By Chun Han Wong
Chinese leader Xi Jinping enshrined in law his vision for a powerful China united around a single national identity, the culmination of a long-running campaign to assimilate the country's ethnic minorities.
The new law adopted by China's rubber-stamp legislature on Thursday mandates the Communist Party to ensure the country's 55 officially recognized ethnic minorities embrace a common language and culture centered on the country's Han Chinese majority. It cements Xi's reversal of decades-old ethnic policies that had tolerated more expressions of diversity.
The law on "promoting ethnic unity and progress" prescribes efforts to build a "shared spiritual home" for all ethnic groups. This includes the use of standard Chinese as the primary language in schools and public settings, and programs to promote official narratives on history, ethnicity and religion, according to a draft circulated to lawmakers last week.
The law also requires parents and guardians to teach minors to love the Communist Party and the motherland. It authorizes the use of legal penalties against officials and institutions that neglect their duties in fostering national unity, as well as people deemed to have sowed ethnic discord or engaged in separatist acts.
Rather than enacting a major shift, the party is "formalizing a general set of policies that have been rolled out across the country somewhat unevenly over the past decade," said Max Oidtmann, a professor of Chinese history at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
"The law is designed to make the psychological construction of a unified, single, homogenous nation-race a nationwide policy, and not something that just people in border regions need to pay attention to," Oidtmann said.
As China's leader, Xi has pledged to forge "a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation" across its 1.4 billion people. This entails programs to promote standard Chinese as the national lingua franca, instill pride in Chinese cultural heritage and exert stronger central control over regions with large ethnic-minority populations such as Tibet and Xinjiang.
While Xi's predecessors relied more on economic development as a way to integrate ethnic minorities, he has opted for a more hard-line approach, with the party taking an active role in reshaping cultural identities.
For Xi, the party's earlier conceptions of a multiethnic China were too weak a foundation for building a modern nation-state, according to Oidtmann. "Xi Jinping and his allies believe that 'blood-and-soil' nationalism is much more reliable than civic nationalism," which focuses on shared values rather than a common culture or ethnicity, he said.
Such policies have manifested differently across China, with harsher tactics applied in areas seen as riven with separatist sentiment.
In the mainly Buddhist region of Tibet, Beijing has imposed increased restrictions on Tibetan religion, education and language, and built a network of police posts that improved surveillance. Authorities also sent Tibetan children to state-run boarding schools at ever-younger ages, educating them predominantly in Mandarin and inculcating Chinese culture.
In the northwestern region of Xinjiang, authorities created a high-tech security dragnet and ran a forced-assimilation campaign for Muslim minorities, with mass-internment camps for political indoctrination and restrictions on religious practices.
Protests broke out in Inner Mongolia in 2020 after authorities tried to promote Mandarin-language education across the region and phase out local history, literature and ethnic textbooks in favor of national coursebooks -- a policy shift that angered ethnic Mongols who saw it as an effort to erase their culture.
Chinese officials generally reject accusations that they are diluting or suppressing the culture of ethnic minorities, instead arguing that the Communist Party has improved lives for these communities while preserving their religious and ethnic identities.
Xi has signaled closer attention to ethnic affairs in the past year or so. The party shook up its ethnic-policy bench and purged some senior ethnic-minority officials. Xi also attended celebrations for major anniversaries of Beijing's system of granting nominal political autonomy to Tibet and Xinjiang, becoming the first paramount leader to do so.
More recently, in December, Beijing revised legislation on the use of standard Chinese, adding provisions that reinforce the use of spoken Mandarin and standardized Chinese characters in schools and public settings. These include new requirements for schools to use "unified state-compiled textbooks" and for all students to have a fundamental grasp of standard Chinese by the time they finish middle school.
Some experts and rights activists say the new ethnic-unity law passed Thursday will effectively supplant 1980s legislation that mandated some autonomy for regions with large ethnic-minority populations.
The law is "a legal capstone meant to send a signal throughout the system" about the new orthodoxy on ethnic policy, said James Leibold, a professor at Australia's La Trobe University.
It marks "the final institutional step in the long retreat from the Chinese Communist Party's original promise that minority nationalities would become 'masters of their own house'" who can manage their own affairs, Leibold said.
According to the latest draft, the law mandates schools and other educational institutions to use standard Chinese as the basic language of instruction, in line with existing legislation.
It calls on all Chinese citizens to promote a patriotic spirit and protect the dignity of state symbols such as the national flag. It requires government agencies to instill "correct" perspectives on history, ethnicity, culture and religion, while news media and internet platforms should promote a sense of common national identity.
The law also urges efforts to strengthen cultural exchanges with the Chinese diaspora, and asserts that groups and individuals outside China can be held legally accountable for undermining national unity in the People's Republic -- a provision that scholars describe as extraterritorial.
Some scholars say the law's vague provisions may prompt front-line officials to act more aggressively in enforcing it -- and potentially invite more backlash.
"Because there aren't really objective measures of how this will work, cadres and officials are going to be really nervous as they try to implement the law," said Oidtmann, the historian. "The impulse will be to further crack down on all sorts of expressions of religious or ethnic identity."
Write to Chun Han Wong at chunhan.wong@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 12, 2026 03:22 ET (07:22 GMT)
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