Law Archives - Friends of Socialist China

China stands with Cuba against illegal indictment of Raúl Castro

On 20 May, the Trump administration unsealed a federal criminal indictment in Miami against 94-year-old Raúl Castro – former president of Cuba and one of the historic leaders of the Cuban Revolution – along with five other Cuban officials. The indictment, on charges including conspiracy to kill US nationals and the destruction of aircraft, was a calculated political provocation at a moment of maximum US pressure on the island.

China’s response, the following day, was unambiguous: a public rebuke calling on Washington to “stop wielding the big stick of sanctions and judicial measures against Cuba”, and a reaffirmation of Beijing’s firm support for Cuban sovereignty.

In the following article, our co-editor Carlos Martinez situates the indictment in the wider US regime-change campaign, examines China’s diplomatic and material solidarity with Cuba, and traces the six-decade partnership that gives it weight.

On Wednesday 20 May the Trump administration unsealed a federal criminal indictment in Miami against 94-year-old Raúl Castro, former President of Cuba and one of the key historic leaders of the Cuban Revolution, alongside five other Cuban officials. The charges include conspiracy to kill US nationals, four counts of murder, and two counts of destruction of aircraft.

The pretext given is the 1996 downing by Cuban air force MiGs of two aircraft operated by the Miami-based exile group “Brothers to the Rescue”.

The indictment is a transparent political provocation. As the Cuban government made clear in its statement on the subject, “Brothers to the Rescue” was not a humanitarian organisation but a counter-revolutionary terrorist operation founded by long-time CIA-linked Cuban exile José Basulto, which had violated Cuban airspace at least 25 times between 1994 and 1996, despite formal complaints filed by Cuba with the US State Department, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the International Civil Aviation Organisation.

The downing of this terrorist group’s aircraft was nothing more than the defence of Cuban sovereign airspace – an act of self-defence explicitly protected by the United Nations Charter, the 1944 Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation, and the established principles of air sovereignty and proportionality.

Meanwhile, the hypocrisy is breathtaking. The same US government accusing Cuba of murder has, in recent months, killed nearly 200 people and destroyed 57 vessels in international waters of the Caribbean and the Pacific, on obviously false allegations of drug trafficking. These are, in the precise legal terms used by the Cuban government, “extrajudicial executions” under international law, and murders under US law itself. The accuser is the world’s most prolific extrajudicial killer.

The Castro indictment is not an isolated legal proceeding. It is the latest move in an open campaign of regime change. The Trump administration has tightened the six-decade economic blockade into a full-scale genocidal energy embargo, threatening tariffs against any country selling oil to Cuba and cutting fuel imports by an estimated 90 percent. Blackouts of up to 22 hours a day are the result, with all the disastrous impact on people’s lives that might be expected.

Trump himself has openly stated that the goal is to bring down the Cuban government “by the end of this year”, and asked at the press conference about the indictment whether he was considering a military kidnapping (as carried out against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and First Combatant Cilia Flores), replied only that he “didn’t want to say”. South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, a highly influential (albeit utterly deranged) figure in the Trump camp, went on record after the start of the US-Israel war on Iran saying that “Cuba’s next”.

China’s response

On 21 May, asked by Cuba’s Prensa Latina news agency about the indictment, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun told reporters that Beijing “firmly opposes” illegal unilateral sanctions that lack any basis in international law or authorisation from the UN Security Council, and stands “against abusing judicial means and exerting pressure on Cuba under any pretext by external forces”.

The United States, he continued, “should stop wielding the big stick of sanctions and judicial measures against Cuba, and stop threatening Cuba with force at every turn”. China, he affirmed, “firmly supports Cuba in safeguarding its national sovereignty and national dignity, and opposes external interference”.

To condemn US aggression in such a direct and unequivocal way, in response to a question from a Cuban journalist, in front of the world’s press, is a significant diplomatic statement. It is a direct rebuke of the US government’s illegal and immoral campaign against Cuba, and a clear declaration of solidarity with Cuba’s Revolutionary Government.

This comes just a day after Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin called out “treacherous military strikes against other countries, the hypocritical use of negotiations as cover for preparing such strikes, the assassination of leaders of sovereign states, the destabilisation of the domestic political situation in these states and the provocation of regime change, and the brazen kidnapping of national leaders for trial”.

Such strident denunciations of the wars on Iran and Lebanon, the assassination of Sayyid Ali Khamenei, the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores and the indictment of Raúl Castro represent a shift towards a more assertive tone, and send a clear signal that the US’s criminal and imperial conduct will not be tolerated.

