Taipei, Aug 4 — Taiwan's President Lai Ching-te on Tuesday urged the international community to oppose China's 'ethnic unity' law and expressed Taipei's firm stance against authoritarian expansion and transnational repression, local media reported.
In his address at the opening of the 10th annual Ketagalan Forum on Tuesday, President Lai said that the ethnic unity law, which came into effect in China on July 1, threatens Taiwan's sovereignty, persecutes ethnic or religious minorities, demonstrates China's use of transnational repression and poses a threat to people in the world through political censorship, Taiwan-based Taipei Times reported.
He expressed Taiwan's commitment to upholding the principles of democracy while maintaining peace and security in the Indo-Pacific region.
"At the Ketagalan Forum, I emphasized Taiwan's firm stance against authoritarian expansion and transnational repression. The international community must oppose China's red terror and its malicious law on 'ethnic unity.' We will strengthen countermeasures through global cooperation," Lai Ching-te posted on X.
The Ketagalan Forum 2026 Indo-Pacific Security Dialogue is co-hosted by Taiwan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research in Taipei.
In July, over 50 Uyghur civil society organisations strongly condemned China's Law on the Promotion of Ethnic Unity and Progress (Ethnic Unity Law) and urged the international community to take meaningful action to repeal the legislation.
According to a joint statement, the law is not a “technical administrative measure” but a “legislative instrument of forced assimilation”. It noted that the legislation explicitly conflates the Chinese nation with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and demands that ethnic groups abandon their distinct identities in favour of loyalty to the Party, the Han-defined “motherland,” and “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.”
Under this framework, the organisations said, the Uyghur, Tibetan, Mongolian, and other non-Han identities are permitted to exist only insofar as they are absorbed into a single, CCP-defined Chinese nation.
“The law’s reach is sweeping. It entrenches Mandarin as the language of education, displacing Uyghur, Tibetan, and Southern Mongolian languages from the classroom and public life. It mandates the ‘sinicisation’ of religion, subordinating faith to Party ideology. It instructs parents and teachers to raise children in loyalty to the CCP rather than to their own culture, religion, or language,” read the statement.
“These are not incidental effects; they are the law’s stated purpose, and they build directly on policies that have already devastated our communities — mass internment, cultural and religious destruction, and the forced separation of children from their families,” it added.
The organisations expressed grave concerns over certain provisions in the law which stipulate that individuals and organisations outside mainland China who “undermine ethnic unity and progress” could be held legally responsible under Chinese law.
They also called on the UN human rights experts and mechanisms — including the Special Rapporteurs on freedom of religion or belief, and the situation of human rights defenders, on minority issues, as well as Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and other relevant treaty bodies — to formally monitor and report on the implementation and extraterritorial application of the Ethnic Unity Law, and press Beijing to repeal it.