On July 1, 2026, the “Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress” came into effect in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The law has drawn scrutiny from many quarters, including United Nations’ Human Rights Commissioner Volker Turk, who has called for the law to be repealed, warning that it risks “deepening restrictions on freedoms of language, education, practice of religion, culture, expression and assembly.” The following will not repeat what has already been said but will comment on some issues in the law that may not yet have been adequately explored.
The pitfalls of the law
Though the law acknowledges that “the state is to persist in promoting commonality while respecting and embracing differences” and that ethnic minorities have the right to autonomy (see Articles 6 and 8), the paramount goal is “preserving the great unity of the Chinese people.” The word “unity” is mentioned 108 times, while “improve system of ethnic autonomous regions” appears only once, rendering the latter purely decorative. The law states that “acts that undermine ethnic unity and create ethnic division are prohibited.” However, there is no corresponding clause prohibiting acts that undermine minority rights to autonomy. It also has no mention of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s historic oppression of Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongolians, and other ethnic minorities.
The new law, instead of acknowledging and redressing these injustices, continues to uphold the party line of denying these communities’ right to self-determination.
The new law, instead of acknowledging and redressing these injustices, continues to uphold the party line of denying these communities’ right to self-determination. This also necessarily further strengthens the oppression of the Han majority as well, because Beijing’s authoritarian state apparatus always emerges stronger, as it develops new skills and technology by oppressing minorities.
The law is another top-down attempt by the party-state to define the meaning of “national unity,” “common national identity among ethnic groups,” and what it means to “strengthen cohesion.” In effect, the real purpose of the law is ensuring both minorities’ and Han Chinese’ subservience to the party-state. For example, Article 4 promises to “ensur[e] the shared role of all ethnic peoples as the masters of the country.” But what does it mean for everyone to be “masters of the country?” Article 20 offers some guidance:
The parents or other guardians of minors shall perform their family education responsibilities in accordance with law, educating and guiding minors to love the Chinese Communist Party, Motherland, people (人民), and the Chinese people (中華民族); and establishing the concept of the Chinese people as a single family; and they must not instill ideas in minors that are not conducive to improving ethnic unity and progress.
In other words, the law already predetermines the party’s version of “national unity” as the only choice for all ethnic peoples. This version of national unity gives the state immense new power to compel parents to instill the ideology of “loving the party” in their children. This is a further expansion of the party-state’s power to intervene in family lives and dictate how parents teach their children.
While the people, masters of the house, have the legal duty to “love” the party, no similar clause stipulates that the party must also love the people in return. Isn’t this very unfair? And how do we define “love” in legal terms? Laws can only discourage or encourage behaviors through legal sanctions; they can never teach people how to love, a realm beyond all legal systems. Any attempt to make loving one’s country a legal duty is, in reality, nothing but ideological control. This law does not stop at the thought control of the parents of ethnic minorities, but also of Han Chinese as well.
Article 15 is a direct assault on both minority and Han Chinese rights to their own language. It declares that “the state is to fully promote the spread of the nation’s common language and script. Citizens’ learning and use of the nation’s common language and script must not be obstructed by any organization or individual.” By “nation’s common language,” it means Mandarin. In 2001, the “Law on the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language” was passed to make Mandarin even more dominant in China’s public life, at the expense of minorities’ rights to use their own languages as a teaching medium in schools and in public spaces in general. It also specifically stipulated that “anyone who interferes with the learning and use of the common language of others shall be ordered . . . to make corrections.” Tibetan dissidents criticized this clause as providing cover for the authority to silence Tibetans who were discontent with its effort in undermining their language.
