RELEASE OF 2025 ANNUAL REPORT HIGHLIGHTING PRC’S BROKEN HUMAN RIGHTS PROMISES

December 10, 2025

WASHINGTON, D.C.—U.S. Senator Dan Sullivan (R-AK) and U.S. Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ), Chair and Cochair of the bipartisan and bicameral Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), today released the Commission’s 2025 Annual Report reviewing human rights conditions and legal developments in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), as mandated by Title III of Public Law 106–286.

The full report and an executive summary are available on the CECC’s website.

“This year’s report lays bare how the Chinese Communist Party keeps breaking its word—to its own people and to the world,” said CECC Chair Senator Dan Sullivan. “Beijing signs human rights conventions, promises autonomy for Hong Kong and Tibet, and pledges to play by global trade rules, then jails dissidents, runs forced-labor factories and illegal fishing fleets, and even dispatches agents to stalk and threaten people on American soil. This report doesn’t just catalogue those abuses; it gives Congress, the administration, and our allies a blueprint to stand with victims of atrocities, defend our workers and supply chains—including our fishing and seafood industries—from slave labor, and make sure the Chinese Communist Party, not American families, pays the price for Beijing’s broken promises. I am honored to work with Representative Smith on the CECC and continue the important work of Secretary of State Rubio, who served on this commission as Chair or Ranking Member for nine years while he was in the Senate.”

“Sadly, the People’s Republic of China under the Communist Party has proven time and again that it seeks hegemony in order to impose the same tyranny it afflicts its own citizens with upon the rest of the world," said CECC Cochair Representative Chris Smith. "China is not a responsible member of the community of nations, for it is run by the Communist Party for the benefit of the Communist Party—a Party State which does not honor the treaties to which it is a State Party. The PRC is thus more than simply a strategic rival to the United States and the rest of the free world, as it is a systemic rival which seeks to undo the stable international order to which the United States has been guarantor since the end of the Second World War. How can a predatory, mercantilist nation that utilizes forced labor, steals intellectual property and massively subsidizes state-owned enterprises be a member of the World Trade Organization or any rules-based order?  The answer is that it cannot be, so long as the Communist Party maintains its monopoly on power.” 

The 2025 Annual Report frames the PRC’s human rights record under the theme “Promises Made, Promises Broken.” It shows how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) invokes the language of “rule of law” while practicing “rule by law”—using courts, police, and regulations as political weapons to preserve one-party rule at home and bend rules abroad. It documents how Beijing signs treaties and pledges on human rights, labor, trade, and maritime conduct, then ignores those obligations in practice, turning coerced labor and state-directed subsidies into tools of economic coercion and exporting censorship and surveillance technologies that undermine freedom far beyond China’s borders. As in previous years, the report’s 18 chapters provide a detailed account of abuses inside the PRC and in areas under its control, and trace how those broken promises distort global markets, weaken international norms, and ultimately threaten the security and prosperity of the American people and our allies.

Among its major findings, the 2025 report documents:

• Expansion of state-imposed forced labor. Authorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) continue to expand coercive labor schemes involving Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims, including transfers from traditional rural livelihoods into industrial work and confiscation of land for state-run cooperatives and developers.
• Systematic repression of religious and ethnic communities. The CCP tightens control over all major faiths, promotes the “sinicization” of religion, and suppresses Muslim, Tibetan Buddhist, Christian, Falun Gong, and other communities through mosque “rectifications,” colonial-style boarding schools, intrusive surveillance, and persecution of groups labeled as “cults.”
• Criminalization of dissent and civil society. Authorities arbitrarily detain human rights lawyers, labor organizers, journalists, women’s rights advocates, and others under vague offenses such as “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” or “separatism,” often using torture, incommunicado detention, and extralegal “black jails.”
• Technology-enhanced human rights abuses. The report details how AI tools, mass data platforms, satellite internet infrastructure, and censorship technologies are embedded with CCP policies and propaganda and exported abroad, enabling other governments to replicate China’s model of digital repression.
• Erosion of Hong Kong’s autonomy and rule of law. National security laws continue to be weaponized to imprison pro-democracy leaders, shutter civil society, and chill press freedom, in violation of obligations under the Sino-British Joint Declaration and Hong Kong’s Basic Law.
• China’s overseas human rights abuses. A distinctive contribution of this year’s report is the chapter “Human Rights Violations in the U.S. and Globally,” which documents the PRC’s efforts to project repression beyond its borders. The Commission details a spectrum of tactics: harassment of diaspora communities and rights advocates, bounties and threats against overseas activists, covert “overseas police” service stations, and law-enforcement cases in the United States involving unregistered PRC agents. The chapter also highlights attempts to influence democratic processes and human rights norms by cultivating foreign politicians and political aides, spreading disinformation about U.S. elections, leveraging Hong Kong Economic and Trade Offices, and working inside the U.N. system to blunt scrutiny of abuses. Taken together, the report argues, these practices show that Beijing’s human rights violations are part of a global strategy to intimidate and censor people on U.S. soil, tilt politics and policy in the PRC’s favor, and erode universal human rights standards.
• Political Prisoner Database. The report again draws extensively on the Commission’s Political Prisoner Database (PPD), which now contains 11,262 records of political and religious prisoners in China; 2,755 of these are “active detentions”—cases in which individuals are known or believed to be currently detained, imprisoned, or under coercive controls. The PPD supports congressional and executive advocacy and helps ensure that individual prisoners are not forgotten.

