Dear President von der Leyen,
Dear High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy/Vice-President Kallas,
Dear Executive Vice-Presidents Ribera, Virkkunen and Séjourné,
Dear Commissioners Šefčovič, Dombrovskis, Síkela and McGrath,
We write to urge you to integrate human rights concerns in your discussions on EU-China relations during the upcoming security college meeting on April 13.
In September 2023, President von der Leyen framed the escalations of China’s policies and actions as “becoming more repressive at home and more assertive abroad,” identifying that China’s “imperative for security and control trump[ed] the logic of free markets and open trade” and that the “Chinese Communist Party's clear goal [was] a systemic change of the international order with China at its center.”
Despite awareness, the EU’s countering actions have been and remain too slow and dispersed as the concerns continued to expand.
Chinese authorities have intensified their assault on human rights since President Xi Jinping assumed power in 2013. Deepening repression at home, including tightening ideological controls, has increasingly extended abroad through multiple pathways from transnational repression to recent abusive laws with extra-territorial application (such as China’s Ethnic Unity Law and its draft Cybercrime Law). China’s export and diffusion of technology across the tech stack (through initiatives like the Belt and Road Initiative/Digital Silk Road and Global Security Initiative) including its digital infrastructure projects, like “smart city” systems or its development of AI models, embed standards and policies that violate rights or offer few protections, reshaping governance in much of the developing world.
The Chinese government has continued to support Russia in its war against Ukraine. Human Rights Watch in June 2025 reported on Russia’s use of commercial drones produced by China-based companies to deliberately target civilians in Kherson, Ukraine, in violation of the laws of war.
Human rights are not peripheral to EU’s security, but central to it. The EU’s concerns over its economic security and faltering efforts to address its dependencies – a trade deficit with China reaching €359 billion in 2025 – are affected by China’s “low-rights” political economy.
China’s economic model is 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; its “household registration” hukou system turns over a third of the workforce into second-class citizens without equal access to public services. These 300 million people—more than the entire EU’s workforce— have little choice but to take low-paid, often precarious work. These factors have helped produce decades of artificially cheap exports, driven a global race to the bottom in labor rights, and contributed to localized job losses in Europe.
The European Union should adopt a structural approach to China that shifts incentives and ambitiously rethinks ways to factor in China’s social and environmental costs in the EU’s trade policy. In particular, we note that the EU has considered the Chinese government’s state provision of land use rights to electric vehicle companies to be a form of subsidy in its landmark use of the anti-subsidies instrument in 2024. We would recommend that the EU consider extending this anti-subsidy analysis to Xinjiang, where there is credible research showing that automotive and other industries have benefited from effective government subsidies, including related to land-grabbing.
The EU has taken some important steps by barring imports linked to forced labor and other abuses through the Forced Labour Regulation and the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive – albeit in a weakened form. It should further invoke labor-rights protections embedded in multilateral trade agreements and International Labour Organization conventions that China has already committed to uphold, to press the Chinese government to abolish the hukou system and allow independent unions.
The EU should use targeted sanctions against Chinese Communist Party-linked entities involved in abuses, in particular surveillance and forced labor, and against Chinese officials responsible for serious abuses in Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, and elsewhere in the country.
Finally, we urge you to break internal silos between your various mandates to define and implement a systematic China strategy that centers human rights, including the government’s transnational repression in the EU, and to make full and appropriately use of the EU’s foreign and economic policy tools and opportunities.
Only by standing stronger together will the EU reduce the risks of retaliation and increase its resistance to the Chinese government’s abusive practices.
Philippe Dam
EU Director, Human Rights Watch
