Law at the End of the Day: Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) 2023 Annual Report

The Congressional-Executive Commission on China was created by the U.S. Congress in 2000 "with the legislative mandate to monitor human rights and the development of the rule of law in China, and to submit an annual report to the President and the Congress. The Commission consists of nine Senators, nine Members of the House of Representatives, and five senior Administration officials appointed by the President." (CECC About). The CECC FAQs provide useful information about the CECC. See CECC Frequently Asked Questions. They have developed positions on a number of issues.

CECC tends to serve as an excellent barometer of the thinking of political and academic elites in the United States about issues touching on China and the official American line developed in connection with those issues. As such it is an important source of information about the way official and academic sectors think about China. As one can imagine many of the positions of the CECC are critical of current Chinese policies and institutions (for some analysis see CECC).

CECC publishes annual reports. For those who missed it, the last report, for 2023, was published 10 May 2024. Its objectives and scope are well summarized by the Statement From the Chairs the Introduced the Report:

STATEMENT FROM THE CHAIRS

This reporting year was marked by Communist Party leader Xi Jinping securing his third term as General Secretary, breaking from post-Mao “reform era” precedent, and by a continued high level of state repression, particularly in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) and areas of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) inhabited by Tibetans and other ethnic minority groups.

In spite of this—or perhaps because of it—the past year also saw the most public demonstrations directed at Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership since 1989’s reform protests that ended in the Tiananmen Square Massacre. As elaborated more fully in the overview below and in the chapters of the Annual Report, this combination of factors pushing toward and pulling away from the PRC’s centralizing governance system forces us to question assumptions about the durability of the repressive status quo.

Consistent with our statutory mandate to chronicle the PRC’s human rights record via our comprehensive Annual Report, maintenance of a representative political prisoner database, and critical hearings examining expert testimony, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC, or the Commission) has sought to highlight abuses by the CCP and PRC authorities on a range of subjects, including worsening persecution of religious minorities—including Muslims, Christians, Falun Gong practitioners, Tibetan Buddhists and those whose faith practices are deemed unorthodox or “evil cults” (xiejiao) by the Communist Party—and the use of forced labor, particularly of oppressed groups such as Uyghurs and North Koreans in the PRC.

The Commission has expanded its focus on the PRC’s transnational repression, directed primarily at diaspora communities in the United States and elsewhere, in particular targeting Hong Kongers, Uyghurs, and other political dissidents.

The Commission also exposed the increasing use of technology as a tool of repression, from ubiquitous surveillance cameras to the digital tools used to surveil and suppress online religious expression.

Reflecting a desire by policymakers to expand the range of tools available to promote accountability for human rights violations, an increasing focus of the Commission has been to address complicity by U.S. and foreign corporations with regard to CCP oppression. The Commission questioned Thermo Fisher Scientific over use of its DNA sequencers by police in the XUAR and Tibet, as well as the National Basketball Association’s squelching of free expression of its players—including Enes Kanter Freedom—for speech that could be seen to offend the political leadership of the PRC, such as with regard to speaking out about atrocities in the XUAR or the shrinking political space in Hong Kong.

The Commission has overseen the implementation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), perhaps the most significant China-focused legislation to have come out of Congress in recent decades. The UFLPA, by creating a rebuttable presumption that goods originating in the XUAR are tainted by forced labor, has put American businesses on notice about complicity in human rights abuse in the PRC and requires them to either clean up their supply chains or have their goods banned from importation. This is having a demonstrable impact on corporate behavior.
There is more that can be done to change how corporations view the risks of doing business in the PRC. As we look forward, this could be accomplished by linking access to capital markets to human rights records and directing the Securities and Exchange Commission to compel publicly traded corporations to disclose activities that intersect with human rights violations in the PRC such as forced labor, forced organ harvesting, or compliance with Hong Kong’s National Security Law.
Finally, it is critical to note the unity of the Co-Chairs and Commissioners in viewing the leadership of the PRC as systematically and systemically seeking to redefine the rules of the post–World War II international order, including and in particular with regard to human rights norms.* * *

The CECC 2023 Annual Report table of contents and executive summary follow below.The 2023 Report and the Executive Summary (about 48 pages) may be accessed HERE: