Foreign Policy29%
A New Law Heralds China’s Fraught Ethnic Future 38%
By Aaron Glasserman0%
7/15/2026, 7:58:57 PM
Keywords: Communism, Law, Race And Ethnicity, Xinjiang, Tibet, Xi Jinping, Ethnic Policy, Assimilation
BS Summary: This article contains 30 faulty reasoning types, including Ambiguity (Equivocation), Post Hoc (False Cause), and Pessimism Bias, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 40.9% saturation with 803 hits. Analysis detected 4,707 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,962 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 43.7% and a BS Rank of 38% (10,345 of 16,550 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 62.50% of the article peer group.
One of the pieces of legislation passed at China’s annual National People’s Congress in March and which came into effect on July 1 was the “Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress.”
Unsurprisingly for China’s rubber-stamp parliament, the law passed by a vote of a whopping 2,756 to 3, plus three abstentions.
But it would be a mistake to discount the bill as mere political theater.
As a “basic law” (meaning it was passed by the full Congress, not just that body’s Standing Committee), it holds the highest possible legislative status.
It is also a signature achievement of President Xi Jinping, who, more than any other Chinese leader, has articulated a vision of a homogenized ethnic future, one summed up in his preferred metaphor for the country’s diverse ethnic groups, which he has repeatedly said should be “tightly packed like pomegranate seeds”—that is, small, similar, and red.
The new law is the strongest signal yet that Xi plans to intensify an already fraught project of national integration and bring to bear the full resources of the state to do so, from media and the education system to tourism and migration management.
Yet beneath the confidence conveyed in the law’s grandiose claims is more than a hint of anxiety about persistent problems in ethnic policy—problems that this law may well make worse.
The new law caps a decade of increasingly assimilationist ethnic policy in China.
The crackdown has been most severe in Xinjiang, where revelations of mass internment, family separation, forced labor, and other human rights abuses sparked international controversy.
But repression is just one aspect of the government’s approach to managing ethnic minorities.
Under Xi’s leadership, the regime has sought to radically transform minority culture and forge a unified ethnonational identity through what officials call the “contact, exchange, and blending” of ethnic groups.
New policies have decimated bilingual education in minority regions that previously enjoyed government sponsorship, including in Xinjiang and Tibet but also in less securitized and—from Beijing’s perspective—less problematic areas, such as Inner Mongolia and the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture.
Assimilationist policies have targeted education and culture as well as the language of instruction and expression.
Minority academics and specialists in minority affairs have been charged by the central government with a massive project of editing primary sources to enforce politically correct interpretations of China’s multiethnic history.
In 2023, Beijing shelved an expensive, decades-long project to write the history of the Qing dynasty—a Manchu dynasty that conquered much of what is modern China’s frontier regions—reportedly because it had been influenced by foreign scholarship that places undue emphasis on sources in non-Chinese languages and on the non-Han character of the dynasty.
Assimilationism has also been palpable on the ground: Since 2016, a new campaign of “Sinicization”—directed at all religions but most intensely targeting Islam—has transformed the China’s Muslim streetscape.
Officials have ordered the removal of allegedly foreign architectural elements such as domes and minarets from mosques and other buildings as well as the removal or effacement of Arabic halal signs and similar ornamental uses of Arabic on shopfronts, restaurants, food stalls, and street-facing doors to private homes, comparable to mezuzahs on entrances to Jewish homes or the Chinese gates and written characters that mark Chinatowns around the world.
Beijing is now doubling down.
The new law signals Xi’s intent to expand and accelerate assimilationist policies regarding language, religion, migration, and scholarship—and to recruit the entire country in doing so.
The law authorizes all citizens to report any behavior that harms “ethnic unity and progress” and makes curbing such harms and forging a unified Chinese ethnonational identity the responsibility of every level of government and every part of the party-state apparatus.
It affirms the status of Mandarin as the language of basic education throughout China and emphasizes indoctrination through propaganda, education, and media.
The law is about more than ideology and identity: It aims to bring about the full integration of China’s population and territory.
It instructs local governments to hire people and promote tourism to and from other regions, encourage members of different ethnic groups to live and study together, and strengthen services in cities where (by implication) minority migrants move in search of economic opportunity.
It also seeks to reduce social, economic, and cultural gaps between regions and emphasizes the construction of a unified national market and interregional networks for transportation, energy, food, environmental protection, and industry, among other measures.
Given that much of this is already in place as policy, such legislation might seem unnecessary.
Moreover, in China’s authoritarian system, the leadership is not constrained by the rule of law.
But the new law still has a function: It signals to officials that assimilating ethnic minorities and constructing a unified Chinese ethnonational identity must be regarded as core, routine tasks of governance for the entire party-state—not just a marginal issue to be handled in an ad hoc manner.
Like the chronic inspections and purges that have come to define Xi’s tenure, this law is about disciplining the bureaucracy and instilling in every cadre a sense of personal responsibility for implementing ethnic policy.
This shock to the system addresses the deeply rooted anxiety among China’s leaders that ethnic policy both sorely lacks and urgently needs greater discipline on the part of local officials.
Ethnic policy is sensitive because it concerns a fundamental dilemma for Beijing: how to manage and ultimately overcome China’s internal ethnic diversity without jeopardizing territorial integrity and political control, whether by being so restrictive that minorities revolt or so accommodating that they come to feel even more culturally and politically independent from the rest of China.
