‘Sinicization:’ China’s decade of crackdowns target activists, lawyers, religious minorities | Local News
The economic resurgence of China as an industrial powerhouse since the 1980s has been one of the most significant world developments in recent decades.
Since 1980, the number of people earning $1.90 or less a day in China has fallen by 800 million people, accounting for three quarters of total worldwide poverty reduction in that time, according to a 2022 World Bank report.
“By any measure, the speed and scale of China’s poverty reduction is historically unprecedented,” the report said.
But international human rights organizations and the U.S. government have documented major escalations in the Chinese government’s repression of civil society.
New laws since President Xi Jinping came to power in 2013 have curtailed religious expression and speech, strengthened state censorship of the press and public dissent and targeted ethnic minorities, according to various human rights organizations and the U.S. Department of State.
“Xi has attempted to enforce greater ideological and cultural conformity and tighter control over
society, aided by digital technologies,” according to a February report from the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan agency that provides research and analysis to members of Congress. “[Chinese] leaders long have asserted that human rights standards vary by country,
that economic development is a key human right, and that a country’s human rights policies are an ‘internal affair.’”
‘709 crackdown’ and ‘Sinicization’
In 2015, lawyers became the subject of a brutal crackdown by Chinese authorities, ensnaring some 300 human rights lawyers and their families, according to a 2020 report from the Congressional commission on China.
The episode became known as the “709 Crackdown,” named for July 9, the day the repressive campaign began.
“Five years after the 709 Crackdown, lawyers continue to face repression, intimidation and punishment for attempting to protect human rights in China,” the report says. “Beside imprisonment, the Chinese government use other administrative means, including disbarment, to target lawyers who express critical views or who advocate for clients whom the Chinese government tried to suppress, including petitioners, Christians, Tibetans, Uyghurs, and democracy and labor advocates.”
In 2016, Xi launched a policy called “Sinicization” that sought to “assimilate” religious and ethnic minorities in China to the majority Han culture as espoused by the Chinese Communist Party, according to the Congressional research service.
In 2017 and 2018, Chinese authorities detained more than 1 million Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic groups largely concentrated in the Western regions of China in Central Asia.
“Detainees were compelled to renounce many of their Islamic beliefs and customs as a condition for their release,” according to the Congressional Research Service. “Treatment in the centers reportedly included food deprivation, psychological pressure, sexual abuse, forced sterilization, medical neglect, torture, and forced labor.”
Tibetans have also experienced repression under ‘Sinizication.’ Chinese authorities have imposed requirements that Buddhist monks, intellectuals, writers and dissidents undergo Chinese Communist Party “education” for the purposes of “political reliability,” according to the Congressional Research Service.
“Assimilation policies in Tibetan areas have included resettling and urbanizing nomads and farmers, policies that include elements of forced labor.”
‘Transnational repression’
More recently, Chinese Americans with ties to pro-democracy movements in China, have been the subject of espionage operations on U.S. soil.
In June, Arthur Liu, a pro-democracy dissident who fled to the U.S. in 1989 after the Tiananmen Square massacre, testified before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China that he and his Olympic Gold Medalist daughter Alysa Liu had been informed by the FBI in 2021 that they had been the target of a Chinese intelligence operation.
“They told me that an individual operating on behalf of the People’s Republic of China had come to the San Francisco Bay Area and was attempting to obtain personal information about us, including passport information,” Liu said.
Earlier this year, the Washington-based pro-democracy nonprofit Freedom House called China the leading perpetrator of “transnational repression” – targeting dissidents and political foes in foreign countries – responsible for 23% of recorded cases since 2014.
“In 2025, [Chinese] authorities and their proxies targeted critics of the CCP, members of diaspora communities, human rights advocates, elected officials, researchers, artists, and civil society organizations outside China,” according to a June report from the congressional commission on China. “While tactics varied, all cases appeared to be attempts to silence criticism, isolate victims, shape public narratives, and/or deter others from challenging the CCP’s authority.”