Xi Jinping’s ‘Forging’ of ‘Ethnic Unity and Progress’

China’s new law on “Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress” that came into effect on July 1 has drawn considerable international attention. That’s largely due to Article 63 of the new law, which stipulates that “organizations and individuals outside the territory of the People’s Republic of China who commit acts that undermine ethnic unity and progress or create ethnic division shall be held legally responsible according to law.” For some commentators, this constitutes a new step in Beijing’s efforts to “pursue organizations and individuals outside China who allegedly undermine ethnic unity or promote ethnic division.” Article 63, however, simply codifies Beijing’s long-standing practices of transnational repression of religious and ethnic minority diasporas, such as Uyghurs and Tibetans. What is more noteworthy is how the new law consolidates a decades-long endeavor by the party-state to fundamentally remake ethnic minority policy in a manner that suggests that Xi Jinping’s solution to the governance of China’s ethnic minorities is to once and for all break down the barriers that he (and the Chinese Communist Party) believes prevent their assimilation. As such the law constitutes but the latest attempt to operationalize the CCP’s preferred narrative construction of zhonghua minzu (中华民族, the “Chinese nation”) in which all of China’s 56 officially recognized ethnic groups are “interconnected” by “history, culture, and blood” regardless of ethnicity. The new law demonstrates this in three major ways. First, the law repeatedly states that all ethnic groups form a single historical community united by “shared” territory, history, culture, and political future. In doing so it further entrenches the party-state’s decisive shift away from the system of nominal ethnic “autonomy” reestablished after the Cultural Revolution toward a framework that eschews ethnocultural heterogeneity in favor of “forging” (铸牢)a “common national consciousness” with a “shared spiritual home.” This concept of “forging” in the original Chinese, as James Leibold has noted, denotes not only the casting of metal into a mold but also “firmness” and “enclosure,” resulting in a phrase that conveys “the deliberate casting and stabilization of identity under party-state direction.” As the articles under Chapter 2 (“Building a New Spiritual Home”) demonstrate, this objective of “casting and stabilization” is to be achieved, in part, by stipulating that “schools and other educational institutions at all levels and types” must “integrate the requirement of forging a strong sense of community of the Chinese nation throughout the entire education process” through the use of “nationally unified textbooks,” “the national common language and script as the basic language and teaching language,” and the construction of a “discourse system” that “explains the history and connotations of the multi-ethnic unity pattern of the Chinese nation and civilization.” Significantly, while the law notes that the state “respects and guarantees the study and use of minority languages and scripts,” their use is subordinated to “the national common language” with “state organs, social organizations, enterprises, institutions, and other social organizations” to “highlight the national common language and script” in everyday use, publications, and public signage. Second, Chapters 3 and 4 (“Promoting Exchange, Exchange, and Integration” and “Promoting Common Prosperity and Development”) frame social and economic development as critical mechanisms for achieving the “forging” of a “common national consciousness” by “advancing all ethnic groups toward socialist modernization together.” The core theme of Chapter 3 is that of the “integration” ethnic minorities with the majority Han Chinese population. This is to be achieved through coordinated “economic and social development” that will emphasize the “construction of interconnected community environments.” Here, the law states that “people’s governments at or above the county level” will develop the “joint construction of population mobility service platforms between ethnic regions and between ethnic regions and between other regions,” support “two-way cross-regional enrolment in higher education institutions in ethnic minority regions and other regions,” and in schools and “other educational institutions at all levels and types” promote “the joint learning, living, and growth and progress of students of all ethnic groups.” Given the now well-documented use of coerced Uyghur labor and the transfer of thousands of Uyghur “surplus” laborers to other areas of China, the focus on “population mobility” in the new law suggests the possible extension of such practices to other ethnic minority populations so as to weaken linguistic, cultural, or religious “barriers” to integration through their placement in Han Chinese dominated environments. The emphasis on “cross-regional” enrollment and “joint living” in the educational domain, too, points toward the objective of subjecting ethnic minority populations to an environment and system focused primarily on the inculcation of Han Chinese values, ethics, and norms. Chapter 4 (“Promoting Common Prosperity and Development), meanwhile, exhibits the core themes of what has been described as the “developmentalist” turn in CCP thinking on ethnic minority policy over the past two decades. Most explicitly displayed in the party’s approach to Xinjiang and Tibet, the “developmentalist” mindset sees economic development and modernization as the key on the one hand to breaking down the social, economic, and cultural barriers between non-Han minorities and the Han Chinese majority, and on the other, the development of non-Han into “high quality” citizens. Thus, the articles of Chapter 4 underscore commitments to improve infrastructure, reduce regional inequality, promote industrial development, encourage labor mobility, and integrate ethnic regions into national development strategies. Third, the law firmly embeds the CCP’s objective that religion must contribute to the development of a “sense of community of the Chinese nation.” Article 46, for example, explicitly asserts that “religious organizations, religious colleges, and religious activity venues” must undertake “publicity and education” to strengthen “the sense of community of the Chinese nation” and “adhere to the Sinicization of religion in China” in order to “promote patriotic traditions, and foster ethnic harmony.” What this means in practice, as demonstrated by the regulation of Islam among Turkic Muslim populations in Xinjiang and Hui communities throughout China, is an endeavor to ensure both the alignment of “religious beliefs with socialist values” and the confinement of religion to “administrative boundaries” defined by the CCP’s ideology. In this manner, “Sinicized” religion will serve as an extension of party governance. The “Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress” should therefore be understood as more than another piece of domestic legislation. Rather, it stands as the legal codification of the party-state’s conviction that China’s long-term stability depends not on accommodating ethnic diversity but on remaking it. By placing education, language, labor mobility, economic development, and religion at the service of “forging” a common national consciousness, the law provides a comprehensive legal framework for an assimilationist project that has already reshaped policy in Xinjiang and Tibet and now appears to be set to extend across all of China’s officially recognized ethnic groups. Thus, the significance of the law lies not simply in its controversial extraterritorial reach, but in what it reveals about the trajectory of party rule under Xi. Ethnic difference is no longer treated as a feature of the PRC to be managed through limited autonomy but as an obstacle to national unity that must be transformed through law, ideology, and state power. As a result, this legislation marks another step in Xi’s broader effort to recast the relationship between the CCP, the state, and society – one in which legal authority serves not merely to regulate behavior but to reshape identity itself. For outside observers, the law offers perhaps the clearest statement yet that Beijing’s preferred solution to what it terms the “ethnic question”” is not coexistence with diversity, but its gradual absorption into a singular, party-defined conception of the Chinese nation.