'China’s new ‘cookie-cutter’ law to shape citizens in the Party’s image', Benedict Rogers

It uses nice terms like ‘ethnic unity,’ but in reality, it is about bringing everyone into line

China’s new "ethnic unity" law, passed by the National People’s Congress last week, is the latest step in Xi Jinping’s campaign of forced Sinicization. It codifies in law what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been implementing for some years — a program of forced assimilation for China’s ethnic minorities aimed at wiping out ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity.

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk expressed concern, arguing the new law “risks entrenching assimilationist policies in statute, restricting minority-language education, and limiting free practice of religion and culture.”

He further said that “its provisions could overly restrict freedoms of expression, belief and assembly and penalise peaceful exercise of minority rights generally,” while reminding that “international human rights law requires states to protect identities of ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities.”

Concepts such as “ethnic unity,” a common national identity, and a shared national language are not in themselves bad ideas. Indeed, in my country — the United Kingdom — and in most Western democracies, they are concepts that are increasingly debated as part of the public discourse.

On one level, it makes sense that citizens of China should be able to speak Mandarin Chinese, the language of the majority, as this will enhance their education, employment, and social mobility prospects.

Sharing a common loyalty to one’s country, regardless of ethnicity, is a desirable objective.

However, there are three points about China’s plans that should be kept in mind.

First, this is less about social cohesion and more about political control and repression.

The “identity” the CCP wants its citizens, of all ethnicities, to adopt is loyalty to the Communist Party. Indeed, the CCP conflates Party and State, so that to be patriotic means to be devoted to the Party.

In any democracy, you can be loyal to your country without being aligned with the governing party. You can be a patriotic American and a critic of the incumbent president. You can be a British patriot and an opponent of the sitting prime minister.

The same is true in Asia’s democracies, such as Japan, Korea, and the Philippines. Even in India under the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi, or in Indonesia under former dictator Suharto’s son-in-law Prabowo Subianto, you can be a political opponent without your patriotism being in doubt.

But not in China. The Party, the State, and the nation are one in the mind of the CCP.

That is why the new law insists that citizens must have “correct views” on history, culture, and religion, and abandon “outdated customs.” It requires parents to “educate and guide children to love the Chinese Communist Party.”

Secondly, this will apply to people who were never part of historic China.

The history is disputed, but certainly for significant periods of history, Tibet and East Turkistan were their own nations, which were invaded by China.

Now the CCP wants us to call East Turkistan — the homeland of the Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim peoples — by the name it has chosen, “Xinjiang,” which literally means “New Frontier.”

It is also mounting a campaign to persuade the world to call Tibet “Xizang,” a Chinese term meaning “Western Zang.”

China invaded Tibet in October 1950.

Last week, Tibetans and friends of Tibet around the world marked the 67th anniversary of the Tibetan National Uprising Day on March 10, 1959. That day, tens of thousands of Tibetans protested against Chinese military occupation and were massacred. The Dalai Lama escaped into exile, where he has been ever since.

A campaign of forced assimilation has already been underway for decades in both occupied Tibet and occupied East Turkistan.

Under Xi Jinping, it has intensified. More than one million Tibetan children have been forcibly separated from their parents and coerced into colonial boarding schools, where they are prohibited from learning their own Tibetan language, practising their own Tibetan Buddhist religion, or celebrating their Tibetan culture.

United Nations experts have spoken of their concern. Thousands of Buddhist monasteries have been destroyed or desecrated in Tibet over the past seven decades. Tibetan Buddhist monks have been jailed. Millions have been killed.

In East Turkistan — or Xinjiang — Uyghurs are facing what is increasingly recognised as a genocide. The United States government and several parliaments around the world have called it a genocide, as has an independent tribunal chaired by British barrister Sir Geoffrey Nice, who prosecuted Slobodan Milosevic.

The United Nations has suggested it may amount to international crimes, particularly crimes against humanity. This has included the destruction or desecration or closure of mosques, and the persecution of Muslims for normal religious activities such as fasting during Ramadan, praying, reading the Holy Koran, wearing a beard of a certain length or a headscarf,  or abstaining from pork or alcohol.

Thirdly, Xi Jinping has also been mounting a campaign of Sinicization against Christians across China, which again proves that this is not about culture or language, but politics.

The Sinicization of religion is not about making religion culturally sensitive or integrated — it is about making religion politically co-opted. It is about forcing state-controlled churches to display portraits of Xi and CCP propaganda banners alongside, or sometimes instead of, religious imagery.

A crackdown against Christians who refuse to comply — or who run churches outside the state-approved institutions — is intensifying, resulting in the detention last October of Pastor Ezra Jin, founder of the Zion Church network, and 17 of his pastors and elders.

This new legislation builds on and enshrines into law this persecution.  It uses nice terms like “ethnic unity,” but in reality, it is about bringing everyone into line, requiring everyone to conform to the CCP’s teachings and propaganda.

“Ethnic unity” is very different from “inter-ethnic harmony.”

A 22-year-old Chinese student, Zhang Yadi, has been detained since last summer because, while studying in Paris, she had become involved with a group working to promote understanding and awareness among Chinese students about Tibetan culture.

This was promoting inter-ethnic harmony, an idea it turns out the CCP dislikes, and so she was arrested when she returned home to visit her family.

Back in 2018, a tiny, inconsequential political party in Hong Kong — the Hong Kong Independence Party, set up by a young man called Andy Chan — was banned.

Diversity, of ethnicity, religion, culture, or thought, and inter-ethnic harmony or pluralism of religious, philosophical, spiritual, political, or cultural ideas, are concepts that terrify the CCP.

That is why it has introduced this new law — because it wants to make every Chinese citizen, regardless of their ethnicity, a cookie-cutter mold in the Party’s image. It is a campaign of forced assimilation that is genocidal in its intentions.

This article was published in UCA News on 17 March 2026.

Photo: Dong Fang, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons