As the PRC’s new Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress is about to formally go into effect—the assigned date is July 1, 2026—some observers of the party-state’s assaults on members of targeted ethnic and religious groups give the impression that the law will enable new such assaults. Assaults that might not have occurred without its injunctions and rationalizations.
Maybe, though it’s hard to see how things could get very much worse without a descent into campaigns of mass extermination of populations in addition to the indoctrinations, imprisonments, and frequent but more intermittent murders that have been the Chinese government’s standard practice of recent years.
A decisive turn
The Council on Foreign Relations says that the Ethnic Unity Law “signals Beijing’s decisive turn away from ethnic autonomy and toward enforced assimilation” (CFR, March 26, 2026).
The new law “is the culmination of a policy trajectory…. Under Xi, Beijing is steering away from the post-1949 legal framework of nominal ethnic autonomy (albeit under tight Party control) imported from the Soviet Union. In its place, officials have steadily been pivoting towards what scholars have termed ‘second-generation ethnic policies’—an aggressive assimilationist approach that emphasizes a common Chinese national identity over accommodation of ethnic differences.”
Nominal autonomy “under tight Party control” is nonexistent autonomy.
One can regard a big new law as the culmination of an already entrenched “aggressive assimilationist approach.” But does the law represent any new approach?
The answer seems to be that it does insofar as it speeds things up.
Provincial and municipal authorities across China have enacted a wave of local ‘ethnic unity and progress’ regulations in recent years, such as those in Xinjiang (2015) or Inner Mongolia (2021). The new national legislation elevates this approach to the level of a national statute governing all of China.
The new law’s core concept is captured in the term zhulao—to “forge” or “cast” metal—and its instruction that “forging the communal consciousness of the Chinese nation” is core to the Party’s ethnic policies. As James Leibold has pointed out, this phrasing reflects a hardening of Beijing’s political line under Xi Jinping—explicitly written into the Party’s Charter at the 19th Party Congress in 2017—aimed at “melting” subnational and ethnic identities into a shared collective one.
This is a sharp departure from the framework of the 1984 Regional Ethnic Autonomy Law, which explicitly provided for education in minority languages and warned against majoritarian (i.e., Han) chauvinism in an effort to reset ethnic relations in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. In contrast, the new 2026 law has no such warning, mandates pre-school education in Mandarin, directs government authorities and private firms to “give prominence” to the display of Chinese characters over minority languages in public settings, and instructs them to promote the “forging of national identity” as a component of all official work on families and family education….
China’s reform-era legal institutions and practices—the framework of nominal ethnic autonomy, and the conventions that maintained some degree of separation between Party and state—are steadily eroding as the country moves yet deeper into the counter-reform era.
An ugly escalation
The chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, John Moolenaar, says that the Ethnic Unity law is “an ugly escalation of the CCP’s cruelty and paranoia, and China plans to use it to continue its harassment and intimidation of critics who live beyond its borders.
“China will also use it to further perpetuate atrocities and to legitimize its abuse of Tibetans, Uyghurs, and other people of faith, as well as people it classifies as minority nationalities. This week as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of our independence, the CCP is going backwards and showing once again it does not believe in the God-given rights we enjoy. The true national unity the CCP seeks comes not from oppression, but from citizens freely living and worshipping as they please.”
Setting aside the not entirely pellucid invocations of “true national unity” and “God-given rights,” we see that Moolenaar refers to both an escalation and a continuity. The CCP will use the new law to continue going after Chinese nationals and critics living outside of China and to “further perpetuate…and legitimize” abuses of the people it currently abuses, abuses that it already asserts are legitimate.
How will any of this constitute an escalation? To be sure, things can always get worse, as they often do under Beijing’s rule.
Also see:
StoptheCCP.org: “You will be assimilated. Your culture will adapt to service us.”
The New York Times: “How China is Erasing Tibetan Culture, One Child at a Time” (January 9, 2025)
“Across China’s west, the party is placing children in boarding schools in a drive to assimilate a generation of Tibetans into the national mainstream and mold them into citizens loyal to the Communist Party.”
