The Chinese Communist Party’s relationship with law, truth, and international commitments has long been marked by a fundamental contradiction: the more Beijing signs agreements pledging cooperation, rights, and restraint, the more systematically it violates them. 

The 2025 annual report of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China lays bare this contradiction with unsettling clarity, portraying a regime for which broken promises are not aberrations but core operating principles. 

The consequences, the commission argues, extend far beyond China’s borders, harming Americans and destabilising the global order.

Created in 2000 to monitor human rights and the rule of law in China, the commission has spent a quarter-century documenting abuses that many hoped would recede as China integrated into global institutions. 

Instead, the opposite trajectory has emerged. According to the latest report, China has regressed sharply on the rule of law, while the CCP has refined its capacity for repression at home and coercion abroad. 

As commission co-chairs Senator Dan Sullivan and Representative Chris Smith bluntly state, broken promises are “a feature” of how the CCP governs and how it deals with the world.

For Americans, the damage is no longer abstract or distant. The report outlines how U.S. citizens travelling to China for work or study can be subjected to arbitrary exit bans and detentions, often with little explanation or legal recourse. 

Businesses find their supply chains tainted by forced labour, while sweeping national security laws grant Chinese authorities expansive access to foreign data. 

Even on American soil, the CCP’s reach is felt through transnational repression, including surveillance, harassment, and the establishment of overseas police operations targeting critics.

At the core of this system lies a criminal justice apparatus that functions less as a mechanism for justice than as a political weapon. 

The commission describes a system in which dissidents are routinely detained without due process, sometimes in psychiatric facilities or informal “black jails,” and subjected to torture and mistreatment. 

The Political Prisoner Database maintained by the commission lists more than 11,000 cases—an acknowledged undercount—ranging from journalists and artists to elderly religious believers. These are not isolated excesses; they are the human cost of a system designed to criminalise dissent.

The report underscores how repression has intensified alongside rising public discontent. 

Data cited by the commission show a significant increase in dissent events in recent years, met by an even sharper escalation in suppression. 

New bureaucratic structures, such as expanded branches of the Central Society Work Department, have been created explicitly to control society and eradicate organisations deemed “illegal.” In practice, this means further shrinking the already limited space for independent civic life.

Religion remains a primary target. Despite constitutional language promising freedom of belief, the CCP continues to impose a rigid, Party-controlled version of faith. 

Muslim minorities face systematic suppression, Protestant house church leaders are arrested en masse, and Catholic institutions are subordinated to Party authority despite agreements with the Vatican. 

Falun Gong practitioners, persecuted since 1999, remain subject to imprisonment, torture, and allegations of forced organ harvesting—an accusation supported by multiple independent investigations and referenced again in the commission’s findings.

China’s status as one of the world’s worst human rights offenders is reinforced by external assessments. Press freedom rankings place it near the bottom globally, while independent media is effectively nonexistent. 

These rankings are not symbolic; they reflect an information environment in which censorship, surveillance, and propaganda are tightly integrated, leaving little room for accountability or factual scrutiny.

What distinguishes the CCP’s current posture is the extent to which repression now operates beyond China’s borders. 

The commission documents a growing use of digital tools and artificial intelligence to shape narratives overseas, including campaigns that criticise the United States or target individual critics. 

Chinese regulations mandating that AI systems embed “core socialist values” raise alarms about the export of censorship models through technology and software.

Physical infrastructure plays a role as well. Satellite expansion and global technology partnerships are increasingly viewed as vectors for digital authoritarianism. 

Combined with diplomatic pressure, passport cancellations, hacking, and even bounties on overseas activists, these tools form a multifaceted system of global intimidation.

Underlying all of this is a long record of violated international commitments. 

Beijing has ratified major treaties—from the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations to conventions on racial discrimination, torture, labour rights, and maritime law—only to breach them when convenient. Hong Kong’s experience stands as one of the most visible examples. 

The Sino-British Joint Declaration promised autonomy and the rule of law; the subsequent imposition of sweeping national security laws and the crushing of dissent exposed that promise as hollow.

Similar patterns appear elsewhere. Despite commitments to eliminate racial discrimination, minority cultures are systematically erased through forced assimilation and boarding school systems. 

Despite ratifying conventions against torture, credible reports continue to detail abuse in detention facilities. Despite pledges to uphold labour rights, forced labour remains embedded in key industries, from cotton and seafood to manufacturing and overseas construction projects.

The environmental and economic implications are equally troubling. Investigations have linked Chinese fishing fleets to forced labour and illegal practices, with products entering global markets, including the United States. 

Such abuses distort competition, undermine labour standards worldwide, and implicate consumers far removed from the original crimes.

The commission’s report paints a picture of a regime that uses the language of law and cooperation as tools of convenience rather than binding commitments. 

Agreements are signed to gain legitimacy, access, or economic advantage, then quietly discarded when they conflict with Party priorities. This pattern erodes trust not only in China’s promises but in the international system itself.

Perhaps the most unsettling conclusion is how normalised this behaviour has become. 

Broken promises are no longer shocking revelations; they are expected outcomes. Human rights abuses are documented, condemned, and then absorbed into a global status quo shaped by economic interdependence and geopolitical caution. 

Meanwhile, the victims—political prisoners, religious believers, ethnic minorities, silenced journalists—remain largely invisible beyond the pages of reports like this one.

The Congressional-Executive Commission on China does not present a story of isolated failures or temporary setbacks. It documents a coherent strategy of control, deception, and repression that has hardened over time. 

For the United States and the wider world, the message is stark: engagement with the CCP has not moderated its behaviour. Instead, broken promises have become instruments of power, and the costs—in security, credibility, and human dignity—continue to mount.

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