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.
Countries with large native minorities usually teach using the native language. For example in the UK there are Welsh medium schools for native Welsh speakers. This is usually not done for migrants, but only for local native languages. In the case of China there are more then a dozen none Chinese native languages with over a million speakers. For some you could easily set up universities and so forth.
Although in Wales, english is already known and used by government services, same in Ireland. Only 81% of Chinese people can speak Mandarin.
In Wales and Ireland the native languages were deliberately subjugated, and are only recently being deliberately re-prioritised. It’s a sore point among both populaces
So to compare the amount of speakers pre and post language erasure isn’t that helpful I don’t think
Doesn’t mean China will necessarily subjugate and erase them though. Minority languages can still be seen represented across China, even on the banknotes. As well as celebrating ethnic minorities, united under the five-starred red flag. It’s likely an effort to just make mandarin a first language.