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.
I’m from Silesia which is now part of Poland after the WWII. All my grand parents were born in Germany and then the borders moved and the land became polish.
But it’s more complicated, because my ancestors were fighting against both the polish and the Germans to make Silesia an independent nation, but they failed. Two of my great grandfathers ended up in concentration camps because of that, one in Auschwitz and another one in Dachau.
When my dad started going to achool he spoke Silesian, a mix of polish and German which was usual there. His parents were called to the principal countless times that they have to do something about it because German was not allowed in school.
When my grandfathers sister who lived in Germany because she fled there - came to visit him they spoke German at the bus station because she didn’t speak polish. Someone called the police and my grandfather spent two weeks in jail for this.
When I started to go to school, it was still forbidden to learn German, so I was supposed to learn Russian instead.
My parents finally had the possibility to flee to Germany and only there 1989 we all started to learn the language of our ancestors, two generations later.
Still to this day the polish government is afraid of the separatistst movement in Silesia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silesian_independence
China has the exact same problem as Poland. Before Xi they have been quite relaxed with it. My wife was born into a Korean family in north east China, she didn’t speak Chinese until middle school. They had their own identity, Korean schools, Shops, etc, no integration needed.
But separatism is dangerous for countries, it brings a lot of problems, fighting, security concerns, etc. It’s just easier and more harmonic if everyone pulls to the same direction. Poland crushed the German identity by constantly putting people into jail and making it impossible to live a normal life and by mixing the rest of the german population who for whatever reason couldn’t flee to Germany after WWII. And they did so very successfully I might add. Now Xi is learning from this success and doing the same with their minorities.
Separatism is a problem if the country’s government wants to preserve unity by force. If the country embraces diversity, separatism becomes weaker and even irrelevant.
This puts the cart before the horse. Nations are supposed to serve the needs of people. People are not supposed to serve the needs of a nation. If your nation needs to go to the extreme lengths of forced ethnic integration to keep a region from breaking free from your country, maybe that region simply doesn’t belong in your country and never should have been a part of it. That’s not harmonizing a nation; that’s conquest and ethnic cleansing.
Unlike what happened with your grandfather, China isn’t getting rid of local languages. They are requiring both in schools, the local regional language (down to microregions, so not everyone in Xinjiang has to learn Uyghur for example which would destroy more than a dozen cultures). This change simply requires mandarin to be taught alongside the local culture and language, so that Uyghurs aren’t trapped in Xinjiang and can actually find work in Beijing without having to take years of Mandarin lessons.
It’s amazing how many downvotes you are getting just for refuting the genocide narrative with simple facts and logic. I can’t tell if people are so afraid of being labeled a genocide denier or if they are genuinely this propagandized that they just instinctively react emotionally to anything that counters their worldview. It’s sad, to be honest.
It’s the latter. Unironically the CIA has made amazing strides in psychological operations compared to their older work despite their massive failings lately in direct interventions.
Despite them admitting to doing the same thing in regards to Tibet, wherein they claimed an impossibly large genocide and totally accidentally supported a child rapist who wants to return to a kingdom that allows him to have infinite child sex slaves, they were still successful in their campaign of making Americans pretend to care about Uyghurs and a genocide that has no evidence behind it.
So when they, the Americans and other groups affected by said propaganda, receive new propaganda like the most uncharitable reading of a positive law that actually protects cultural identity, ensures continued education in endangered languages and cultures, while still enabling the economic boon that comes from being able to speak the same language as 86% of all businesses in the country… they just believe that interpretation. Cognitive Dissonance is a serious problem amongst propagandized populations (warning, ironic link) and I don’t know how exactly to combat that except act as a beacon of diverse opinion and fact so that some of them might possibly break out of their conditioning, or at least start to question why they agree with the CIA over actual people living in the region.
Edit; if you’re wondering why, exactly, I choose to over cite my sources on this and other specific lemmy.world subs, cross check the [redacted]