Under the banner of national cohesion, Beijing is combining language, education, religion, migration, business, historical memory, and digital surveillance into a single mechanism of loyalty. Yet, the more insistently the state erases differences, the higher the risk that they will return in the form of political conflict.
On July 1, 2026, a law came into force in China that is formally dedicated to harmony, development, and equality, but in reality, reshapes the very architecture of relations between the state and ethnic minorities.
The PRC Law "On Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress", adopted on March 12 at the fourth session of the National People's Congress by 2,756 votes to three, with three abstentions, consists of 65 articles. Its political significance is not limited to another tightening of the fight against separatism. Beijing is turning the formation of a unified Chinese identity into a permanent responsibility of the entire party-state system: from the government, military, and schools to families, businesses, media, internet platforms, and religious organizations.
The main paradox of the new law is that China is trying to remove the ethnic issue from the political agenda by making it an obligatory element of practically every public policy.
Aaron Glasserman's original analysis accurately captures the main intrigue: the law does not initiate Xi Jinping's assimilationist course, but rather seals its transition from the realm of political guidelines into the domain of fundamental legislation.
From now on, an official can be punished not only for direct discrimination, failure to suppress conflict, or violation of state policy. They also risk their career for failing to actively cultivate the so-called "consciousness of the community of the Chinese nation".
This is precisely why it is dangerous to underestimate the law as a ritual product of a parliament that almost never disputes the leadership of the Communist Party of China. In an authoritarian system, the law is needed not so much to limit power, but to unify its behavior. It signals to millions of officials, school principals, editors, police officers, teachers, managers, and party functionaries that they are now personally responsible for creating a culturally and politically more homogeneous China.
Eight Percent of the Population Controls Half of the Strategic Map
According to the 2020 census, Han Chinese made up 91.11 percent of mainland China's population, or 1.286 billion people. The 55 officially recognized ethnic minorities accounted for 125.47 million people, or 8.89 percent. However, the arithmetic here is deceptive. Minorities are concentrated in border and resource-rich regions, which cover an estimated half of the country's territory. The Chinese system includes 155 ethnic autonomous areas: five autonomous regions, 30 autonomous prefectures, and 120 autonomous counties.
These territories cannot be viewed merely as a cultural periphery.
Xinjiang connects China with Central Asia, Pakistan, and the land routes of the Belt and Road Initiative. Energy, rail, and logistics corridors pass through it. The region possesses large reserves of oil, gas, and coal, holds key positions in cotton production, and is integrated into solar energy supply chains.
The Tibetan Plateau serves simultaneously as Asia’s water tower and a military flashpoint between China and India. Inner Mongolia is integrated into the coal, metallurgical, and rare earth industries of the PRC. Guangxi opens the way to Vietnam and mainland Southeast Asia. Ningxia, where Hui Muslims make up a significant portion of the population, holds symbolic importance for state policy regarding Islam.
Therefore, for Beijing, ethnic policy has long ceased to be a matter of folklore, national costumes, festivals, and quotas. It is part of managing borders, natural resources, transport arteries, food security, military logistics, and defense depth.
The law itself states this connection with utmost clarity. Ethnic regions are assigned the mission of ensuring border, resource, energy, food, and ecological security. The armed forces are required to participate in cultivating a pan-Chinese identity. Local authorities are directed to develop border cities, infrastructure, trade, tourism, and economic cooperation.
In other words, Beijing is finally combining two tasks that were previously presented separately: developing the periphery and politically neutralizing it.
Autonomy is Not Abolished - It is Stripped of Political Substance
After the founding of the PRC in 1949, the Chinese leadership chose a model that formally recognized ethnic diversity but excluded federalism.
Autonomous territories remained inseparable parts of the unitary state, yet they received their own administrative bodies, the right to accommodate local specifics, support minority languages, and promote local cadres.
Following the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976, during which religious institutions, local elites, languages, and traditions suffered massive destruction, Deng Xiaoping's leadership restored a more flexible model. Its legal core became the Law on Regional National Autonomy, adopted on May 31, 1984, and amended in 2001. It enshrined the system of autonomous regions, prefectures, and counties, special powers of local authorities, cultural guarantees, and state support for minorities.
