The Chinese government breaks promises. The 2025 Annual Report of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which covers the period from mid-2024 to mid-2025, starts by accusing the People’s Republic of China of a sin that hardly distinguishes it. In laws and in public statements, the party-state says one thing but in practice does another.
“The People’s Republic of China…makes solemn commitments, then governs as if those commitments are optional…. Broken promises are not an exception; they are a feature of how the CCP deals with the world and with its own people. The 2025 Annual Report traces broken promises across international obligations and China’s own stated guarantees.”
Breaking a promise doesn’t mean that the promise-maker has lied unless he never had any intention of keeping his promise to begin with. CCP conduct fills the bill in this respect. But many governments around the world—or officials of those governments—lie or break promises, and quite often. Not all of these governments are totalitarian states that censor, surveil, imprison, torture, and murder as routinely as the People’s Republic of China. The PRC’s chronic lying is bad; what’s really bad is what the lies help to enable.
Promises versus practice
The Chinese government has lied about “the fifty years of rights and unchanged ‘way of life’ promised in Hong Kong, and ‘autonomy’ to Uyghurs and Tibetans that has yielded mass detentions and omnipresent surveillance; ‘constitutional’ protection for belief and speech overshadowed by tighter controls on worship and expression; declarations of labor rights contradicted by persistent forced labor and unfair trade practices; and pledges to play by global rules narrowed or reinterpreted in practice. What is promised on paper does not match what is practiced in reality.”
Some of what’s covered in the 272-page report: freedom of speech and freedom of religion, criminal justice, the rights of women and minorities, human trafficking, worker rights, Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Macau, violations of treaties, and CCP violations of human rights within the United States and elsewhere in the world.
The report also mentions internal opposition to the party-state: “PRC citizens continued to engage in ad hoc collective expressions of discontent and advocacy, predominantly in response to perceived injustices at the local level. According to China Dissent Monitor, there were 937 dissent events between July and September 2024, constituting a ‘27 percent year-on-year increase’ over the same period in 2023. Groups engaged in protest events this past year included property owners and investors.”
A note of dissent
Although the Commission adopted the report unanimously, the text includes a two-page postscript by Senator Jeff Merkley and Representative Jim McGovern entering a couple of reservations. They contend, first, that coverage of treaties broken by the PRC is not comprehensive enough; second, that unlike Uyghurs, Kazakhs and “practitioners of the multitude of religions being persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party,” homosexuals are “not imprisoned on the basis of their perceived sexual orientation” and do not suffer comparable restrictions in society.
“Notwithstanding these concerns,” say Merkley and McGovern, “we vote in favor of this annual report, with the inclusion of this statement, and compliment the dedication of staff in producing a thorough and well-researched report.”
The body of the report says little about what it describes as “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) persons living in China” except that during the period covered by the report they “continued to experience ongoing state repression.”
Some details are available that might have been mentioned. For example, in March 2025, it was reported that “dozens of writers covering gay issues in China have been subjected to police crackdown, including imprisonment in the past year…. In the past few years, many ‘Pride Parades’ were cancelled by the Chinese authorities…. Even social media accounts for LGBTQ groups were suspended.”
This kind of thing doesn’t approach in scope what is being done to the Uyghurs, to practitioners of Falun Gong, to Tibetans, and to others most viciously, pervasively, and persistently targeted by the CCP. But the report doesn’t seem to say that it does.
Also see:
Congressional-Executive Commission on China: 2025 Annual Report
