China's Repression as a Single Strategic System: Toward a Japanese Institutional Response

Event: Symposium — China's Ethnic Regional Autonomy System and the Reality of the Uyghur Genocide
Location: House of Representatives, Tokyo
Date: 25 February 2026

English translation of remarks delivered in Japanese by Alric Lee, Executive Director of Lady Liberty Hong Kong, at the symposium "China's Ethnic Regional Autonomy System and the Reality of the Uyghur Genocide" — House of Representatives, Tokyo, 25 February 2026.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Alric Lee, Executive Director of Lady Liberty Hong Kong. Thank you for inviting me to speak at this symposium on "China's Ethnic Regional Autonomy System and the Reality of the Uyghur Genocide."

First, let me state clearly my solidarity with the Uyghur people. The infrastructure of surveillance and repression built in the Uyghur region has already been exported to, and adapted for, Hong Kong — a global financial city.

Repression by the Chinese Communist Party is no longer a matter confined to particular ethnic groups or regions. It is a structural problem that reaches across the whole of Greater China and bears directly on the security order of East Asia.

This month in Hong Kong, Jimmy Lai was sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment under the National Security Law. This is not merely a judicial ruling; it is "lawfare" — the use of law as a weapon — and a political signal, to audiences at home and abroad, of the state's will that resistance will not be tolerated.

Especially significant is that Xi Jinping has entered an unprecedented third term, cementing the concentration of power. At the same time, pressures are accumulating inside China — a property slump, deteriorating local-government finances, youth unemployment — that could shake the legitimacy of its governance.

Authoritarian regimes have repeatedly shown a tendency to divert domestic instability into hardline action abroad. Seen in this light, the possibility that a military move against Taiwan could be attempted on a two-to-four-year horizon is a realistic policy risk.

A Taiwan contingency is a Japan contingency: it bears directly on Japan's sovereignty and security, including in the East China Sea.

And yet Japan no longer has the time to keep treating China's repression as merely "a domestic Chinese human-rights issue." Far from improving, China's human-rights violations have become institutionalized, more sophisticated, and increasingly transnational.

As Prime Minister Takaichi has pointed out, China is not a state that can be dealt with on the same premises as a democracy. In China, society, the economy, diplomacy, security, and human rights do not exist as separate spheres; all are integrated under the single objective of preserving the Communist Party system.

Human-rights abuses, economic coercion, transnational repression, and military action are all policy instruments for regime preservation. Japan therefore needs to grasp China's domestic human-rights violations, external conduct, economic pressure, and military expansion not as separate issues, but as a single strategic system of behavior.

From this standpoint, I support the reestablishment of a Special Advisor on Human Rights Issues as a first concrete step toward such a response.

At the same time, I believe Japan needs a permanent, cross-party "China Strategy Committee" — a framework that can analyze human rights, security, the economy, and transnational repression in an integrated way, and make policy decisions that are mindful of the time horizon.

Japan no longer has time to wait and see. To look squarely at China not in fragments, but as a coherent strategic actor — that, I believe, is the vital responsibility the Diet must fulfill now.

Thank you very much for your attention.