The political calculation was pragmatic. Beijing offered minorities a limited set of guarantees in exchange for recognizing the unconditional sovereignty of the center.
Local languages could exist as long as they did not become tools for political mobilization. Religion could persist as long as it remained under state supervision. Regional elites received posts but not independent centers of power. Benefits in university admissions, exemptions in family planning policies, budget transfers, and symbolic representation were meant to show that belonging to the PRC brought more advantages than resisting it.
By the beginning of the 21st century, this compromise began to erode from both sides.
Among minorities, a sense of cultural and economic marginalization persisted. Among a segment of Han society, resentment grew over the privileges, quotas, and budget subsidies granted to autonomous regions. Within the bureaucracy, officials learned to shift responsibility: a routine labor or domestic dispute could be declared ethnic and referred to a specialized agency, while actual discrimination, conversely, was concealed to avoid damaging statistics and careers.
Xi Jinping's new policy was a direct response to this dual inefficiency.
Article 8 of the 2026 law preserves the system of ethnic autonomy. However, dozens of other articles subordinate it to a higher goal - strengthening the unified community of the Chinese nation.
Autonomy is not legally liquidated. It is turned into an administrative shell within which the primary task is no longer preserving uniqueness, but expanding cohesion.
The Shadow of the Soviet Union: The Fear Driving Beijing
Behind the assimilationist turn lies more than just Xi Jinping's personal ideology.
In the Chinese leadership, there is a deeply rooted conclusion drawn from the collapse of the USSR: ethnically defined territorial republics, local elites, distinct languages, and historical narratives can transform into a ready-made infrastructure for disintegration if the central government weakens.
For Beijing, the Soviet collapse serves as a warning that state-recognized identities may, in a moment of crisis, demand political sovereignty.
To this fear, specific shocks were added. In March 2008, protests and riots swept through Tibet. In July 2009, interethnic violence in Urumqi resulted in massive casualties. In October 2013, an attack occurred near Tiananmen Square, and in March 2014, an assault took place at the Kunming railway station.
The Chinese authorities linked these events to separatism, religious extremism, and terrorism. In May 2014, the "Strike Hard" campaign was launched in Xinjiang.
According to figures cited by Beijing itself in a 2019 white paper, since 2014, authorities have dismantled 1,588 groups labeled as terrorist, arrested 12,995 suspects, seized 2,052 explosive devices, and punished 30,645 individuals for 4,858 cases of illegal religious activities. The Chinese government asserts that no terrorist attacks have occurred in Xinjiang since 2016.
It was in 2014 that Xi used the now-famous formula: ethnic groups must be embraced "like pomegranate seeds". Later, this imagery evolved into a universal state doctrine.
The softness of the metaphor is deceptive.
The seeds may retain their individual shapes, but they must remain within a single shell, tightly pressed together, with no independent political space. The official narrative speaks of mutual respect and shared prosperity. In practice, the policy increasingly means that differences are permissible only as decorative elements, not as sources of separate educational systems, historical memory, religious organizations, or social solidarity.
Mandarin Becomes a State Loyalty Test
The most sensitive part of the law concerns language.
Article 15 establishes the national common language and script as the basic medium of instruction in all schools and educational institutions. The state must strive to ensure Putonghua proficiency starting in early childhood.
If a minority language and the national language are used simultaneously in official documents, public spaces, or organizations, the latter must receive priority in terms of placement and order. At the same time, the law declares the protection of minority languages.
On paper, this looks like a balance. In a centralized administrative system, priority almost inevitably translates into displacement.
The Chinese leadership has a strong economic argument: without a good command of Mandarin, a resident of Tibet, Xinjiang, or Inner Mongolia stands less of a chance in universities, the job market, and the state apparatus. A unified language lowers transaction costs, facilitates internal migration, and expands access to the national market.
The problem begins where Mandarin instruction does not supplement native-language education, but replaces it.
In 2020, transitioning key school subjects to Mandarin sparked rare mass protests by ethnic Mongols in Inner Mongolia. History, politics, and language arts began to be taught using national textbooks. Parents and activists perceived this as the dismantling of Mongolian-medium schooling.
