A New Law Heralds China’s Fraught Ethnic Future |
One of the pieces of legislation passed at China’s annual National People’s Congress in March and which came into effect on July 1 was the “Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress.” Unsurprisingly for China’s rubber-stamp parliament, the law passed by a vote of a whopping 2,756 to 3, plus three abstentions. But it would be a mistake to discount the bill as mere political theater. As a “basic law” (meaning it was passed by the full Congress, not just that body’s Standing Committee), it holds the highest possible legislative status.
It is also a signature achievement of President Xi Jinping, who, more than any other Chinese leader, has articulated a vision of a homogenized ethnic future, one summed up in his preferred metaphor for the country’s diverse ethnic groups, which he has repeatedly said should be “tightly packed like pomegranate seeds”—that is, small, similar, and red.
One of the pieces of legislation passed at China’s annual National People’s Congress in March and which came into effect on July 1 was the “Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress.” Unsurprisingly for China’s rubber-stamp parliament, the law passed by a vote of a whopping 2,756 to 3, plus three abstentions. But it would be a mistake to discount the bill as mere political theater. As a “basic law” (meaning it was passed by the full Congress, not just that body’s Standing Committee), it holds the highest possible legislative status.
It is also a signature achievement of President Xi Jinping, who, more than any other Chinese leader, has articulated a vision of a homogenized ethnic future, one summed up in his preferred metaphor for the country’s diverse ethnic groups, which he has repeatedly said should be “tightly packed like pomegranate seeds”—that is, small, similar, and red.
The new law is the strongest signal yet that Xi plans to intensify an already fraught project of national integration and bring to bear the full resources of the state to do so, from media and the education system to tourism and migration management. Yet beneath the confidence conveyed in the law’s grandiose claims is more than a hint of anxiety about persistent problems in ethnic policy—problems that this law may well make worse.
The new law caps a decade of increasingly assimilationist ethnic policy in China. The crackdown has been most severe in Xinjiang, where revelations of mass internment, family separation, forced labor, and other human rights abuses sparked international controversy. But repression is just one aspect of the government’s approach to managing ethnic minorities. Under Xi’s leadership, the regime has sought to radically transform minority culture and forge a unified ethnonational identity through what officials call the “contact, exchange, and blending” of ethnic groups.
New policies have decimated bilingual education in minority regions that previously enjoyed government sponsorship, including in Xinjiang and Tibet but also in less securitized and—from Beijing’s perspective—less problematic areas, such as Inner Mongolia and the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture.
Assimilationist policies have targeted education and culture as well as the language of instruction and expression. Minority academics and specialists in minority affairs have been charged by the central government with a massive project of editing primary sources to enforce politically correct interpretations of China’s multiethnic history.
In 2023, Beijing shelved an expensive,........