Freeland, in Taiwan, warns new Chinese law has ‘dark kinship’ with Putin invasion rationale

Former deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland said Beijing’s new law claiming the right to prosecute people and organizations anywhere in the world for undermining its “ethnic unity” reminds her of the rationale Vladimir Putin used to justify his 2022 military assault on Ukraine.

Speaking this week at a security forum in Taiwan, she called on democratic countries to unequivocally push back against China’s ethnic unity law.

Taiwan, a self-governing democracy, lives under threat of invasion from China. Beijing claims Taiwan as a breakaway province and has not ruled out the use of force to annex the island and its 24 million people in the name of “reunification.” Taiwanese officials have said the sovereignty and security provisions in the new Chinese law hand Beijing an additional legal pretext for targeting people in Taiwan it regards as separatists.

Ms. Freeland, who served as deputy prime minister and finance minister under Justin Trudeau and then minister for transport and internal trade under Prime Minister Mark Carney, delivered a keynote address Tuesday to the Ketagalan Forum, hosted by Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a local think tank. She said parts of China’s new Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, which took effect July 1, mirror the rationale Mr. Putin deployed before launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Ms. Freeland told the forum the Chinese law bears what she called a disturbing parallel with the ethnic and cultural justifications Russia has used to encroach on the sovereignty of its neighbours.

“Article 63 is particularly sinister for me, given its dark kinship with Russia’s malign use of linguistic, cultural, and ethnic ties to justify illegal encroachment on the sovereignty of its neighbours, including the bloody full-scale invasion of Ukraine,” she told the forum.

Taiwan begins annual military drills aimed at countering a potential Chinese attack

The section of the law Ms. Freeland is criticizing states that individuals and organizations outside China can be held legally responsible for acts that “undermine ethnic unity and progress or create ethnic division.” It doesn’t define what this means in practice, leaving broad scope for interpretation by Beijing, critics have warned.

Ms. Freeland pointed to an essay Mr. Putin published in the summer of 2021 arguing that Russians and Ukrainians were “one people.” Seven months later, Russian tanks crossed into Ukraine, she noted.

“The lesson of history is clear,” she said, adding that democracies “must not mince their words about this legislation.” She said governments need to state plainly that a foreign law assigning political loyalty on the basis of ethnicity “has no force on our territories and no application to our citizens, whatever their ancestry, whatever their passport, wherever they or their parents were born.”

Canada’s comments on the Chinese law to date include a brief mention at the United Nations Office in Geneva in mid-June. There, Peter MacDougall, Canada’s ambassador to the UN Office in Geneva, told the UN Human Rights Council that Ottawa is “also concerned about the ethnic unity law in China, and call for respect of the human rights of minorities.”

Inside Taiwan’s budding civil defence movement, where ordinary citizens are preparing for disaster

Ms. Freeland talked of her own history covering Ukraine as a journalist in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, and her later role as deputy prime minister during Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. She argued one lesson from Ukraine is that appeasing authoritarian states does not buy security.

The former politician cited the West’s muted response to Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia and its 2014 seizure of Crimea, arguing that pattern of condemnation followed by business as usual convinced Mr. Putin that democracies would not back Ukraine if he invaded outright.

“We taught Putin to believe we would not have the resolve to support Ukraine,” she said. “I wish even more fervently that he had never made that miscalculation.”

In her speech, Ms. Freeland said Taiwan’s dominance in semiconductor manufacturing gives it strategic leverage similar to Ukraine’s drone industry, making it indispensable to allies rather than a dependent.

She said Taiwan has a major role to play in reducing democratic countries’ reliance on supply chains that run through authoritarian states – Russia, China, Iran or North Korea – and specifically urged support for Taiwan’s bid to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Pacific Rim trade pact whose members include Canada.

Liberal MP Judy Sgro to visit Taiwan despite China’s sanctions on New Zealand lawmakers

Ms. Freeland said democratic allies of Taiwan need to speak out against any disruption to the status quo in the region.

“The peace of the Strait of Taiwan will be kept by the plainness with which the world’s democracies say in advance that we will not accept that peace being broken,” she said.

“That is why solidarity with Taiwan and recognition of your flourishing democracy is so important,” she told the forum.

China’s embassy in Canada did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, the country’s state-run Global Times tabloid attacked the Ketagalan forum Ms. Freeland spoke at as a place where “former and marginal foreign politicians” are working to promote “Taiwan independence.”

Ms. Freeland resigned as MP in January, 2026. She serves as an economic development adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. She is also warden of Rhodes House and CEO of the Rhodes Trust, the Oxford-based charity that administers the Rhodes Scholarship.