China tells its minorities to integrate or face consequences with sweeping new law | CNN
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For years, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has pushed ethnic minority groups like Tibetans and Uyghurs to adopt an identity rooted in Chinese nationality and allegiance to the ruling Communist Party.

For years, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has pushed ethnic minority groups like Tibetans and Uyghurs to adopt an identity rooted in Chinese nationality and allegiance to the ruling Communist Party.

Now, that push has been codified into a sweeping new law that reaches into classrooms, neighborhoods and homes – and gives Beijing the right to target people outside of its borders that it believes violate its rules.

The statute, officially known as the Ethnic Unity and Progress Promotion Law, came into effect on July 1. It bans acts that “undermine ethnic unity or create ethnic division” among China’s 56 officially recognized ethnicities, which include a Han Chinese majority that makes up over 90% of the country’s 1.4 billion people.

  • ALoafOfBread@lemmy.mlEnglish
    281·
    19 days ago

    Here’s the wiki article on the law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_on_Promoting_Ethnic_Unity_and_Progress.

    Some stuff makes sense - like economic modernization of regions with many minorities (especially poor regions), teaching Mandarin in schools so that everyone can speak the majority language, and preserving cultural works and texts of minority groups.

    Other stuff seems repressive, like the broad enforcement section, the extremely broad reach of the law into all public and private institutions, legislating what various actors can/can’t teach the youth if it might “harm Chinese ethnic unity” which is left pretty vague. Very ethnostate-coded stuff on the whole, not great.

    Some sections I thought were noteworthy, taken from wikipedia, shortened with DeepSeek. There is lots more stuff in there.

    "Chapter I… tasks the whole of government and society to achieve these goals, mandating general obligations on a wide range of public and private actors such as … " [basically all imaginable institutions]

    “Chapter II, titled Building a Shared Spiritual Home, lays out the ideological characteristics … requiring fostering identification with ‘the great motherland, the Chinese nation, Chinese culture, the Communist Party of China, and socialism with Chinese characteristics’ through patriotic education … and promotion of ‘Chinese cultural symbols and image of the Chinese nation’. It also codifies the predominance of Standard Chinese (Putonghua) in public life … and requires that Chinese characters be displayed more prominently than minority scripts if both must be used in public.”

    “It tasks the Ministry of Education and the National Ethnic Affairs Commission in developing textbooks regarding ‘the community of the Chinese nation’ … It vows to support the standardization, digitization, and preservation of minority texts. It broadly requires media, internet service providers, families, among others, to promote the CCP’s ethnic policy … while prohibiting them from ‘instilling in minors ideas detrimental to ethnic unity and progress’.”

    “Chapter V and VI concern the enforcement mechanisms … permits citizens to report conduct that ‘undermines ethnic unity and progress’ … Procuratorates may initiate public interest litigation when any such conduct also ‘undermines national interests or the public interest’. It generally leaves penalties to be imposed under other applicable laws. It also asserts jurisdiction over foreign organizations and individuals that ‘commit acts targeting the PRC that undermine ethnic unity and progress or create ethnic division’.[7] The law empowers the state to pursue those outside of China perceived as undermining notions of ethnic unity.”

    • marcos@lemmy.worldEnglish
      284·
      19 days ago

      It’s quite standard fascist discourse:

      Point to real problem that everybody wants to solve; declare that some policy they want (almost always some kind of racism) is the only solution; do some genocide as the means of implementing the policy.