cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/57237859
Former deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland said Beijing’s new law claiming the right to prosecute people and organizations anywhere in the world for undermining its “ethnic unity” reminds her of the rationale Vladimir Putin used to justify his 2022 military assault on Ukraine.
Speaking this week at a security forum in Taiwan, she called on democratic countries to unequivocally push back against China’s ethnic unity law.
Taiwan, a self-governing democracy, lives under threat of invasion from China. Beijing claims Taiwan as a breakaway province and has not ruled out the use of force to annex the island and its 24 million people in the name of “reunification.” Taiwanese officials have said the sovereignty and security provisions in the new Chinese law hand Beijing an additional legal pretext for targeting people in Taiwan it regards as separatists.
Ms. Freeland, who served as deputy prime minister and finance minister under Justin Trudeau and then minister for transport and internal trade under Prime Minister Mark Carney, delivered a keynote address Tuesday to the Ketagalan Forum, … said parts of China’s new Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, which took effect July 1, mirror the rationale Mr. Putin deployed before launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
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The section of the law Ms. Freeland is criticizing states that individuals and organizations outside China can be held legally responsible for acts that “undermine ethnic unity and progress or create ethnic division.” It doesn’t define what this means in practice, leaving broad scope for interpretation by Beijing, critics have warned.
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Ms. Freeland pointed to an essay Mr. Putin published in the summer of 2021 arguing that Russians and Ukrainians were “one people.” Seven months later, Russian tanks crossed into Ukraine, she noted.
“The lesson of history is clear,” she said, adding that democracies “must not mince their words about this legislation.” She said governments need to state plainly that a foreign law assigning political loyalty on the basis of ethnicity “has no force on our territories and no application to our citizens, whatever their ancestry, whatever their passport, wherever they or their parents were born.”
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The former politician cited the West’s muted response to Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia and its 2014 seizure of Crimea, arguing that pattern of condemnation followed by business as usual convinced Mr. Putin that democracies would not back Ukraine if he invaded outright.
“We taught Putin to believe we would not have the resolve to support Ukraine,” she said. “I wish even more fervently that he had never made that miscalculation.”
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Ms. Freeland said democratic allies of Taiwan need to speak out against any disruption to the status quo in the region.
“The peace of the Strait of Taiwan will be kept by the plainness with which the world’s democracies say in advance that we will not accept that peace being broken,” she said.
“That is why solidarity with Taiwan and recognition of your flourishing democracy is so important,” she told the forum.
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