cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/52545959
*This is an opinion piece by Benedict Rogers, a British human rights lawyer. *
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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.
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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That is why the new law insists that citizens must have “correct views” on history, culture, and religion, and abandon “outdated customs.”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.”
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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.
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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.
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“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.
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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.