China passed a new law calling for ethnic unity on Thursday, March 12, which is seen as a legal boost to further assimilate 55 officially ethnic minorities into the dominant Han Chinese population and a severe threat to human rights.
The Ethnic Unity and Progress Promotion Law, signed into law by Chinese President Xi Jinping, will come into effect from July 1, 2026, and seeks to ramp up promoting the Mandarin language as the “national common language and script.”
This would allow the communist government to legally pursue sinicisation, the systemic process of aligning religious beliefs, ethnic identities, and cultural practices, which was more aggressively implemented under Xi Jinping’s leadership.
At the centre of the law is what the government calls a “sense of community for the Chinese nation,” a phrase recurring throughout the 19 pages of the draft, that analysts believe could mask policies that suppress “minority distinctiveness,” especially concerning specific ethnic minorities like Tibetans and Uyghurs.
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“It indeed signals a shift from nominal ethnic autonomy to enforced integration, potentially masking policies that suppress minority distinctiveness while countering perceived separatist risks,” Sriparna Pathak, Professor of China Studies and International Relations at OP Jindal Global University, told CNBC-TV18. She called it a means of intensifying repression under the guise of unity.
Most of the mandates in the new law — allegiance to the state and the party, Mandarin promotion, control over historical, cultural, and religious narratives, as well as educational institutes — appear to give the state the powers it already exercises with little to no significant consequences.
Pathak explained that the law undermines existing protections for minority customs and self-governance by calling for national unity over regional ethnic autonomy. In Xinjiang and elsewhere, it gives a legal framework for ongoing mass detentions and forced assimilation, she said.
For regions like Tibet, where human rights defenders have presented a severe crackdown on the Tibetan language, with about a million children forced into colonial boarding schools and elders taking initiatives to teach their mother tongue, are frequently detained, analysts say the law could mean harsher punishments since it criminalises advocacy work.
“While China has coercively shaped history and controlled cultural content for years, this law institutionalises these practices nationwide, making them more systematic and resistant to change, thus representing a significant escalation in legal entrenchment rather than a radical shift in on-the-ground actions,” Pathak said.
The law also warns against “external forces” from interfering in matters of ethnic unity and in the name of human rights, while mandating the ethnic minority population “to firmly establish correct views of the state, history, nation, culture, and religion.”
The Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), which functions as the Tibetan government in exile, has condemned the law, saying it stems from China’s fear of instability.”China’s ethnic unity law is a new regulation intended to assimilate different nationalities with distinct identities by forcibly homogenizing into single entity through measures of control and coercion. The ongoing suppression of Tibetan identity, culture and way of life are part and parcel of this grand strategy of ethnic uniformity, which is made out of China’s fear of instability,” Tenzin Lekshay, spokesperson of the CTA told CNBC-TV18.
A closer look at the mandate
Parents or guardians are legally required to instil a love for the Communist Party of China and the nation. The draft also says parents “shall not instil in minors concepts that are harmful to ethnic unity and progress,” which restricts room for dissent of any kind.
To embed this “sense of community for the Chinese nation,” local governments build “education practice bases” and implement specific measures in population management as they deem suitable for local conditions.
The Chinese government will promote its “own systems of historical materials, discourse, and theory concerning the Chinese national community,” so any account or narrative that does not align with the government’s version would be considered illegal.
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Further, the government plans to dictate new social trends and practices and transform outdated customs and practices, with children in China mandated to study “unified textbooks.”
It also makes dissent on social media illegal, requiring internet operators to report content that “undermines ethnic unity and progress” to relevant authorities. “No organisation or individual may use text, images, audio, or video to produce or disseminate information containing content that undermines ethnic unity and progress, such as ethnic hatred or ethnic discrimination,” the draft reads.
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Manoj Kewalramani, Chairperson of the Indo-Pacific Research Programme and a China Studies Research Fellow at the Takshashila Institution, said the law operationalises the Party’s existing assimilationist approach.
“It also creates whole-of-society legal obligations, which will have significant consequences for private sector actors, families and individuals,” he added.
