On the morning of July 27, uniformed marine security guards lowered the American flag at the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu for the last time, signally the compound’s official closure. Outside, police shut down the streets surrounding the building after large crowds had gathered, taking selfies and milling around after Beijing gave the United States 72 hours to close the consulate.

For years activists and lawmakers have called on the Trump administration to punish Beijing over its gross human rights violations, yet the government seemed slow to act. But this week the United States announced a flurry of new sanctions against Chinese officials addressing policies in several places: Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong. The week also included the United States’ strongest condemnation of China’s claims in the South China Sea.

Daniel Cheung first heard of Beijing’s plan to impose a national security law on Hong Kong in late May, while he was stuck inside a Causeway Bay hotel for his mandatory 14-day quarantine. He had just returned to Hong Kong from the United States, where he is getting his Ph.D. in theology, and he remembers feeling angry and frustrated as he read the news on social media. He had known one day mainland China would clamp down on the city’s autonomy, but he had no idea it would be so soon.

The last time Akida Pulat saw her mother, renowned Uighur anthropologist Rahile Dawut, was in 2016. Dawut had come as a visiting scholar to the University of Washington, where Pulat was studying for her master’s degree. She remembers her mother spending hours cooking Uighur polo, a traditional dish of rice mixed with carrots and topped with lamb, for her newly made Chinese and American friends. When Pulat said goodbye to her mother at the airport, she promised she’d go back home to Ürümqi to visit the next year.

Hundreds of Catholics and Protestants filled Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in Hong Kong’s Wan Chai district Wednesday for an annual prayer meeting. It was the anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover to China, which residents usually mark with large protests. 

This year, attendees had another weight on their minds: the sweeping national security law that went into effect the night before. “Everyone has a sword over his or her head,” the event organizer said in his opening prayer.

Since 2017, the Chinese government has been enacting a cultural genocide of the Uighur people and other Muslim ethnic minorities in the western region of Xinjiang. Officials have thrown between 1 and 3 million Uighurs into re-education camps, created a high-tech surveillance state, used Uighurs for forced labor in factories around the country, and razed mosques and Uighur cemeteries. 

On May 31, Zhou Fengsuo, a U.S.-based Chinese dissident and president of Humanitarian China, organized a virtual Tiananmen Square Massacre commemoration over Zoom. About 250 people, including participants from mainland China, joined the event. It included talks by Zhou and other student leaders of the 1989 democracy movement, the mothers of those killed in the crackdown, and survivors like Dong Shengkun, a Beijing resident who spent 17 years in prison for attempting to block troops from reaching Tiananmen Square.