Confronted with what he calls a “commercial tsunami” from China and growing unpredictability from the United States, French President Emmanuel Macron has urged Europe to become “a true geopolitical and economic power” capable of defending its long-term economic security and competitiveness.
Yet one crucial element remains missing from this vision: human rights.
European debates about “unfair competition” from China often focus on state subsidies or industrial policy. But China’s economic model is also built on a scaffolding of human rights abuses that enable authorities to reshape economic sectors and to strong-arm communities with minimal resistance.
China is the only major industrial economy that bans independent labor unions; anyone attempting to organize workers risks arrest and imprisonment. China’s “household registration” system makes over a third of the workforce migrant workers, second-class citizens without equal access to public services. These 300 million people—more than the entire work force of the European Union— have little choice but to take low-paid, often precarious work. In Xinjiang, the authorities coerce Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim workers into forced labor.
Local governments in China can forcibly seize rural land, displace villagers, and green‑light massive infrastructure projects without public consultation or effective legal constraints. Those who challenge these actions—from billionaire entrepreneurs to protesting villagers—risk prosecution and long prison sentences. The Chinese Communist Party-controlled courts serve not as a meaningful check on state power but enforcers of such power.
Economic development has not led to China’s political liberalization, as then-US President Bill Clinton claimed it would when advocating China’s membership in the World Trade Organization in 2001. Rather it has enriched and empowered a country that has become increasingly repressive. About 5 percent of China’s GDP is devoted to “internal security”, comparable to its military spending.
Little wonder that the Chinese government can pay for expensive technology, including artificial intelligence-enabled mass surveillance and internet censorship. These systems have helped ensure that local protests, including labor actions, never coalesce into organized nationwide movements. Under such conditions, workers who try to seek a remedy often battle alone, vastly overpowered by the government.
Some in the West partly attribute China’s economic success to a strong work ethic. But for many in China, the sense of being trapped in an exploitative system has fueled “lay flat” and “let it rot” sentiments—quiet acts of refusal by people who see themselves treated like endlessly renewable “chives,” cut and regrown for profit. Some openly declare they will have “no next generation” rather than perpetuate these conditions.
Rather than quietly acquiescing to China’s authoritarian development model, European countries and other democracies should band together and integrate human rights into their economic and foreign policies. Europe has begun moving in this direction through corporate due diligence legislation and forced labor bans. These tools should not be weakened as France and Germany did in the name of “simplification,” but strengthened to meet both goals.
Democratic governments should also invoke labor protections embedded in International Labour Organization conventions and trade agreements that China has ratified, pressing Beijing to abolish the household registration system and allow independent unions. Business ties with Chinese entities implicated in rights abuses or surveillance should be restricted. Democratic governments should ambitiously rethink ways to factor in China’s social and environmental costs in their trade policies.
Beyond trade, addressing China’s transnational repression is equally critical. Harassment and manipulation of diaspora communities abroad, interference in academic freedom in the West, and pressure on foreign-based activists are not only human rights concerns but national security issues. Protecting academic independence strengthens Europe’s knowledge ecosystem at a time when China is treated as a “systemic rival.”
Some critics argue that embedding human rights into economic policy risks retaliation or raises costs for European consumers. These concerns may be valid in the short term. But the alternative—accepting surveillance‑linked technologies in critical infrastructure or enabling coercive practices in supply chains—carries deeper long‑term risks: national-security vulnerabilities, reputational damage, and political backlash that has already fueled domestic populism. The question is not whether costs exist, but whether they are managed or unpredictably absorbed later.
For years, European countries have parked their human rights diplomacy in low-level bilateral dialogues and isolated statements of concern, knowing that, without consequences, the Chinese government would not take them seriously. The costs of marginalizing human rights are now apparent.
A Europe that systematically embed human rights across trade, procurement, migration, and security policies, would strengthen not only its credibility, but also its security, acting as a stabilizing force in an unstable world.