This law has affected Han Chinese communities’ rights to use their “dialects” as well. For instance, in Guangdong, Cantonese-speaking children were forced to give up their mother tongue (considered by the party to be “dialects,” hence inferior to Mandarin) in schools, even when residents mostly speak Cantonese, despite a consensus among educators that using the residents’ mother tongue as a teaching medium is the best practice. Gradually, schoolchildren were banned from speaking Cantonese even during breaks, and those who broke the rule were disciplined. Eventually, the policy angered many Guangdong people, which led to the outbreak of a campaign to save Cantonese. When Xi Jinping took power in 2012, the campaign began to die down. Hongkongers watched this process closely, and soon they saw similar policies imposed on them as well. Indeed, Beijing’s increasing denial of Hongkongers’ self-determination was one of the reasons for their 2019 revolt. The new 2026 law now goes even further by greatly expanding state coercion of residents to speak the “common language.”
Another clause further strengthens the policy of forced integration for minorities, meaning greater power for the state to move minorities from their home regions to predominantly Han Chinese living areas. Article 22 stipulates that county governments should “advance the establishment of mutually embedding the community environment, improving social conditions for all ethnicities to live and learn together.” One can consider past examples for what “mutual embedding” entails. Last year, the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region promoted a poverty-alleviation project to urbanize dozens of ethnic minority groups. This was done by relocating them to newly built residential areas in cities to advance the party’s policy of “improving social conditions for all ethnicities to live and learn together.” To accomplish this, the state heavily intervened to enforce this migration, from town planning and promoting Mandarin at the expense of minority languages, to forcing minorities to leave their homelands. In this vein, the new law makes no mention of seeking the consent of minorities for such “mutual embedding.” One also cannot legally complain that the party is violating any part of the constitution, as the clause on the freedom of movement was abolished in 1975.
Daiyitong: China’s imperial vision
This Ethnic Unity Law, along with other repressive laws that preceded and accompany it, points to a China that is increasingly totalitarian and moving closer to a far-right version of nationalism. Especially alarming is the specific term it uses to describe “unity.” This problem is less obvious in the English translation. In the preamble, it says, “all ethnic peoples of China have consistently adhered to the ideal of unity in which the nation’s territory must not be divided.” The translation is inaccurate and misleading. The Chinese original term for “the ideal of unity” here is dayitong (大一統). A better translation is “the ideal of great or grand unity.” This is still not satisfactory, as the phrase is not just about “unity.”
As a concept, daiyitong was originally coined in an ancient Confucian classic text, Gongyang Zhuan. The original idea is comparable to what Thomas Hobbes argued for 2500 years later: a unified state under an absolute sovereign. The idea was put into practice by the first Chinese emperor, Qin Shi Huang, when he unified China in 221 BCE. Qin became so extreme in his pursuit of “unity” that his empire lasted only 15 years before being overthrown by multiple rebellions. Yet, after minor adjustments, both his basic ideas and practices became the standard model of empire-building in China thereafter.
The crux of the matter regarding daiyitong is that it is not just about a unified state that denies minority rights, but also about the sovereign’s absolute power.
The crux of the matter regarding daiyitong is that it is not just about a unified state that denies minority rights, but also about the sovereign’s absolute power. As historian Ge Zhaoguang puts it, “from the original meaning of ‘great unity’, the concept was initially intended to safeguard the absolute control of imperial authority over the empire against uprisings of barbarians, feudal lords, and local powers.”
Although the term dayitong only appears once in the law, it is not a one-off occurrence in Xi’s China. As early as 2014, Xi Jinping had already explicitly linked his political vision to dayitong. In a more recent 2023 speech at the Symposium on Cultural Inheritance and Development, he repeated the term favorably four times. In recent years, state publishing houses encouraged and funded hundreds of research papers on the subject, coinciding with the growing concentration of power in Xi’s hands. Now the CCP has officially incorporated the term into the new law. With this context, one cannot help but relate the term to Xi’s increasingly absolutist governance. When he made the People’s Congress abolish the two-term limit on the executive office, he also justified it as part of China’s common pursuit of the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”
The early CCP and KMT on the Chinese nation
These developments in the PRC’s attitude to national minorities and governance evoke the conservative and chauvinistic approaches that the Kuomintang (KMT) promoted, and which the early CCP challenged. After the 1911 Chinese revolution, a majority of the Chinese literate class abandoned absolutism and embraced republicanism. But there were differences in how they conceived of China’s struggle for democracy and national unification. When Chen Duxiu and his comrades first founded the CCP, the party’s 1922 manifesto argued that:
The Chinese people should oppose joint-provincial autonomy dominated by warlord separatism and dayitong-style unification by military means, first by overthrowing all warlords and unifying China under the rule of the people, thereby establishing a genuine democratic republic. At the same time, to accommodate different economies, we must prevent the expansion of warlord power on the one hand, while respecting the self-determination of peoples on the frontier on the other hand. This would be done by facilitating the creation of autonomous regions for Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang, which would then unite to form a Chinese federal republic.
