When the People’s Republic of China was founded, in 1949, it was explicitly a multinational state. Although Han Chinese make up more than 90 percent of the country’s population, China’s constitution and subsequent laws grant minority nationalities autonomy in specific regions and promise them collective agency as “masters of their own homes.” For decades, the party-state’s official bargain—honored unevenly and often violated—was that national unity would be best secured by recognizing difference and granting minorities limited territorial, linguistic, and political autonomy within China, rather than by forcing them to be absorbed into Han culture.
As of July 1, however, national integration through forced cultural assimilation is the law of the land. The constitution still defines the country as a multinational state, but the passage of the Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress marks a decisive turn away from the promise of territorial autonomy. It codifies the coercive project to create a Chinese national community in which minority peoples can exist only insofar as they serve Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s vision of China—a vision rooted in the belief that commonality is better than diversity and that national cohesion requires a single shared Chinese cultural and linguistic identity.
The new ethnic unity law did not introduce the policy of assimilation; for more than a decade, Xi has been replacing minority-language education with Mandarin Chinese instruction, increasing the party’s control over religion, and recasting minority histories as strands of one continuous Chinese civilization. But this approach is now consolidated in national legislation enacted by the full National People’s Congress, signaling that Beijing regards it as a matter of fundamental state importance and enshrining it with the highest legal authority. And the law distributes responsibility for implementing these policies across all levels of the state and throughout society.
Beijing’s campaign of cultural dispossession will now become more deeply embedded in bureaucratic practices and institutional structures, which are difficult to dislodge or change. Even if a more liberal leader were to one day succeed Xi, reviving autonomy would require a complete bureaucratic, political, and cultural overhaul. For the foreseeable future, therefore, Beijing has closed the door on peaceful coexistence, locking itself instead into a more hostile and zero-sum relationship with the minority groups whose cultures and languages it once accommodated.
ASSIMILATION NATION
China’s official policy, inspired by the Soviet model of national-territorial autonomy, recognizes 56 formally equal nationalities within the country. Its constitution promises to protect the rights and interests of all minority nationalities and grants them territorial autonomy in areas where they live in concentrated communities. A 1984 law formalized the protections and accommodations granted to minority groups as part of this territorial autonomy. In areas as varied as Xinjiang in the far northwest and Yunnan in the country’s southwest, minority groups were entitled to use their own languages as the medium of instruction in schools and maintain their own traditions, cultures, and religious practices. Even when these protections were violated, the law maintained the principle of collective rights for China’s non-Han nationalities.
But Xi began systematically dismantling the foundations of this system soon after he became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012. His move to dismantle territorial autonomy is often explained as a response to episodes of unrest that broke out in minority regions shortly before he took power. In 2008, protests that began in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, escalated into a full-blown uprising across the plateau. And in 2009, a Uyghur protest in Urumqi, in Xinjiang, descended into rioting and retaliatory violence that killed nearly 200 people, according to official figures.
The roots of Xi’s campaign, however, go back much further. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s prompted some leading Chinese scholars and officials to reconsider granting territorial autonomy to minority nationalities. Starting around the first decade of the twenty-first century, advocates of a so-called second-generation ethnic policy argued that China’s Soviet-inspired approach had hardened ethnic boundaries and created the conditions for separatism. They warned that minority groups’ distinct identities, institutions, and languages were impeding China’s attempt to construct a cohesive nation. Although the situation in Beijing is fundamentally different than it was in Moscow—China’s autonomous regions are much more tightly controlled by the central government and possess neither sovereignty nor a legal route to independence, as federal republics in the Soviet Union did—these powerful voices warned that even limited autonomy was dangerous. China’s existing policy, they argued, was putting it at risk of sharing the fate of the Soviet Union, which had disintegrated along the borders of its nationality-based republics.
Beijing has closed the door on peaceful coexistence.
Xi’s nation-building project has grown out of their radical thesis. Xi has insisted on dismantling and weakening the minority languages, religious institutions, and historical memories that might sustain any claims to collective self-rule. He has sought to remake the inner life of China’s non-Han peoples so that claims to distinct political identity become harder to imagine, mobilize, or transmit. The Mongolian scholar Uradyn Bulag has called this “politicide”—the destruction of a people’s capacity to understand itself and act as a distinct political community.
This campaign of assimilation has ensnared all minority groups, but it has especially targeted the three nationalities most culturally distinct from the Han majority: Mongols, Tibetans, and Uyghurs. Starting in 2017, authorities in Xinjiang detained an estimated one million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in political reeducation camps. Beijing has placed nearly a million Tibetan children in state-run boarding schools, including preschools, where separation from their families and education predominantly conducted in Mandarin weaken the intergenerational transmission of culture. And in 2020, when Inner Mongolia required key school subjects to be taught in Mandarin, Mongolian students and parents organized boycotts and demonstrations; party authorities responded by detaining protesters, pressuring families to send their children back to school, punishing teachers, and purging Mongolian officials from party leadership positions.
The effects of these efforts are visible. The nationalist newspaper Global Times reported as early as 2016 that some Tibetan children were losing the ability to converse easily with parents and grandparents, and videos shared over social media in recent months show children struggling to pronounce their own names in Tibetan. For Beijing, such episodes suggest that forced assimilation is working as intended. In the logic of Xi and his intellectual forebears, the erasure of distinct cultural and linguistic identities will make it harder for a territorially based separatist movement to gain traction.
