China’s rubber-stamp legislature on Wednesday passed a “Foreign Relations Law” intended to enhance “extraterritorial application” of Communist law — in other words, force people in other countries to obey it, or at least fear it — and protect the regime in Beijing from foreign sanctions.
China’s state-run Global Times babbled about “fixing loopholes in the rule of law” and protecting the regime from “frequent external interference in its internal affairs,” but eventually got to the point and said the Foreign Relations Law would provide “a legal basis for the diplomatic struggle against sanctions.”
Not much in the law is really new — it most codifies some measures dictator Xi Jinping already put in place, tightens his grip on foreign relations, and effectively automates tit-for-tat retaliation against foreign sanctions.