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.
Okay, just look into what the US and Canada did with their “cultural education” program for indiginous peoples and tell me this doesn’t smell the same.
Cool, again if you read the comment you’ll know I’m Choctaw. I’m very, very well versed in the various cultural genocide attempts of the US. This does not smell the same. It smells like the current education available to Indian-priority schools within the 10.5 counties of the Choctaw nation today, which is the language being taught alongside English, and history class for an entire year being Choctaw history and cultural studies, with at least one day a month for the rest of the years covered being a cultural day.
It smells like what Irish people have described their school life since Gaeilge became a requirement for graduation, wherein school is taught in both languages. Where traditional Irish culture and modern Irish culture are both taught.
It smells like what those programs said they were, in an honest attempt to avoid making the same mistake.