Large non-Han groups, including the Uyghurs, Tibetans, Mongols, and Zhuang, are concentrated in what are today the peripheral regions of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), where Chinese influence and political control have historically been relatively weak.
The global “Free Tibet” movement and, more recently, international activism in support of Uyghur rights stoke Beijing’s fears of foreign plots to split China along ethnic lines.
In the past, the political logic of this sensitivity led China’s leaders to implement limited protections for ethnic minority identity.
The first decade of the PRC saw an array of institutions and measures intended to strike a delicate balance in ethnic relations.
With affirmative action in public employment; multicultural symbolism; policy exemptions (such as for family planning, including the one-child policy); and special economic, cultural, and political rights in the so-called “autonomous areas,” the central government sought to promote the integration of minority groups into the Han-dominated mainstream without provoking an ethnonationalist backlash.
In the 1980s, as the CCP emerged from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, which included revolts among minority communities, it sought to restore and reinforce the relatively accommodating ethnic policies and institutions of the 1950s.
From the central leadership’s point of view, the problem was not the content of the policies but the tendency of local officials to ignore them.
The principal remedy to what was at heart a problem of party discipline was then—as it is today—the passage of a new “basic law,” the 1984 Regional Ethnic Autonomy Law, which cemented the autonomous regions, affirmative action schemes in education and public employment, and multicultural symbolism that defined ethnic policy in first three decades of the post-Mao Zedong era.
In addition to the system of ethnic regional autonomy, beginning in the 1980s Beijing restored and expanded a system of offices charged with implementing and monitoring minority policy, headed by the State Ethnic Affairs Commission and consisting of hundreds of “ethnic work departments” in cities and counties around the country, which at the local level often combined religious as well as ethnic issues.
Yet even with these protective institutions in place, ethnic tensions persisted into the 1990s and early 21st century.
Minorities continued to be socioeconomically marginalized, but simmering grievances among the Han population over preferential policies toward minorities—especially in the ultracompetitive college entrance exam and public sector job market—and fiscal transfers to frontier regions with relatively high minority populations posed new political challenges to the regime.
Mounting anxiety over separatism and religious extremism, especially following the collapse of the Soviet Union (which Chinese officials blamed in part on Moscow’s mishandling of ethnic tensions and minority nationalism) onset of the U.S.-led global war on terror, lent credence to official and public concerns about the dangers of being too accommodating of cultural difference—particularly with regard to Islam.
As these societal pressures intensified and public opinion polarized, new problems emerged and festered within the bureaucracy.
One of the dynamics recurringly highlighted in Chinese policy discourse since the 2000s is the tendency of local officials to mishandle issues involving ethnic minorities.
An official seeking to avoid unwanted trouble might classify a dispute that incidentally touches on ethnic issues—say, a conflict between two workers of different ethnicities—as an “ethnic problem,” kicking responsibility over to the special office responsible for ethnic affairs.
Or an official might avoid classifying an incident of genuine ethnic discrimination or hostility as “ethnic,” fearing that it will only mar his record and stunt his career.
By the late 2000s, Chinese intellectuals and officials were openly debating the need for what some called a “second-generation” ethnic policy to more aggressively suppress separatism, dilute minority ethnic consciousness, enforce unity, and ensure that issues involving ethnic minorities were properly classified and handled according to law and not instrumentalized for political purposes.
Xi himself has directly linked addressing this bureaucratic dynamic with the broader problem of law.
He has repeatedly spoken of the need to “handle problems relating to ethnic factors according to law” and to guard against the tendency of summarily treating all such problems as essentially ethnic problems.
The new law may succeed in conveying to officials the sense of urgency that grips Xi when it comes to the party’s arduous quest for ethnonational integration.
At the very least, it counterbalances the 1984 law on autonomy, which can no longer be invoked as the supreme articulation of ethnic policy.
But it is unlikely to resolve the underlying problems that have long frustrated that quest and pushed local officials toward complacency.
Even as the law codifies assimilationism, it preserves some of the core institutions designed as safeguards against discrimination that have fueled resentment in certain segments of Han officialdom and society, including the autonomy system and affirmative action for ethnic minority cadres.
Subsequent policy announcements indicate that so-called “ethnic regions” will continue to benefit from fiscal transfers.
The law also strengthens and entrenches the “ethnic work departments,” which it charges with coordinating and supervising the implementation of “the work of forging consciousness of the community of the Chinese nation and of promoting ethnic unity and progress” nationwide.
If, as the legislation directs, minorities continue to migrate to the eastern and central regions and come under increasing pressure to work, study, eat, and live with each other and the Han majority without freedom to fully express their identity and uphold their traditions, these offices are likely to have even more disputes and conflicts to handle.
The new law is also an implicit repudiation of international criticism of and legal action against China’s most repressive policies toward its ethnic minorities.
Indeed, Beijing now touts its “correct path” for “resolving” ethnic problems as a pearl of “Chinese wisdom” from which other countries can learn.
On the bureaucratic front, too, problems are likely to persist and possibly worsen.
It is unclear how a law that makes ethnic policy everyone’s business and elevates its political status to unprecedented heights will help defuse its ideological charge and make room for predictable, rational, and routinized administration “according to law.”
The law, paradoxically and likely unsuccessfully, aims to “resolve” ethnicity as a political problem by making ethnonational identity a central and constant element of the political system.
Analysis
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