On the other hand, the KMT’s commitment to republicanism and democracy was always half-hearted. The KMT was never serious about respecting minority rights. After Chiang Kai-shek crushed the CCP in 1927 and gained national power, he soon revealed his real ambition to concentrate power in his hands under an absolutist rule—dayitong. His only problem was that he lacked the means to achieve his ambition of asserting effective control and sovereignty over Tibet, Xinjiang, and Mongolia.
In the face of a full-scale invasion by Japan in 1939, there was a debate, first in academia, about the relationship between the Han Chinese and ethnic minorities. A leading historian at the time, Gu Xiegang, argued that there was only one nation—the Chinese nation—within “Chinese” territory because, for him, the minorities were also considered “Chinese.” This amounted to denying that they enjoyed rights to self-determination as ethnic minorities. A well-known sociologist, Fei Xiaotong, criticized this thesis as one-sided because the “Chinese nation” was never a homogeneous whole; rather, it was highly diverse. Chiang closed the debate in 1943 in his book, The Fate of the Chinese Nation, by affirming Gu’s position. He contended that the minorities were just zongzu (宗族), or “clans” of the same family of zhonghuaminzu (中華民族), or “Chinese nation.” By flatly denying that the minorities were nations at all, distinctive from the Han, he nullified their right to self-determination. This was also the text Chiang invoked dayitong twice, thus linking his vision for the KMT with an imperial China.
Instead of replacing Chiang’s modern continuation of dayitong, Beijing has incorporated and strengthened it.
The CCP’s ascent to power in 1949 was supposed to replace Chiang’s one-party dictatorship with people’s democracy. This was enshrined in the new constitution of 1954 in Article 2, which upheld the people’s sovereignty, and in Article 4, which stipulated the autonomy of minorities. The CCP’s record of implementing these clauses has been very poor. But this trend has only gotten worse since Xi took power. The new law, instead of giving back what is owed to ethnic minorities and to the Han Chinese, is merely an even stronger noose around both communities. Instead of replacing Chiang’s modern continuation of dayitong, Beijing has incorporated and strengthened it.
Looking at this law, many Taiwanese people may have a sense of what would happen to them if Taiwan “unifies” with China. The main languages of Taiwanese Hokkien, Hakka, and the 16 different languages of the Indigenous peoples may be curtailed in schools, as was the case when Chiang ruled Taiwan. In Chiang’s time, the children were punished for daring to speak them in schools. This is not to mention that Beijing’s new law explicitly targets “organizations and individuals outside the territory of the PRC that commit acts aimed at the PRC that undermine ethnic unity and progress or create ethnic division are to be pursued for legal responsibility in accordance with law.” So, Taiwanese people living in Taiwan are not the only ones who are targeted. The law targets anyone in the world who dares to “undermine” Chinese ethnic unity.
The problem of national unity
Some in the left, however, have misconceptions about this new law. There is a non-Chinese commentator who sees the law very differently. Q. Anthony Ali, a Canadian writer now based in Beijing, wrote a long favorable essay defending the law. Against critics of the law, he cites Article 8, which states that “the state is to uphold and improve the system of ethnic autonomous regions, preserving national and ethnic unity.” But how? This article has only 18 words and provides little detail on how this system would be “improved.” On the contrary, what the law does specify, as explained earlier, is the wide scope of power given to the party and the state to uphold “national unity.” With this in mind, common sense—and the PRC’s past actions—suggests that Article 8 is purely decorative, and that only those articles that uphold “national unity” are the law’s quintessential content.
