Former Canadian deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland told a security forum in Taipei this week that China's new Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress carries echoes of the reasoning Vladimir Putin used to justify his 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and she urged democratic governments to push back against it.

Freeland delivered the keynote address on Tuesday to the Ketagalan Forum, an annual Indo-Pacific conference hosted in Taipei by Taiwan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a local think tank (The Globe and Mail; Taiwan Today).

The Chinese law at the centre of her remarks took effect July 1. Its Article 63 says individuals and organizations outside China can be held legally responsible for acts that "undermine ethnic unity and progress or create ethnic division" (The Globe and Mail). An analysis by the George W. Bush Institute describes the statute as asserting Beijing's authority to prosecute Chinese freedom advocates worldwide for undermining "ethnic unity and progress" (Bush Center).

Freeland called Article 63 "particularly sinister" for its "dark kinship with Russia's malign use of linguistic, cultural, and ethnic ties to justify illegal encroachment on the sovereignty of its neighbours, including the bloody full-scale invasion of Ukraine." She pointed to an essay Putin published in the summer of 2021 arguing that Russians and Ukrainians were "one people." Seven months later, Russian tanks crossed into Ukraine (The Globe and Mail.

The analogy Freeland drew turns on a specific mechanism: a country invoking cross-border ethnic and cultural bonds to assert legal or political authority over people and territory beyond its own borders. She said governments need to state plainly that a foreign law assigning political loyalty on the basis of ethnicity has no force on their territories and no application to their citizens.

Taiwanese officials have said the sovereignty and security provisions in the new law give Beijing an additional legal pretext for targeting people in Taiwan it regards as separatists (The Globe and Mail). Taiwan's President Lai, who also attended the 2026 Ketagalan Forum, said the law infringes upon Taiwan's sovereignty (Office of the President, Taiwan).

Canada's ambassador to the UN Office in Geneva, Peter MacDougall, briefly mentioned the Chinese law at the UN Human Rights Council in mid-June, ahead of its entry into force (The Globe and Mail.

Freeland also used the Taipei address to call for Taiwan to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (Toronto Sun). The CPTPP is the trade pact that succeeded the original Trans-Pacific Partnership after the United States withdrew. Both Taiwan and China have applied to join, and member states have not yet finalized how either application will proceed.

The broader context here is one of escalating legal and rhetorical claims by Beijing that extend well beyond its territorial jurisdiction. Article 63's extraterritorial reach means the law is not solely a domestic governance measure. On paper, it creates a basis for legal liability that could touch diaspora communities, advocacy organizations, and foreign nationals whose speech or activity Beijing deems contrary to "ethnic unity and progress." The comparison Freeland drew to Putin's "one people" essay is aimed at that extraterritorial dimension: the use of ethnic-unity language not as internal policy but as a claimed basis for authority over people and places outside the state's borders.

For a Canadian audience, the precedent that comes to mind is the two Michaels saga, in which Beijing detained Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor in apparent retaliation for the arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou on a U.S. extradition request. Ottawa spent nearly three years navigating that confrontation. A law that explicitly claims prosecutorial authority over individuals outside China adds a legal instrument to the coercive toolkit already on display in that earlier episode.

Freeland's decision to deliver these remarks in Taipei, at a forum hosted by Taiwan's foreign ministry, is itself part of the signal. The speech paired a substantive critique of Chinese legislation with a call for Taiwanese participation in a multilateral trade architecture, linking the security file and the trade file in a single address.