In Tibet, the closure of small village schools and the expansion of boarding schools have increased children's dependence on a Mandarin environment. In May 2026, Human Rights Watch stated that integration policies now extend to preschools and called for the preservation of comprehensive Tibetan language instruction. Beijing maintains that the centralized system provides children from remote areas with access to better teachers and infrastructure.
For Xi Jinping, language is not just a tool of communication. It is a conduit through which the state transmits a unified version of history, law, and political loyalty.
Therefore, Article 16 requires that the consciousness of the community of the Chinese nation permeate the entire educational process: lessons, social practice, themed activities, and the internet. Textbooks must undergo centralized control.
Here, the line between linguistic modernization and ideological standardization disappears.
Religion is Permitted as Long as it Ceases to Be Independent
An equally strict front is religion.
Article 46 requires religious associations, educational institutions, and places of worship to adhere to the path of Sinicizing religions, conduct education in the spirit of national identity, and adapt religious life to a socialist society.
For China's five officially recognized religions - Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism - this means further subordination to the party's control system.
The Sinicization campaign began long before the law was passed. In Muslim-majority areas, authorities dismantled domes and minarets, modified mosque architecture, and removed Arabic inscriptions from facades and signage.
Reuters, after examining satellite imagery of ten mosques in the city of Changji, reported that in just the two months following April 2018, 31 minarets and 12 green or gold domes had been removed.
In Ningxia and Gansu, the modification of mosques primarily affected the Hui - a Muslim group that speaks mostly Chinese and was historically considered better integrated than the Uyghurs. This demonstrates that the campaign's goal is significantly broader than merely combating separatism.
The state seeks to eliminate the visual, institutional, and transnational markers of religious affiliation.
Beijing’s logic is clear. Independent religious networks can connect local communities with foreign centers of influence, create alternative moral authority, and mobilize people outside of party structures.
Yet, the attempt to transform faith into a managed appendage of patriotic education backfires. The more stringently the state regulates the appearance of mosques, the content of sermons, the training of clergy, and religious contacts, the more believers perceive standard practices as a form of resistance.
Policy that is meant to depoliticize Islam or Tibetan Buddhism ends up politicizing them to the extreme.
History is Rewritten to Fit National Security Requirements
The new law intervenes not only in the present, but also in the past.
Article 17 mandates the creation of a distinct Chinese system of historical sources, academic discourse, and theory regarding the formation of the community of the Chinese nation. Universities and research centers are expected to explain Chinese history through the model of unity in diversity.
At first glance, this looks like an ordinary academic research program. In practice, the state is shaping a mandatory historical framework in which the modern borders of the PRC must appear to be the natural outcome of a millennia-long convergence of peoples, rather than a complex history of conquests, treaties, migrations, and conflicts.
The multi-decade project of compiling the official history of the Qing Dynasty is highly revealing.
Work began in 2002. More than two thousand researchers participated, and the manuscript ballooned to 103 volumes and approximately 32 million characters. However, publication has been delayed because, under Xi, requirements for interpreting the Manchu dynasty have become increasingly stringent.
The question is fundamental: was the Qing a Chinese dynasty that naturally unified a multiethnic space, or was it a Manchu empire that utilized distinct governance models for the Han, Mongols, Tibetans, and Muslim peoples?
The second interpretation does not necessarily lead to separatism, but it makes the history of modern borders less linear. This is precisely why the political vetting of the manuscript proved more critical than its scholarly completion.
Beijing needs control over history for three reasons.
First, it bolsters the legitimacy of current borders.
Second, it strips minority national movements of their own language of historical arguments.
Third, it connects the Communist Party not only to the 1949 revolution, but to China's entire multi-millennial statehood. The CPC is cast not as one of several political forces, but as the sole modern guardian of civilizational integrity.
The cost of such a construct is high. When a scholarly hypothesis is evaluated based on territorial security criteria, the researcher stops seeking the truth and begins guessing the permissible formula.
Assimilation through the Market: Living, Studying, Working, and Relaxing Together
The new course is not limited to prohibitions. Its most ambitious part is social engineering.
