Since taking office, the Trump administration has made repeated references and centered a significant part of its foreign policy around responding to the threat of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its malign actions. There is no question that the CCP is engaging in grave human rights abuses, including crimes against humanity. Withstanding heavy revisions intended to limit its scope, the State Department’s own recently published 2024 Human Rights Report on China outlines the continued control and expanding repression within and outside of China under President Xi Jinping.
However, despite the Trump administration’s tough stance on China, particularly on trade, its track record falls far short of what is needed for responding to, and now even reporting on, these abuses in a meaningful way.
Since January, President Donald Trump’s executive action on China has prioritized responding to national and economic security concerns laid out in the America First Trade and America First Investment policies, while sidelining human rights issues. The most notable result has been an ongoing tumultuous tariff war. Since coming to an initial resolution in Geneva in May, both sides have continued to accuse the other of violating the fragile agreement as negotiations continue. Meanwhile, American and Chinese workers and businesses have borne the brunt of impacts of market uncertainty, rising prices and loss of inventory, jobs, and wages.
Simultaneously, increased caseload enforcement of the administration’s tariffs has also raised human rights concerns about the ability of Customs and Border Patrol to implement the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA). Now coupled with USAID cuts to rights groups that inform UFLPA enforcement, these decisions not only ignore longstanding calls from civil society and lawmakers to strengthen enforcement mechanisms, but actively undermine it.
The administration has issued executive orders gutting federal agencies at a dizzying pace, severely undermining the United States’ existing response capabilities to Chinese human rights issues. Some of these policy changes have been outright welcomed by the CCP.
The dismantling of USAID had cascading negative impacts on Chinese human rights NGOs and Tibetan refugee communities. Strict domestic laws governing foreign funding and operation of NGOs in China, coupled with gaps in private and philanthropic sectors, have resulted in China-focused groups relying heavily on U.S. government funding, with USAID dispersing $4.3 million in aid distributed for government and civil society out of $14.2 million in aid for China in 2024.
Cuts to the Agency for Global Media, which includes the Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA), threaten crucial and often exclusive reporting on Uyghur and Tibetan issues. This renders many of the abuses suffered by these communities even more hidden to the world and enables the Chinese government to continue that oppression with increased impunity. The State Department’s Human Rights Report China chapter made repeated references to RFA as a source for documenting abuses, demonstrating the administration’s own need for its reporting.
Most recently, the reorganization of the State Department and the termination of all but two programs awarded under the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) decimates human rights expertise and diplomacy within the institution and represents an overall downgrading of human rights – at a time when civil society groups in many contexts, not least China, are in critical need of support.
As a part of DRL’s restructure, the new Office of Natural Rights significantly narrows the bureau’s policy focus, with China reportedly singled out as the office’s only country policy priority under “competition with China through a human rights lens.” What this means in practice remains to be seen. However, reframing an understanding of human rights based on “natural rights” rather than the definition established under international law and further elaborated under by recognized international institutions raises significant concerns that the U.S. government plans to define rights unilaterally to meet its own political agenda, undermining universal, long-established protections. These institutional changes, coupled with the extensive revisions to the State Department’s annually mandated human rights reporting, shrink opportunities for the United States to document CCP abuses and seek accountability.
There were significant omissions from the State Department’s 2024 Human Rights Report on China, Hong Kong, and Tibet published last month. That included a blanket omission of LGBTQ issues and a reduction of focus on women’s rights and ethnic discrimination issues, particularly on Tibetan language and cultural erasure efforts.
In 2024, Amnesty reported on continued repression against LGBTQ activism in China, with activists facing arbitrary detention and interrogation and online censorship of related topics. In Hong Kong, the government cut funding and obstructed fundraising and promotion activities to LGBTQ groups, and failed to provide any meaningful updates on progress toward the implementation of a 2023 ruling by the Court of Final Appeal requiring it to provide an alternative legal framework for the recognition of same-sex partnerships. None of these threats and legislative attacks appeared in the State Department’s report.
The report did include some overview of repressive reproductive policies and systemic challenges unmarried pregnant women in China face. However, it failed to report on gender equality issues beyond certain policies, including continued workplace gender discrimination and government efforts to encourage women to return to “traditional Chinese values” and encourage a “birth-friendly society.” The report briefly made reference to the #MeToo Movement as a “taboo” topic, but contrary to prior reports, did not report on the June sentencing of #MeToo activist Sophia Huang to five years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power.”
On Hong Kong, while the report did discuss in detail the human rights impacts of the National Security Law (NSL) and Article 23, the report failed to highlight the added gender-based challenges and gender-based and sexual violence women human rights defenders face for pursuing their activism. This gap is demonstrated in State’s reporting on the case of Chow Hang-tung. While the report highlights her case, it fails to mention her latest legal challenge filed against the Commissioner of Correctional Services over a policy that requires female prisoners to wear pants during the summer while male inmates are allowed to wear shorts.
