Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party are getting flustered by the day, in the face of the unending failure of their foreign policies. And in such desperation, China passed a new law that orders all individuals and businesses in China to apply sanctions that the regime launched against its foreign counterparts, but they don’t need to honour foreign restrictions. Furthermore, the law went into force on June 10 after the regime’s rubber-stamp legislature passed it without a third reading, as required by Chinese law.
The law mandates that all individuals and organisations in China, no matter their citizenship or registered status, must execute the sanctions that the Beijing regime launched. At a time when China is getting further and further isolated from the world over, it has decided to up the ante and go tit for tat. The laws have come at a time when the lab leak theory is again gaining ground as the plausible reason for the spread of Coronavirus.
Glimpses of the impact of China controlling the narrative were visible since last year when the theory was dismissed as a conspiracy. However, with mounting evidence, many journalists who had previously labelled the lab leak origin idea as a “conspiracy theory” or “debunked” it, seem to be shifting their minds, accepting it as suddenly feasible. Following allegations of a declassified intelligence dossier describing three Wuhan Institute of Virology experts who were hospitalised in November 2019 with symptoms consistent with COVID-19, a month before the first confirmed case in China, the theory gained support.
The Chinese Communist Party understands the extent of the damage it will face if the narrative it so assiduously changed shatters. And in an effort to make sure that the organisations and influential firms are forced to toe the line of the Chinese Communist Party globally, it can in the short term contain the spread of lab leak theory and in the long term, can control the narrative and opinions as it deems fit. And in these efforts, China has come up with sanction laws that will dissuade foreign firms from questioning China.
Clause 12 of the law states, “No organization or individual can enforce or help to enforce the discriminatory restrictive measures that foreign countries use against Chinese citizens and organizations … Chinese citizens or organizations can file a lawsuit against foreign entities [who are complying with foreign-imposed sanctions], and ask them to stop the infringement and pay compensation for [Chinese] losses.”
“It orders foreign citizens to act against their own homelands, and be loyal to the Chinese Communist Party [CCP],” said Tang Jingyuan, a U.S.-based China affairs commentator, in a phone interview with The Epoch Times on Thursday. “The timing is key. The CCP passed the law right after President Joe Biden started his Europe trip. Biden will talk with European leaders about the investigation into the origin of the CCP virus, which likely leaked from the Wuhan lab,” Li Hengqing, a scholar at the Washington Institute for Information and Strategy, told The Epoch Times on June 10.
The law targets foreign violators and their direct family, firm managers and directors, as well as other linked individuals and organisations, in retribution for foreign-imposed sanctions. Violations of the new rule can result in the denial or revocation of visas, the seizure of property and assets, and the prohibition of economic activity. In a press brief on June 10, Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry, claimed that a bill is a legal tool for retaliating against foreign sanctions.