The law requires the creation of so-called "interbedded communities", in which representatives of different groups must live, study, work, build, and spend leisure time together. Local authorities are required to consider this goal in urban planning, housing policy, population management, employment, and social services. Interregional employment, tourism, staff exchange, and the relocation of specialists are encouraged.
The economic rationality here is real.
Many autonomous territories depend on budget transfers, state investments, and assistance from wealthy eastern provinces. Infrastructure integration reduces isolation, creates jobs, expands the market, and gives young people access to major cities.
The law promises transportation, energy, water management, digital networks, logistics, industrial cooperation, medicine, and education. It integrates ethnic regions into a single national market and internal capital circulation.
But development is also used as a political technology.
A new road does not only connect a remote area with the market. It accelerates migration, tourism flows, cultural standardization, and administrative control.
A boarding school does not only provide a child with access to a teacher. It tears them away from the family language environment.
Urban employment does not only increase income. It makes local identity less suitable for an everyday career.
Tourism does not only bring in money. It turns culture into a stage performance, safe for the state and convenient for the consumer.
This is the fundamental difference between the current course and the previous policy of preferences. Previously, the state tried to buy the loyalty of minorities while preserving part of their institutional separateness. Now, it seeks to change the social environment itself so that separateness gradually loses its economic meaning.
Assimilation is carried out not only by police and propaganda, but also by the labor market, mortgages, transport, school geography, and career incentives.
Every Official is Responsible for Unity, Every Citizen Receives the Right to Report
The main managerial innovation of the law is the distribution of responsibility throughout the system.
The United Front Work Department of the Central Committee and the State Ethnic Affairs Commission coordinate the policy, but local governments, ministries, enterprises, trade unions, youth and women's organizations, writers' associations, scientific societies, foundations, village committees, and the military must be responsible for it.
The requirements of a national identity must enter professional training, corporate culture, organizational charters, family upbringing, and personnel policy.
Article 54 gives citizens the right to complain and report actions that destroy ethnic unity, as well as officials who fail to properly perform their duties. The prosecutor's office receives the opportunity to file public interest lawsuits. Managers and direct perpetrators can face disciplinary, administrative, and criminal liability.
This creates a classic mechanism of political campaigns of the Xi era.
The center formulates a broad task, turns it into a cadre evaluation criterion, after which the bureaucracy begins to demonstrate zeal, often exceeding the original instructions.
For Beijing, this is a way to overcome sabotage, formalism, and passivity on the ground. But the system has a predictable flaw.
When the concept of damage to ethnic unity is formulated broadly, it is safer to punish an extra person than to miss a potentially dangerous episode. An official, school principal, editor, or internet platform manager will focus not on a nuanced assessment of a conflict, but on protecting their own career.
A domestic dispute is easily turned into a case of political disloyalty, and a peaceful expression of cultural discontent into a sign of separatism.
The law is supposed to teach the apparatus to distinguish between a common offense, discrimination, a religious dispute, and a real security threat. However, it simultaneously raises the political price of an error sharply.
This is not a rationalization of governance, but the creation of bureaucratic fear, under which any ambiguity pushes the system toward a harsher interpretation.
The Unity Algorithm: Censorship Receives a New Legal Formula
The information dimension of the law is no less significant than the educational or religious ones.
Newspapers, television, publishing houses, and network services are required to report on the achievements of building the community of the Chinese nation.
Internet companies must produce and distribute content that supports unity. Upon detecting materials deemed to incite ethnic hatred, discrimination, or undermine cohesion, operators are obliged to immediately stop transmission, delete information, save records, and report to the authorities.
The law explicitly names the internet, big data, and artificial intelligence as tools of integration.
The prohibition of ethnic hatred itself corresponds to normal legal practice. The problem is that in the Chinese system, the boundary between hatred, criticism of state policy, and discussion of historical trauma is determined not by an independent court, but by the political logic of security.
A publication about a school closure, mosque remodeling, language discrimination, or a controversial page of history can be viewed as a defense of rights, as a scholarly discussion, or as undermining unity - depending on the current stance of the party apparatus.
Artificial intelligence increases the scale of this uncertainty. Platforms will be forced to proactively block words, images, and topics that algorithms associate with ethnic conflict.