A solidarity built over six decades

China-Cuba relations go back many decades. In September 1960, Cuba became the first country in the Western Hemisphere to establish diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic. Fidel Castro always identified strongly with the Chinese Revolution, describing China in 2004 as “the most promising hope and the best example for all Third World countries”.

Visiting China in 1994, Fidel famously said: “If you want to talk about socialism, let us not forget what socialism achieved in China. At one time it was the land of hunger, poverty, disasters. Today there is none of that. Today China can feed, dress, educate, and care for the health of 1.2 billion people. I think China is a socialist country, and Vietnam is a socialist nation as well. And they insist that they have introduced all the necessary reforms in order to motivate national development and to continue seeking the objectives of socialism.”

Xi Jinping has, in turn, called the China-Cuba relationship “an exemplary case of solidarity and cooperation between socialist countries”. Cuba joined the Belt and Road Initiative in 2018 and the Belt and Road Energy Partnership in 2021.

In recent years, that partnership has become a lifeline. China has committed to building 92 solar parks in Cuba by 2028 – with a combined capacity of roughly 2 gigawatts, equivalent to Cuba’s entire current fossil-fuel generation. More than half are already online. Cuba’s solar share of electricity generation has risen from 5.8 percent to over 20 percent in twelve months – in the words of energy analyst Dave Jones, “one of the most rapid solar revolutions” anywhere in the world.

In January 2026, Xi Jinping personally approved $80 million in emergency financial aid for electrical equipment, alongside a donation of 60,000 tons of rice. Beijing has also delivered 10,000 photovoltaic systems for isolated homes, maternity wards and clinics. Chinese Ambassador to Cuba Hua Xin summarises the relationship as one of “firm support under all circumstances”.

The Trump administration’s indictment of Raúl Castro is a calculated provocation, choreographed to threaten and humiliate at a moment of maximum US pressure. It will not succeed. Cuba’s Revolutionary Government has reaffirmed its “unwavering decision to defend the Homeland and its Socialist Revolution”.

China – the world’s largest economy by purchasing power, its largest manufacturer, and the most important member and partner of the Global South – continues to stand squarely behind Cuba and against hegemonism in all its forms.

The KMT-CPC Meeting: Architecture of peace and global stability in a changing world

In April 2026, against the backdrop of a global crisis – most notably a criminal war waged by the United States and Israel against Iran that has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz and sent energy prices soaring to levels not seen in a generation – something highly significant took place in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing: President Xi Jinping met with Cheng Li-wun, Chairwoman of the Kuomintang (KMT), reopening a high-level cross-strait dialogue that had been frozen for nearly a decade (as reported on this website on 13 April).

The following article – submitted by Douglas de Castro, Professor of International Law at Lanzhou University – examines that meeting through the lens of international law, arguing that the CPC-KMT dialogue is a demonstration of what the UN Charter’s core principles – peaceful resolution of disputes, non-interference, sovereign equality – actually look like in practice.

Professor de Castro’s analysis unpacks the legal architecture of the meeting – from UNGA Resolution 2758 and the 1992 Consensus to China’s Anti-Secession Law and the Global Governance Initiative – and shows why the lessons of Cheng Li-wun’s visit extend well beyond the Taiwan Strait.

The meeting in April 2026 between President Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, and Cheng Li-wun, the Chairwoman of the Kuomintang (KMT), was a historic moment in modern diplomacy. It took place during one of the most turbulent times in recent international relations history. This dialogue took place in the East Hall of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

As a scholar of international law, I found that the meeting not only reopened high-level communication channels between parties that had been closed for almost ten years but also demonstrated how the principle of non-interference and the peaceful resolution of conflicts, when applied in practice, can ease tensions in regions important to the international system. It upholds and reaffirms the importance of Articles 2(3) and 2(4) of the UN Charter, which require that disputes be settled peacefully and that no State threaten or use force against the territorial integrity of another State or region.

Why has China blocked Meta’s purchase of Manus AI?

When China’s National Development and Reform Commission ordered Meta to unwind its $2 billion acquisition of AI startup Manus on 27 April, Western media reached predictably for its standard toolkit: “authoritarian overreach”, “arbitrary intervention”, an assault on the “democratisation of technology.” What this framing systematically obscures is the substantive legal, strategic and political logic behind the decision.

The two pieces collected here provide that missing context. Sara Vivacqua’s investigation, published by the progressive Brazilian outlet Diário do Centro do Mundo and translated into English by the author, dissects both the legal architecture of China’s decision and the character of the company it rejected. Manus is not simply a commercial product; it is an autonomous AI agent – capable of operating inside authenticated platforms, accessing local sessions and executing complex multi-step tasks – built by Chinese engineers in China, with Chinese state support, before a hasty relocation to Singapore (presumably for purposes of regulatory evasion). The NDRC’s ruling establishes a clear and consequential precedent: jurisdictional control follows where technology is built and who builds it, not where a holding company is incorporated.