LEGALLY BOUND
But until July 1, these assimilationist policies had a problem: they violated legal promises that the state had made to its citizens. Xi has now narrowed this inconvenient gap between law and policy. He did not repeal the existing framework guaranteeing autonomy, which formally remains in place. Instead, he imposed a new statutory framework that institutionalizes cultural assimilation, emptying autonomy of any substantive meaning.
The new ethnic unity law makes Mandarin Chinese the basic language of education and official life across China. It says that museums, heritage sites, public buildings, and place names are required to display “shared Chinese cultural symbols,” and requires state officials to use new technologies, including artificial intelligence, to promote a standardized image of the Chinese nation. Even family life is drawn into the project: parents and guardians of minority children are told to educate them to love the party, the motherland, and the Chinese nation. Those who violate the law, including individuals and organizations outside China, are said to be creating “ethnic division” and may face administrative penalties, detention, or even criminal prosecution.
The law presents itself as a measure to strengthen national cohesion. At its heart is one of Xi’s signature formulations: “forging a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation.” In English, the phrase sounds benign—a type of civic nationalism with Chinese characteristics. But in Chinese, the wording carries a far more assertive and directional connotation: forging is the same word used to describe casting molten ore into unbreakable iron. In Xi’s usage, the goal is not only to encourage loyalty to the party-state but also to mold individual consciousness itself. It is, in the official language of the party, the forging and casting of souls—that is, the remaking of habits, attachments, and historical memories that national minorities in China rely on to understand who they are and where they belong.
The stakes of the law can be understood through the political theorist Will Kymlicka’s distinction between colonized national minorities and immigrant communities. In many liberal societies, immigrants seek equal citizenship, protection from discrimination, and accommodation of distinct cultural or religious practices. National minorities, by contrast, were involuntarily incorporated into new states. They ground their claims to collective continuity and self-government in ancestral territory, language, and inherited institutions. Their demand is not only to be included as individuals but also to preserve and transmit their collective identity across generations.
Many Mongols, Tibetans, and Uyghurs are not willing to trade partial assimilation for equal opportunity. These groups’ repeated street demonstrations—even in the face of harsh state retaliation—have made it clear that what they want, at a minimum, is some level of genuine autonomy in China or a way to preserve their unique cultures. What the new law enforces, under the guise of civic inclusion, is a requirement that they become part of a single, party-defined Chinese identity. It sends the message that the languages, histories, and identities of China’s non-Han citizens will not be tolerated unless they can be folded into a single Chinese national story.
THE DOWNSIDE OF UNITY
The law does not prohibit diversity, and officials are likely to welcome ethnic costumes, food, and music—at least where they can be packaged and commercialized as colorful performances for Han tourists and party officials, or displayed as evidence of China’s supposedly harmonious pluralism. But this is diversity reduced to spectacle. It will be carefully curated and mostly detached from the communities that produce it. If it challenges Han Chinese norms, suggests a distinct collective identity, or supports claims to meaningful self-rule, it will not be tolerated.
Minority communities that seek to maintain their culture will be pushed toward a double life of public conformity and private preservation. Language instruction, religious practice, and historical memory are likely to retreat further into homes, rely more on informal networks, and increasingly center on diaspora institutions based outside mainland China, widening the gap between official performances of unity and experiences of coercion.
Xi may believe that the new law will secure political stability for generations by reducing the possibility of separatism. But turning the project of cultural homogenization into law may end up backfiring. For decades, prominent figures such as the Dalai Lama, the Han writer Wang Lixiong, and the Uyghur economist Ilham Tohti occupied a shrinking political middle ground between assimilation and independence. They argued, in different ways, that meaningful autonomy, not independence, offered a realistic path to interethnic reconciliation. With enough autonomy, they believed, minority groups could coexist peacefully with the Chinese state without sacrificing their culture or challenging Beijing’s authority.
Xi has sought to remake the inner life of China’s non-Han peoples.
By formally hollowing out the autonomy it once promised, Beijing is closing off the possibility of such a settlement. The party claims exclusive authority to select and recognize the successor to the Dalai Lama; Wang’s work is barred from publication in China, and he has been prevented from leaving the country since 2015; and Tohti is serving a life sentence in a Chinese prison on trumped-up charges of separatism.
Rather than ensure stability, a program of coercive integration can harden political claims that survive beyond the state’s reach. In the late Soviet Union, for example, backlash against Russification helped fuel national mobilization, especially in the Baltic republics, where reform movements eventually became independence movements. And in Yugoslavia, the former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic’s move to dismantle Kosovo’s autonomy, in 1989, became a symbol of Serbian centralization and helped destroy confidence in the federal compact that promised cultural and linguistic accommodation.
China’s far greater coercive capacity makes comparable mobilization inside the country unlikely, at least for now. But as Beijing eliminates the possibility of meaningful autonomy for minority nationalities inside China, demands for independence are likely to grow among Mongolian, Tibetan, and Uyghur activists in exile. On July 2, one day after China’s new law took effect, Tibetan independence activist Lobga Rangzen set himself on fire outside the United Nations headquarters in New York to protest Chinese rule over Tibet. A single tragic act does not make a trend, but the self-immolation captures the polarizing effect of destroying the middle ground between assimilation and separation. By dismantling autonomy, Xi may find that his only option for preserving national unity is a state of permanent coercion.
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