This leads to over-moderation: not only radical agitation disappears from the public space, but also the factual material necessary to understand the causes of tension.
The state receives a calmer information picture, but loses feedback. The conflict does not disappear. It becomes less visible to the center until the moment it manifests in a sharper form.
The Chinese Law Goes Beyond China's Borders
Article 63 provides for legal liability of organizations and individuals outside the PRC if they commit actions against China that Beijing considers an undermining of ethnic unity or the creation of separatism.
On June 24, a high-ranking Chinese official publicly stated that applying the norm to persons abroad is legal, necessary, and consistent with international practice.
This turns domestic ethnic policy into a diplomatic conflict.
China cannot automatically arrest a journalist, scholar, or activist in another jurisdiction. But the extraterritorial norm creates a wide range of risks: criminal cases, entry restrictions, pressure on relatives in China, requests for legal assistance, and threats to organizations working with Chinese partners.
For diasporas, the law becomes a signal that activities outside the country can have consequences inside China.
The European Parliament on April 30 demanded the repeal of the law, calling it an instrument for intensifying assimilation and restricting cultural, religious, and linguistic freedoms. European MPs called for a review of extradition mechanisms and a response to transnational pressure.
Beijing, in turn, views international criticism as an element of the strategy to contain China. The text of the law explicitly rejects interference under the pretext of ethnicity, religion, and human rights.
For the Chinese leadership, support for Uyghur, Tibetan, or Mongolian organizations abroad is inseparable from the geopolitical pressure of the US and Europe.
The dispute over minority rights is finally merging with the struggle of great powers for legitimacy, sanctions, technology, and control over the international agenda.
Xinjiang Was a Proving Ground - Now the Model is Becoming National
The harshest version of the policy has already been tested in Xinjiang.
In August 2022, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights concluded that serious human rights violations had been committed in the region as part of anti-terrorist and anti-extremism policies.
The document stated that the large-scale arbitrary and discriminatory deprivation of liberty of Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim groups could constitute international crimes, in particular, crimes against humanity. Beijing rejected the findings, insisting that its actions were aimed at combating terrorism, vocational training, and regional development.
The new law does not transfer the Xinjiang camp model to the whole of China. It does something more systemic.
Practices previously justified by an extraordinary threat in one region are being translated into a national norm by softer means: unified textbooks, the priority of Mandarin, the Sinicization of religion, mixed communities, digital surveillance, official accountability, and control over historical discourse.
From Beijing's point of view, this is prevention. The state does not want to wait for the emergence of an underground, mass riots, or a foreign political network, but to dismantle in advance the social conditions in which a separate identity can become a political project.
From the critics' point of view, this is a transition from targeted repression to long-term cultural assimilation.
Both sides capture the same change, but evaluate it oppositely.
A school can increase mobility and simultaneously displace a language. A road can develop a region and strengthen control. The fight against extremism can protect citizens and create space for mass abuse.
The decisive question is the existence of independent mechanisms capable of limiting the state. In the Chinese system, such mechanisms are extremely weak.
Who Wins: The Center, the Security Apparatus, and the National Market
The primary political victor is the central leadership of the Communist Party of China.
The law reduces the significance of local compromises and makes Xi’s course mandatory across the entire country. Beijing gains a unified set of criteria by which to evaluate governors, party secretaries, university rectors, editors, and corporate executives.
The second victor is the internal security and United Front apparatus.
The broader the concept of ethnic risk, the more authority, resources, and data flow to the structures responsible for conflict prevention, religion, the internet, and diasporas. The law ties ethnic policy directly to the overarching concept of national security, allowing cultural and social processes to be treated as potential threats to the state.
The third beneficiary is the single national market.
The spread of Mandarin, infrastructure, standardized education, and interregional mobility facilitates the flow of labor and capital. Eastern companies secure more convenient access to the resources and consumers of the periphery. The center lowers administrative and linguistic barriers.
Yet, this gain has a downside.
The deeper the integration, the greater Beijing’s responsibility for employment, income, and the quality of public services. If economic growth slows, the previous exchange - cultural concessions in return for prosperity - begins to falter.