But Sara goes further, placing the ruling in the context of what Meta actually is. The company’s integration into US military AI development, its Llama models deployed across federal agencies and Five Eyes intelligence partners, its partnership with defence contractor Anduril, and its documented history of global electoral interference through the Cambridge Analytica scandal – all of this reframes the acquisition not as a business deal but as a potential intelligence operation. The question the Western press refuses to ask is the obvious one: why would any sovereign state hand strategic AI infrastructure to a company that functions as an arm of the US national security apparatus?

Below Sara Vivacqua’s article, we reproduce a Global Times editorial making the complementary case from a Chinese regulatory perspective: that the decision is legally grounded, internationally consistent, and entirely compatible with China’s continued openness to foreign investment in non-sensitive sectors. The EU, the US and Japan all operate comparable review mechanisms; the difference is that when China uses them, it is treated in the Western media as evidence of authoritarianism rather than ordinary statecraft.

Together, these two pieces offer what the mainstream coverage has failed to provide: a clear-eyed account of a decision that is legally sound and strategically coherent.

How China Blocked Zuckerberg’s Espionage Project with Manus AI

Meta, owned by Mark Zuckerberg and the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, found itself frustrated this Monday (27^th April) in its attempt to appropriate Chinese artificial intelligence technology.

The Yangtze River Protection Law as a model of ecological governance

The Yangtze River Protection Law (YPL), enacted on March 1, 2021, is China’s first comprehensive river-specific legislation and a landmark in the country’s environmental governance.

The following article, submitted by İbrahim Can Eraslan, describes how, rooted in the concept of ecological civilisation and the principle of harmony between humanity and nature, the YPL seeks to balance economic growth with ecological protection. It addresses decades of industrial, agricultural, and developmental pressures that have degraded the Yangtze River Basin, aiming to integrate ecological restoration, sustainable resource use, and coordinated governance.

Key measures of the law include permanent fishing bans in critical waters, regulation of sand mining, navigation controls in sensitive zones, pollution control, and biodiversity restoration. The YPL also prohibits relocating polluting industries upstream, restricts hazardous chemical transport, and protects shoreline and wetland ecosystems.

As is increasingly the case in China, the YPL embeds environmental protection into economic and land-use planning. By combining detailed statutory provisions, cross-agency cooperation, public oversight and adaptive planning, the YPL creates a model of environmental governance which not only advances China’s ecological modernisation but also offers a potential blueprint for Global South nations confronting similar development–environment tensions.

The author is a Turkish socialist and postgraduate student of Chinese Law and Governance at Tongji University, Shanghai.

As stated in Xi Jinping’s article “Green Mountains and Clean Waters are also Gold and Silver Mountains”, while economic development and growth are prioritized, the environment should not be sacrificed for these goals[i]. Again, in Xi Jinping’s 2017 keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, green development was emphasized[ii]. In the same speech, he called for strengthening cooperation in ecological and environmental protection and for building an ecological civilization while achieving the goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Also in 2017, the Chinese government published the Guiding Opinions on Promoting Green Belt and Road Construction and the Belt and Road Ecological and Environmental Cooperation Plan. From all of these, it can be understood that while the Communist Party of China emphasizes development, the principle of “harmony between humans and nature” is adopted as a guiding concept in China’s path to modernization.[iii]

In terms of these principles, the Yangtze River carries significant importance. Following China’s economic reforms, the rapid development of industry and agricultural methods implemented to increase productivity have led to the pollution of the Yangtze. However, the Chinese government has taken significant protective steps in this regard, one of which is the Yangtze River Protection Law, a unique law exclusively dedicated to the protection of the Yangtze. In this sense, I believe that analyzing this law is important in terms of its potential to serve as a model for countries in the Global South.

There are seven laws related to the environment in China.[iv] Although the Constitution holds a different place within the legal hierarchy, special laws also have practical application in their respective areas. In essence, Article 26 of the Constitution of China directly mandates state action to protect and improve the living and ecological environment. It requires pollution control, afforestation, and forest protection. This is the most direct article in the Constitution concerning the environment and represents the principle of “ecological civilization.” On the other hand, Article 22 of the Constitution, by stipulating the protection of sites of scenic and historic importance, combines environmental and cultural elements under the umbrella of national identity. Articles 9 and 10 also form the constitutional backbone of environmental protection.