Month: September 2026

On 1 July, China’s Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress came into force – the country’s first comprehensive national law on ethnic affairs. Within days came denunciations from Washington and Brussels, a European Parliament resolution, and a wave of headlines announcing that China had ordered its minority peoples to “assimilate”. CNN’s version: “China tells its ethnic minorities to integrate or face consequences.”

In this contribution to the international webinar China’s National Unity vs US Social Hierarchy, Carlos Martinez looks at the distance between what the law actually says and what we have been told it says. The law prohibits discrimination against any ethnic group, explicitly reaffirms the right of all peoples to use and develop their own languages, and requires the state to direct infrastructure, industry and public services towards minority regions. It continues a framework that in the West would be called affirmative action – preferential university admissions, bilingual education, protected minority-language broadcasting, autonomy arrangements, and exemption from the one-child policy throughout its existence.

“Assimilation”, meanwhile, is not a neutral word. It names specific and well-documented crimes: the residential schools of Canada and the United States, the stolen generations in Australia, forced adoption and conversion, languages beaten out of colonised peoples – including generations of Welsh schoolchildren punished for speaking their own. Applying that word to China takes an association rooted in Western colonial history and lets it do the work that evidence cannot.

The video also goes through the record the coverage leaves out – life expectancy in Xinjiang rising from around 30 in 1949 to 77 today, Uyghur population growth of 16 percent between 2010 and 2020 against 2 percent for the Han population, 420 poverty-stricken counties in ethnic autonomous areas lifted out of absolute poverty, minority-language publishing and schooling, and central government transfers flowing towards the periphery rather than away from it – along with the documented history of CIA and National Endowment for Democracy sponsorship of separatism, the strategic reasons Xinjiang and Xizang matter, and the warning of Yugoslavia.

The article this contribution is based on: Manufactured outrage: the truth about China’s ethnic unity law (Friends of Socialist China).

The webinar was organised by Friends of Socialist China, the United National Antiwar Coalition and the International Manifesto Group, with contributions from Chen Weihua, Jason Smith, Jacqueline Luqman, Arnold August and Sara Flounders.