For years, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has pushed ethnic minority groups like Tibetans and Uyghurs to adopt an identity rooted in Chinese nationality and allegiance to the ruling Communist Party.
Now, that push has been codified into a sweeping new law that reaches into classrooms, neighborhoods and homes – and gives Beijing the right to target people outside of its borders that it believes violate its rules.
The statute, officially known as the Ethnic Unity and Progress Promotion Law, came into effect on July 1. It bans acts that “undermine ethnic unity or create ethnic division” among China’s 56 officially recognized ethnicities, which include a Han Chinese majority that makes up over 90% of the country’s 1.4 billion people.
Define integrate. I live in a country that I wasn’t born in. Obviously, I follow the laws, but I don’t owe anyone to change my personality. I eat whatever the fuck I want, dress the way I want, etc. I’m allergic to narrow-mindness because it implies low intelligence, among other things
Here’s the wiki article on the law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_on_Promoting_Ethnic_Unity_and_Progress.
Some stuff makes sense - like economic modernization of regions with many minorities (especially poor regions), teaching Mandarin in schools so that everyone can speak the majority language, and preserving cultural works and texts of minority groups.
Other stuff seems repressive, like the broad enforcement section, the extremely broad reach of the law into all public and private institutions, legislating what various actors can/can’t teach the youth if it might “harm Chinese ethnic unity” which is left pretty vague. Very ethnostate-coded stuff on the whole, not great.
Some sections I thought were noteworthy, taken from wikipedia, shortened with DeepSeek. There is lots more stuff in there.
It’s quite standard fascist discourse:
Point to real problem that everybody wants to solve; declare that some policy they want (almost always some kind of racism) is the only solution; do some genocide as the means of implementing the policy.
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This law does none of that btw. You can read the text.
The reason this law is written this way is because of the US funded and armed East Turkestan movement that has killed hundreds of men women and children and dozens of police over the last 30 years.
That is the ‘ethnic policy’ that no, East Turkestan, a “country” invented in the 1990s by white people that were upset their spy networks in China kept getting executed, is not real and is not a part of Chinese history or culture. Because the East Turkestan movement used propaganda that said the evil Chinese Communists invaded East Turkestan (literally several millennia before communism came to China) randomly and out of the blue and stole away the people of turkey and their land (that just has happened to have been on every single western map of China ever made).
The “ethnicity” is Chinese. All people in China, Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Yue, etc are Chinese. There are sub ethnicities like Uyghur, but they are Chinese.
This law is to reduce racism and radicalism.
I am definitely sympathetic to the defense against foreign dissent-manufacturing. I don’t doubt that is a serious issue.
But, ethnicity and nationality are separate things. Being a Chinese citizen does not make one ethnically Chinese - or in this case Han Chinese. I think what you are calling “sub-ethnicity” here is just what people mean by “ethnicity”. And what you’re implying is “ethnicity” is just “nationality”.
Though I think the CCP is trying to establish the concept of a Zhonghua Minzu (中华民族) or “Chinese Nation/Ethnic Group” - which is an artificial category intended to create a unified Chinese national identity out of the 56 ethnic groups recognized in China - maybe that’s what you mean? Either way, that doesn’t fit the typical anthropological definition, in my opinion.
I think they walk a fine line with that concept - it’d be very easy for that national identity to represent the Han majority more than the small minorities. As evidenced by the language restrictions posed by the law. Given the Han majority is 90% of the country, I don’t see how it could be otherwise.
To the extent that it reduces racism and foreign-sponsored dissent groups, that is good. To the extent that it limits free practice of culture and true, non-US-State-Dept sponsored, free speech, I’d say it’s overly draconian. But, I can also appreciate the need for more “authoritarian” laws in a country that has been under attack by foreign powers for as long as China has.
I am not a Chinese legal expert and have not read the full law, nor do I fully understand the context. So I withhold full judgment and don’t value my opinion too highly.
Ethnicity is a crap word created by the western political discourse to undermine the developing countries.
In many regions of the world, people don’t identify via their ethnicity l, but their tribes or their religion (e.g. middle east before 1930ish). You don’t see the average westoid liberal defend those rights tho.
Same here (I’m on my 3rd migration) and after 5 years I still don’t even speak the language, which is embarrysing but also just fact.
Winnie the Pooh, probably
Source?
The Uyghurs.
Persecution? I thought it was a genocide?
Ah yes, dealing with radical islamic terrorism is only bad when China does it
And not just “dealing with it.” Ending it by increasing regional economic opportunities, infrastructure projects, increasing access to healthcare and education, and thereby effectively eliminating poverty, the root cause of most crime, including terrorism. Oh, and all of that without impacting the Uyghur peoples’ culture or religion.
At least, that’s what the rest of the world outside of America, Europe, and Israel say.
https://www.qiaocollective.com/education/xinjiang?rq=Xinjiang
As far as I am aware, that’s what China has been doing for decades… Possibly even better than the west, although we did have a head start and healtchare and education is still better in places here than some parts of China. But they’re progressing.
Depends how you define impact. Islam is protected under the Chinese constitution. Uyghur culture is still celebrated, I’ve even seen Uyghur food stalls and restaurants with signage in the Uyghur language well away from Xinjiang. Whenever I watched it, state media seemed to make a point of telling everyone that the day of that reporting was a special festival for the Uyghur people and detailing some of their traditions. It seemed like a far cry from what I heard from western media.
Well don’t move to China!
You can’t, you can get visa’s to stay there but you can never be a chinese citizenship/passport.
This is all about ethnically cleansing the chinese born minorities to be all han chinese.
It’s the opposite, hence this law, kiddo.
China doesn’t limit how people dress or what they eat, or even their personality