Europe's Economic Security Begins With Human Rights: The Case for Integrating Rights into Trade Policy on China

Last updated: 22 September 2026

As Europe debates how to address the "commercial tsunami" from China and growing instability in its relationship with the United States, a crucial element remains missing from the European strategic vision: human rights, Human Rights Watch analysts Maya Wang and Bénédicte Jeannerod argue in a major commentary published on March 24, 2026.

China's Economic Model and Human Rights

European debates about unfair competition from China typically focus on state subsidies and industrial policy. But Human Rights Watch argues that China's economic model is also built on a foundation of human rights abuses that give it structural advantages that no trade regulation can fully address without confronting the rights dimension directly.

China is the only major industrial economy that bans independent labour unions; anyone attempting to organise workers risks imprisonment. China's household registration system creates a workforce of more than 300 million internal migrant workers — a figure exceeding the entire EU workforce — who are denied equal access to public services, forcing them into low-paid, precarious work. In Xinjiang, Uyghur and other Turkic Muslim workers are coerced into forced labour schemes. Local governments can forcibly seize land and displace communities without effective legal challenge.

Rather than quietly acquiescing to China's authoritarian development model, European countries and other democracies should band together and integrate human rights into their economic and foreign policies.

Maya Wang and Bénédicte Jeannerod, Human Rights Watch, March 24, 2026

Surveillance, Repression, and the Competitiveness Paradox

Approximately 5% of China's GDP is devoted to internal security — comparable to its military spending. This investment in AI-enabled surveillance, internet censorship, and mass monitoring systems ensures that labour protests and civil unrest never coalesce into organised national movements. The result is a structural suppression of wages and resistance that distorts competitiveness in ways that conventional economic analysis fails to capture.

The report notes that economic development has not led to China's political liberalisation, as many Western governments anticipated when advocating for China's WTO membership in 2001. Rather, economic integration has enriched and empowered an increasingly repressive state, with consequences now felt across the global economic order.

What Europe Should Do

HRW calls on European countries to strengthen — not weaken — corporate due diligence legislation and forced labour bans, which France and Germany had recently diluted in the name of "simplification." Democratic governments should invoke labour protections embedded in ILO conventions and trade agreements China has ratified, pressing Beijing to abolish the household registration system and permit independent unions.

The report also calls for restrictions on business ties with Chinese entities implicated in rights abuses or surveillance, and for an ambitious rethinking of how to factor China's social and environmental costs into trade policy. Addressing China's transnational repression — including harassment of diaspora communities, interference in academic freedom, and pressure on foreign-based activists — is framed as both a human rights concern and a national security priority.

Source: Human Rights Watch — Europe's Economic Security Begins With Human Rights