China enacts sweeping new national security law, fortifying Communist Party powers and worrying rights advocates and political dissenters

• The law expands China’s “core interests” to include economic development; polar, maritime, and extraterrestrial project protection; and a broad sense of national security encompassing culture, education, and politics.
• With two complementary bills on foreign organization regulation and counterterrorism in the pipeline, security experts and human rights advocates expect the new law to lead to more activities categorized as national security violations and strengthened legal justification for crackdowns on dissent.
• Under the agreements that led to their reintegration into China, Hong Kong and Macau will not be subject to application of the law.

“All these things are brought together in a way that links the idea of the nation or the state with the security of a political regime. … Everybody knows this is the understanding that the Communist Party has, but it’s rarely put this explicitly in national law. That’s just striking.”

Read the full story at the New York Times.

(Image Credit: Bobby Yip/Reuters, via The New York Times)