On Tibet, there were cuts to previous year’s section on “systematic racial or ethnic violence and discrimination” and redactions to the Children’s Rights section on education. Last year, this section importantly highlighted the United Nations’ 2023 statement on the forced separation of one million Tibetan children from their families to attend residential schools. These reductions left a major gap in reporting on the continued repression against Tibetan language and cultural instruction, most notably the July closures of the Jigme Gyaltsen Vocational School in Gansu province and the Gangjong Sherig Norbu School in Qinghai province.
The BBC, New York Times, and RFA all reported on residential boarding schools for Tibetan children and their “prison-like” conditions. RFA published exclusive reporting on the continued staggering number of forcible transfers of monastic students to residential schools, including over 300 students ages 6 to 14 years old from the now-closed Lhamo Kirti Monastery school in Sichuan province in July alone. RFA reports also highlighted the arrests of teens for resisting attending boarding schools, and teens taking and attempting to take their lives after being forced to transfer from monasteries. None of these important reports was mentioned in the State Department’s overview.
On transnational repression and “bilateral pressure,” the report failed to mention the Chinese government’s efforts to erase Tibetan culture on the global stage, including the late 2023 mandate to use “Xizang” in all official documents referring to Tibet, and media reporting on the CCP’s actions in 2024 to encourage international bodies and organizations to use the term, including the British Museum and Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac.
Simultaneously, the administration’s response to human rights concerns – a significant part of then-Senator Marco Rubio’s critique of the Chinese government – has been noticeably muted. In March, the State Department issued visa restrictions in response to the forced return of 40 Uyghurs who had spent over a decade in Thailand to China – after the U.S. demonstratively failed to exhort sufficient influence on its “longstanding ally” to uphold international law. Rubio had expressed strong confidence in his department’s diplomacy to “achieve results” on this issue during his January confirmation hearing. That confidence was clearly misplaced.
In May, Trump suggested he would raise the case of Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong billionaire-turned-media mogul who faces trial under the NSL, during trade negotiations in Geneva. No public reporting confirmed this occurred, and the official joint readout of the talks did not mention Lai.
Rather than modeling rights-respecting policy, the administration’s own authoritarian-like actions have been criticized by some as mimicking CCP behavior, with a few commenters coining these similarities as “MAGA Maoism.” These actions risk fundamentally undermining the United States’ credibility to maintain and implement a principled China policy.
Instead, rhetoric on the threat of the CCP and its authoritarian practices is increasingly being used by the administration to justify terminating domestic policies the administration already opposed, including education programs and reproductive health policies. On May 9, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) announced the United States’ decision to cut its funding to the organization, amounting to $355 million, on the unfounded claim that UNFPA supports the Chinese government’s coercive reproductive policies.
On May 22, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced it had decided to terminate Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification to hold the school “accountable for… coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus.” On May 28, State Department took further action, announcing the administration will “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students” and “revise visa criteria” for all future Chinese and Hong Kong applicants.
On August 26, Trump appeared to reverse his stance, stating the U.S. would accept 600,000 Chinese students into the country, but an DHS proposal that appeared two days later reiterated visa restrictions against international students, including Chinese nationals explicitly.
By abandoning international fora and its responsibility to pressure the Chinese government to end its human rights abuses while simultaneously taking knee-jerk actions to combat the “the China threat” at home, the Trump administration leaves the root issue of CCP authoritarian abuses unaddressed. While legislation aimed at addressing CCP human rights abuses recently passed the House, emboldened congressional and state lawmakers are also increasingly introducing blunt and far-reaching anti-China bills that have the potential to exacerbate existing vulnerabilities already faced by dissidents in exile, diaspora, and heritage communities in the U.S.
With Trump’s repeated statements of his intention to visit China in the near future, there is an opportunity for lawmakers to push the administration to take a more principled approach to policymaking on China. Opposing the CCP for its authoritarian practices and repressive abuses is a stance U.S. lawmakers should continue to hold. Any government systematically violating the human rights of the people in its jurisdiction and beyond its borders should face such opprobrium.
However, that stance will be increasingly and rightfully criticized as uncredible and meaningless in practice if the lawmakers in power aren’t equally opposing the use of authoritarian practices at home, or if lawmakers who have consistently stood up against the abuses of the CCP in the past are suddenly silent or unwilling to challenge the administration’s policy decisions on China. The lawmakers in power need to be vocally and publicly supportive of minority colleagues’ efforts to document and challenge the administration’s decisions to undermine means to combat abuses.