Xi Jinping’s ‘Forging’ of ‘Ethnic Unity and Progress’ |
China Power | Politics | Society | East Asia
Xi Jinping’s ‘Forging’ of ‘Ethnic Unity and Progress’
The new law consolidates a decades-long endeavor by the party-state to fundamentally remake ethnic minority policy.
China’s new law on “Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress” that came into effect on July 1 has drawn considerable international attention. That’s largely due to Article 63 of the new law, which stipulates that “organizations and individuals outside the territory of the People’s Republic of China who commit acts that undermine ethnic unity and progress or create ethnic division shall be held legally responsible according to law.”
For some commentators, this constitutes a new step in Beijing’s efforts to “pursue organizations and individuals outside China who allegedly undermine ethnic unity or promote ethnic division.” Article 63, however, simply codifies Beijing’s long-standing practices of transnational repression of religious and ethnic minority diasporas, such as Uyghurs and Tibetans.
What is more noteworthy is how the new law consolidates a decades-long endeavor by the party-state to fundamentally remake ethnic minority policy in a manner that suggests that Xi Jinping’s solution to the governance of China’s ethnic minorities is to once and for all break down the barriers that he (and the Chinese Communist Party) believes prevent their assimilation. As such the law constitutes but the latest attempt to operationalize the CCP’s preferred narrative construction of zhonghua minzu (中华民族, the “Chinese nation”) in which all of China’s 56 officially recognized ethnic groups are “interconnected” by “history, culture, and blood” regardless of ethnicity.
The new law demonstrates this in three major ways.
First, the law repeatedly states that all ethnic groups form a single historical community united by “shared” territory, history, culture, and political future. In doing so it further entrenches the party-state’s decisive shift away from the system of nominal ethnic “autonomy” reestablished after the Cultural Revolution toward a framework that eschews ethnocultural heterogeneity in favor of “forging” (铸牢)a “common national consciousness” with a “shared spiritual home.” This concept of “forging” in the original Chinese, as James Leibold has noted, denotes not only the casting of metal into a mold but also “firmness” and “enclosure,” resulting in a phrase that conveys “the deliberate casting and stabilization of identity under party-state direction.”
As the articles under Chapter 2 (“Building a New Spiritual Home”) demonstrate, this objective of “casting and stabilization” is to be achieved, in part, by stipulating that “schools and other educational institutions at all levels and types” must “integrate the requirement of forging a strong sense of community of the Chinese nation throughout the entire education process” through the use of “nationally unified textbooks,” “the national common language and script as the basic language and teaching language,” and the construction of a “discourse system” that “explains the history and connotations of the multi-ethnic unity pattern of the Chinese nation and civilization.” Significantly, while the law notes that the state “respects and guarantees the study and use of minority languages and scripts,” their use is subordinated to “the national common language” with “state organs, social organizations, enterprises, institutions, and other social organizations” to “highlight the national common language and script” in everyday use, publications, and public signage.
Second, Chapters 3 and 4 (“Promoting Exchange, Exchange, and Integration” and “Promoting Common Prosperity and Development”) frame social and economic development as critical mechanisms for achieving the “forging” of a “common national consciousness” by “advancing all ethnic groups toward socialist modernization together.”
The core theme of Chapter 3 is that of the “integration” ethnic minorities with the majority Han Chinese population. This is to be achieved through coordinated “economic and social development” that will emphasize the “construction of interconnected community environments.” Here, the law states that “people’s governments at or above the county level” will develop the “joint construction of population mobility service platforms between ethnic regions and between ethnic regions and between other regions,” support “two-way cross-regional enrolment in higher education........