rights abuses” taking place against Uyghurs in forced-labor factories. Reports of corporate involvement in mass atrocities in XUAR, “implicate the agricultural, apparel, automative, critical minerals, pharmaceutical, shipbuilding, and tourism industries,” the survey states.

The U.S.-passed Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act signed into law by President Biden in 2021 places sanctions on any companies, U.S. or otherwise, suspected of profiting from China’s forced labor. The measure keeps tabs on nearly 150 China-based companies tied to rights abuses in the XUAR. Since it became law, several members of Congress and human rights leaders have questioned its effectiveness in curbing forced-labor practices.

The report notes that XUAR Communist Party Secretary Ma Xingrui claimed in March 2025 that U.S. sanctions on entities over forced labor had “become one of the biggest challenges in the region’s development.” It also cites a Radio Free Asia report noting that Ma’s assertion was the first time such an admission had been made by a representative of the Chinese government, “proving that international sanctions do have bite.”

The commission said it had observed reports of “the discriminatory effects of [China’s] centrally led family planning policies, including the likely continuation of birth suppression of Uyghurs” in the XUAR. Over the last several years, respected human rights groups have issued reports on evidence of China’s forced sterilization of Uyghur women as part of what several international bodies and countries have deemed genocide.

Even though China has signed onto the United Nations Convention Against Torture, it continues to violate its ban on government entities inflicting severe pain or suffering, which it repeatedly violates in egregious ways, including the state-sanctioned forced harvesting of human organs. The horrific practice has taken place “extensively” for decades against Falun Gong practitioners and more recently against Uyghurs, the report states. The commission urged Congress to pass a bill expanding annual State Department reporting on forced organ harvesting and to take action to stop “organ tourism,” visits by citizens of the U.S. and other countries traveling to China to procure organs. Congress also should require the State Department to offer rewards to disrupt the market for illegally procured organs and to deny U.S. entry visas for physicians and researchers, Chinese or otherwise, known to be involved in forced organ harvesting activities, the report urges. And it should sanction entities and individuals, including any U.S. companies or research institutions, complicit or directly involved in forced organ harvesting or illegal organ trafficking.

Despite China’s constitution, which says citizens shall enjoy freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and association, this past year alone Chinese authorities continued to grossly violate those purported rights, according to the report.

Authorities sentenced filmmaker Chen Pinlin to three years and six months in prison after he produced a documentary about the 2022 White Paper protests against COVID-19 restrictions. Police in Zhejiang province detained several individuals who had participated in a memorial event for Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo. And in August 2024, police detained artist Gao Zhen in Hebei province on charges of “insulting revolutionary and martyrs” for creating satirical artwork in the past depicting Mao Zedong. In late 2024, Chinese authorities also cracked down on a mass nighttime bicycle ride by an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 university students in Henan province, a grassroots phenomenon symbolizing youthful freedom and an escape from job-market anxiety.

When it comes to China’s ongoing crackdown on religious freedom, the report cited several instances in which Chinese authorities continued to arbitrarily detain practitioners and religious leaders.

Chinese officials sentenced Linfen Covenant Church pastors Li Jie and Han Xiaodong to three years and eight months in prison for “fraud” in relation to the collection of donations from church members – a common charge against leaders of unregistered churches in China. In Qinghai province, authorities sentenced Pangkar Than Monastery monk Jampa Choephel to one year and six months in prison after he shared a speech by the Dalai Lama online. Hundreds of young Tibetan monks were also forced to leave monastery-affiliated schools and instead enroll at state-run residential schools. In Yuxi municipality in Yunnan Province, public security officials took Imam Ma Yuwei into custody in connection with his preaching. Chinese officials also ordained two Catholic bishops in apparent contravention of the Sino-Vatican Agreement, during the period following Pope Francis’ death and preceding the appointment of a new pope.

The report also found no sign of relief for Beijing’s crackdown on freedoms in Hong Kong. A 1984 treaty between China and Britain was supposed to guarantee that Hong Kong would maintain “a high degree of autonomy” with “executive, legislative and independent judicial power” to “remain basically unchanged” after Hong Kong’s 1997 return to China under the “one country, two systems” principle. Under President Xi Jinping’s regime, however, the conflict between China and Hong Kong has escalated in recent years, with widespread protests against Beijing’s increasing control and severe limits on freedoms. This past year Chinese authorities continued to weaponize national security laws foisted upon the former British colony to repress all forms of political dissent, which included the convictions of 45 pro-democracy advocates of subversion for having organized an unofficial primary election. In another case, a slogan emblazoned on a T-shirt was seen as a “national security” threat.

“This year’s report underscores the important role of human rights in U.S. strategy and diplomacy,” Sullivan and Smith said in a statement. “When forced labor undercuts American workers, when state-sanctioned hostage taking endangers our citizens, when censorship chills speech globally, and when international rules at sea are ignored, Americans pay the price – in security, in prosperity, and in credibility.”

“Upholding human dignity helps keep markets fairer, travel safer, technology freer, and alliances stronger. It reduces the leverage authoritarian states – led by a totalitarian PRC – wield over people and partners,” the lawmakers concluded.