this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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China tells its minorities to integrate or face consequences with sweeping new law (edition.cnn.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago by MicroWave@lemmy.world to c/world@lemmy.world
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For years, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has pushed ethnic minority groups like Tibetans and Uyghurs to adopt an identity rooted in Chinese nationality and allegiance to the ruling Communist Party.

Now, that push has been codified into a sweeping new law that reaches into classrooms, neighborhoods and homes – and gives Beijing the right to target people outside of its borders that it believes violate its rules.

The statute, officially known as the Ethnic Unity and Progress Promotion Law, came into effect on July 1. It bans acts that “undermine ethnic unity or create ethnic division” among China’s 56 officially recognized ethnicities, which include a Han Chinese majority that makes up over 90% of the country’s 1.4 billion people.

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[–] setsubyou@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago

The situation in the US is a bit different though because the US has been doing this for over a hundred years and only turned around “recently” (in my lifetime, in particular via NALA in 1990 for native American languages). The US famously went as far as kidnapping native American children, and the path to any kind of protection has been a long struggle that people still remember. Non-native languages also were systematically eradicated (e.g. famously German after WWII).

At the same time the Civil Rights Act requiring equal access is still interpreted to mean that everybody needs to learn English, state laws still require grading within an English based framework, etc. As a result Americans who grew up in the US can generally speak English, and most people probably consider that a good thing too because in theory it means young Americans are not blocked from climbing the social ladder on grounds of their language.

In contrast, China has 20-30% of Chinese born in China who can’t speak standard Mandarin. There are large differences between more urban and more rural areas. For example, in Shanghai virtually everybody speaks Mandarin and nowadays it has more speakers there than Shanghainese has. But e.g. in Kashgar in the Uyghur AR, around 50% can’t speak Mandarin at all.

In the US you basically have to go to Puerto Rico (which is less integrated than a Chinese AR, e.g. with no voting rights in US elections) to get anything close to that, and even there English is mandatory in schools. Otherwise, Hawaii is the only actual state with two official languages, but Hawaii has very high English proficiency regardless. The same goes for other areas where some other language than English is dominant - the US has areas with >90% Spanish as a first language outside Puerto Rico too, but people there generally also speak English.

So basically if we’re judging these laws by US standards we’re looking at it a bit differently than it looks from a Chinese POV because the US has previously already put significant effort in suppressing languages other than English, which we still remember, and as a result there also is no problem of children of minorities not speaking English and thereby not being able to work and live in most of the US. For the US it would be a regression, but for China it’s also progress in terms of integration and equal rights.