Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 8, No. 11, November 2020
By Dr. Terri Marsh, J.D. (Human Rights Law Foundation) and Dr. Teng Biao (University of Chicago)

Chinese Communist Party flag. Source: Wikimedia
The Chinese Communist Party (the Party) was founded in 1921 to defeat the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, through a “violent revolution” and establish a totalitarian communist state. Since its victory in 1949, it has directed a wide range of activities that include the waging of violent suppression campaigns, providing material support to known terrorist organizations and state sponsors of terrorism, abducting foreign diplomats, in addition to the use of forms of “soft” power to export repression through an “increasingly powerful and brutal totalitarianism that is metastasizing globally.” Operating without constitutional support,[1] left to its own devices, it will continue to rewrite international norms and create a new international order in which the rule of law, human dignity, democracy and justice are debased and denied.
The U.S. government has shown an increasing willingness to confront the Party on different policy fronts, including by calling it out for human rights abuses and encroachments of civil liberties around the world. It has publicly sanctioned four Party officials (though more may be subject to visa restrictions) in connection with persecution in Xinjiang, including senior Chinese Communist Party officials Chen Quanguo (Politburo member and Party Secretary of Xinjiang, who perfected his tools of repression in Tibet) and Zhu Hailun (Deputy Party Secretary of Xinjiang). It has also recently issued robust sanctions against the Party-controlled Xinjiang Public Security Bureau (XPSB)[2] also in connection to the severe human rights abuses leveled against ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).[3]