Since the CCP came to power, its policy of ethnic autonomy has meant only administrative autonomy, not political autonomy, let alone the right to self-determination
Even if Article 8 provides more detail, it would not mean much. Since the CCP came to power, its policy of ethnic autonomy has meant only administrative autonomy, not political autonomy, let alone the right to self-determination (as promised by the party to ethnic minorities before 1940). Two scholars from mainland China, Xu Xiaoping and Jin Xin, acknowledged in a state-sanctioned book, Report on Chinese National Problems, that the 1984 Law on Regional Autonomy only covers areas like “marriage, inheritance, elections, family planning, compulsory education, etc.,” and “is completely silent on the regions’ economic rights to control finance, taxation, foreign trade, development of their natural resources, etc.”
Ali’s argument is false, but consistent. His apology for Beijing comes from his central belief that “national unity” is essential for postcolonial states. He argues this by lengthily discussing Congo’s colonial and post-colonial tragic history, focusing on how the country continued to be exploited and oppressed by imperialism even after independence. Thus, national unity is necessary to defend against imperialism. Through this history, Ali guides his readers to the conclusion that “for a developing state, national unity is the condition under which land, resources, schooling, taxation, and security become national rather than foreign-managed . . . China doesn’t have the luxury of treating the exploitation of ethnic and regional division as an obsolete Cold War strategy.”
National unity is necessary, Ali argues, because US imperialism continues to subject countries, from the Congo to China, to its dominance by sowing divisions within the latter. To prove this, he quoted a US Army colonel saying that “the CIA would want to destabilize China.”
The problem here is not that US imperialism’s exploitation and oppression of lesser nations and their working people is not something evil—it is, and must be resisted. The issue lies in the binary Ali constructs—either you support US imperialism, or you support the CCP, along with its claims to “national unity.” This, however, is a false dichotomy. A basic democratic or socialist position on the nation is precisely to avoid prioritizing national unity over the value of democracy and the rights of minority or oppressed peoples. We can only endorse this unity when it is based on full consent from the people, and, last but not least, respecting ethnic minorities’ right to self-determination. To use the term “national unity” as a sweeping generalization is anything but a genuinely free union of communities.
Ali bases his argument on the history of post-colonial Congo, but his conclusion and analysis are also one-sided. In retrospect, the post-war anti-colonial movement’s achievement in winning independence has failed to deliver its promises of democracy and equality—or even “socialism,” in some countries. But this is not just the fault of imperial dominance. Often it is also because their new indigenous elites, or national bourgeoisie, were more interested in power-grabbing and self-enrichment. It is precisely because of this that they also tended to strike compromises with imperialism. Post-Deng China is one of the best examples of this kind of post-colonial state.
Indeed, Xi has been standing up to Trump’s bullying. However, one must not forget that it is also Xi who, ironically, is becoming the new champion of the neoliberal world order of “free trade” and capitalism, as laid down by the Clinton administration after Trump dumped it. This is why Xi continues to welcome foreign investment while exporting vast amounts of Chinese capital as well–for him, Trump is bad, but American money is good. The contest between Xi’s China and Trump’s US is, first and foremost, the fight over their share of the world market–one built upon the exploitation and oppression of working people across the globe. Therefore, we criticize Beijing not because we support Washington. On the contrary, we do so because both regimes are now underpinning global capitalism. They do this by exploiting billions of people, even as they fight among themselves.
Ali advises us to support the PRC and oppose the US. My reply to this is that we should choose neither of them. We remain opposed to both regimes and come forward to hold them accountable for their own crimes. Ali’s false dichotomy is only a concern for those whose perspective tends to be state-centered—they support this or that state but have little interest in listening to the voices of those on the ground. It is no accident that Ali’s source of information all comes from official PRC media. In contrast, a genuine leftist position must be people-centered—we make political judgments based on our assessment of how democratic, equal, and free those societies are, and how much diversity of voices is heard.