PRIORITY RECOMMENDATIONS AND LEGISLATION

The 2025 Annual Report includes a broad set of recommendations for Congress and the executive branch. The Chairs highlighted several priority areas—forced labor, unjustly detained Americans in China, forced organ harvesting, and transnational repression—where the report calls for concrete action and major legislative initiatives.

Key recommendations include:

• Confronting forced labor and tainted supply chains. Strengthen enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, close loopholes in small-parcel and transshipment trade, and end U.S. imports of PRC seafood caught or processed with forced labor—including on illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) PRC fishing fleets as well as in processing plants that rely on North Korean and transferred Uyghur workers—so that American families, including servicemembers and children in school meal programs, are not unknowingly buying products made with slavery.
• Freeing unjustly detained Americans in China. Treat the PRC’s arbitrary prosecutions and “exit bans” as a form of hostage-taking; improve transparency in travel advisories; and deepen coordination with allies through a wrongful-detention working group so that Americans are not used as political bargaining chips.
• Ending forced organ harvesting. Expand State Department reporting on organ trafficking, restrict “organ tourism,” impose visa bans and sanctions on perpetrators, and end U.S. funding and partnerships with PRC institutions implicated in unethical transplant practices.
• Countering transnational repression and malign influence. Develop a whole-of-government strategy against PRC transnational repression, improve support for victims in diaspora communities, increase transparency around foreign interference in U.S. politics, and coordinate with allies on sanctions and law-enforcement tools to deter intimidation, digital harassment, and covert influence operations.

The report also spotlights priority bipartisan legislation that would implement these recommendations and that the Chairs have championed in Congress, including:

• The FISH Act (S. 688) – to target illegal, unreported, and unregulated PRC fishing fleets and forced labor in the PRC seafood industry.
• The Transnational Repression Policy Act (S. 2525 / H.R. 4829) – to build out U.S. authorities, reporting, and coordination to confront transnational repression on U.S. soil and globally.
• The Uyghur Genocide Accountability and Sanctions Act (S. 2560 / H.R. 4830) – to expand sanctions and restrict federal procurement of PRC seafood and other goods linked to atrocity crimes.
• The Nelson Wells Jr. and Dawn Michelle Hunt Unjustly Detained in Communist China Act (H.R. 5491) – to enhance tools for securing the release of unjustly detained Americans.
• The Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act (H.R. 1503) – to expand reporting and authorities to disrupt forced organ harvesting and organ tourism.
• The Hong Kong Judicial Sanctions Act (S. 1755 / H.R. 733) – to seek targeted sanctions on judges and prosecutors responsible for undermining Hong Kong’s autonomy and rule of law and jailing political prisoners.

Beyond these priorities, the 2025 Annual Report makes detailed recommendations on defending human rights in Hong Kong and Tibet, confronting malign PRC influence operations, defeating the export of digital authoritarianism, evaluating U.S. human rights diplomacy, and building a robust public diplomacy strategy that exposes abuses while supporting open access to information.

Senator Sullivan and Representative Smith commended the professional work of the CECC’s research staff in producing the 2025 Annual Report and reiterated that the United States must hold the PRC to the promises it has made—to its own citizens and to the world.