Assimilation without rapid growth no longer looks like modernization, but rather like a one-sided loss.
Who Loses: Languages, Local Elites, and China Itself
The first to lose are linguistic and religious institutions, which cannot survive merely as private habits.
A language is preserved when it can be used to acquire an education, build a career, write academic papers, produce media, and conduct public life. If it is relegated to the home, folksongs, and tourism festivals, its transmission to the next generation rapidly weakens.
The second to lose are local elites.
The old model granted them the role of mediators between the center and the community. The new system demands, above all, the demonstration of a pan-Chinese identity. A representative of a minority is valued not as a defender of local interests, but as proof of successful integration into the party project.
This reduces the ability of local leaders to convey unpleasant information to Beijing and to protect the specific needs of their regions.
The third loser may be the Chinese state itself.
Unification simplifies governance in the short term, but it destroys legal channels for expressing differences. When language, religion, and historical memory are stripped of institutional space, they do not necessarily vanish.
They can migrate into family networks, emigration, digital undergrounds, and religious solidarity. Consequently, the state sees less, understands worse, and is forced to employ even more control.
Three Scenarios: Dissolution, Covert Resistance, or a New Cycle of Repression
The first scenario is the gradual and largely conflict-free dissolution of differences.
The youth switch to Mandarin, move to cities, enter intermarriage, and build careers within national structures. Local languages and rituals are preserved as cultural heritage but lose their political and social functions.
For Beijing, this is the ideal outcome. It is possible where integration is accompanied by rising incomes, social mobility, and the absence of crude humiliation of local culture.
The second scenario is managed cultural resistance.
Communities formally comply with demands but preserve their language, religion, and memory in private life, informal education, and the diaspora. There is no open separatism, yet trust in the state declines.
China achieves outward tranquility and inward alienation. This model appears to be the most likely for a significant portion of the ethnic regions.
The third scenario is a self-sustaining cycle of repression.
Overzealous officials expand the definition of threat. Cultural discontent is interpreted as political disloyalty. Arrests and restrictions fuel radical sentiments. The center responds with fresh measures.
In this way, prevention can end up creating the very threat it was designed to avert.
In all likelihood, China will face a combination of all three scenarios. Successful assimilation will occur in major cities and among career-oriented groups. Passive resistance will persist in families, religious communities, and emigration. The harshest policies will continue where Beijing perceives a connection between identity, borders, foreign influence, and organized protest.
A Unity That Must Be Enforced Already Admits Weakness
The new law demonstrates the immense power of the Chinese state.
Beijing is capable of restructuring curricula, the architecture of religious buildings, personnel criteria, media agendas, urban planning, and digital algorithms around a single political objective. No other major power possesses a comparable mechanism for everyday social engineering.
Yet, hidden within this display of strength is deep anxiety.
A resilient national community does not require every family, school, company, editorial office, mosque, monastery, and internet platform to regularly prove its commitment to unity. When the state turns identity into a permanent object of accountability, it effectively admits that it does not trust the natural loyalty of society.
Xi Jinping seeks to resolve an ancient Chinese dilemma: how to preserve a vast, multiethnic territory without allowing cultural differences to become political borders.
His answer is not federalism, not a new treaty of autonomy, and not a competitive civic identity, but a managed convergence under the absolute control of the party.
This model may yield decades of outward stability. It may increase mobility, strengthen the market, and reduce the likelihood of organized separatism.
However, it does not eliminate the primary source of risk - the absence of voluntary consent to the rules.
The law can force a person to speak the required language, study from the correct textbook, pray in a properly designed building, and avoid dangerous words on the internet. It cannot legally manufacture a sense of belonging.
This is where the limit of Xi Jinping’s project lies.
China is attempting to pack its peoples "like pomegranate seeds", but it is squeezing the shell tighter and tighter. As long as the economy grows and the apparatus maintains its efficiency, the pressure can pass for order.
Should the center face a prolonged economic downturn, a split among the elites, or a major external crisis, the suppressed differences will not have disappeared. They will return at the moment of state weakness - no longer as cultural diversity that could have been integrated into the system, but as the accumulated memory of forced unity.