It is widely assessed that the Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, enacted on July 1 2026, is the denouement of the ‘second generation ethnic policy’, an aggressive assimilationist style of governance that has been in place for well over a decade.
It is China’s brazen coming-out party as a modern colonial power, as it no longer feels the need to hide its colonial intentions. By formally dissolving the on-paper provisions of the 1984 regional ethnic autonomy law, which ostensibly protected local languages, cultures and practices, it is also doing away with the need to maintain the façade of recognising autonomous regional identities as distinct and deserving of self-governance.
This has been made clear over the years through assimilationist campaigns, policies and laws that can be summed up as cartographic and demographic violence, targeting both the identities of the people and the land on which they stand.
The Ethnic Unity Law is particularly damning for Tibetans, Uighurs and Mongolians, who are the primary targets of the legislation. Tibetans in exile across the world have been resounding in their rejection of the law through multiple protests, culminating in the self-immolation of Tibetan activist Lobga Rangzen outside the UN headquarters in New York on 2 July, a day after the law came into force on the founding day of the Chinese Communist Party.
This marks the 171st documented case of Tibetan self-immolation against Chinese rule, beginning in the diaspora in 1998 and taking off in Tibet from 2008. The final calls have unanimously been for freedom, the preservation of Tibetan culture and the return of the Dalai Lama to Tibet, or the sovereignty embodied by the personhood of His Holiness.
It is this uncompromising allegiance to the Dalai Lama and to Tibet’s sovereignty that China is trying to stamp out with its new law.
The serious impact of this piece of legislation on the ground is evident throughout its provisions, especially Article 15, which mandates the use of Mandarin as the common national language, with no tolerance for anyone ‘obstructing’ the work; Article 46, which requires religious groups to sinicise religions in pursuit of a sense of community of the Chinese nation; and Article 63, which extends extraterritorial jurisdiction by legally implicating all organisations and overseas individuals outside the PRC for allegedly supporting activities that undermine China’s national unity.
The provisions of other articles must also be highlighted for how they expand upon the provisions of these three articles.
Article 10 illustrates what sort of activities Article 63 warns about. It characterises ethnicity, religion and human rights as forms of excuses that the PRC will resolutely oppose.
Article 17 reveals the legislation’s chauvinistic nature by requiring the promotion of the establishment of China’s own systems for historical data, discourse and theory on the community of the Chinese people, while supporting institutions conducting research along these lines. Or in other words, this amounts to the revision of history to align it with the Communist Party’s narrative.
In keeping with state control of the information and media system, which has resulted in the information blackout underway in Tibet, Articles 19, 31 and 52 require all forms of media and information-provider services, including big data and AI, to publicise and disseminate information promoting the great unity of the Chinese people while requiring all levels of governments to strengthen the alert and report system like the grid management system in the ethnic sectors to monitor activities closely.
The combined provisions of the law pronounce punitive legal action for ‘obstruction’ of work in the pursuit of ethnic unity and progress, while instructing people on how to conduct everyday activities to forge consent to building a strong sense of the community of the Chinese people.
The legislation is an example of Gramsci’s double face of law in practice, in which law straddles the tactics of coercion and consent used to maintain control. The legislation uses coercion through the enforcement power of legal institutions, phrased in the current legislation as: ‘where a crime is constituted, criminal responsibility is pursued in accordance with law’.
It also seeks to engender consent by establishing what a ‘normal’ way of being is, through broad and binding instructions on what education, ideology and religious activities to carry out at the family level, including exhortations to use the common language and script, embrace common responsibilities, common destiny, common prosperity, common mission and so on.
The Gramscian concept of ‘common sense’ refers to the uncritical beliefs of ordinary people who regard systems as natural, thereby creating fertile ground for the ruling party to impose its rules through consent. In the current legislation, consent is also incentivised through a system of rewards, spelt out in Article 55: ‘Groups and individuals who make outstanding contributions to the cause of ethnic unity and progress shall be given commendations and awards in accordance with relevant state provisions.’
The law throws in enough virtuousness for its propagandists to defend its benevolence. The repressive stipulations are placed between high-sounding, vague and broadly defined articles.
China’s core virtue-signalling has always revolved around its pursuit of ‘progress’, domestically touted as ‘common prosperity’, which the ruling Communist Party believes provides the mandate for its rule.
The allusion to the primacy of progress represents the PRC’s position on the superiority of economic rights over political and civil rights.
A significant way in which China represses Tibetans and other minoritised groups is through its Mandarin-language-based economy: a state-induced market system that incentivises identification with the Han Chinese majority and the Chinese Communist Party’s way of being.
The absurdity is not lost on China’s project of global domination and ties back to its ancient political concepts, which are now being repurposed.
Tianxia, translating as ‘all under heaven’, describes the Chinese imperial cosmology of the universe or world order. It is being repurposed by the Communist Party into the concept of the ‘Community with a Shared Future for Mankind’. What remains intact is the Sino-centric world order, which is currently on display through its overreach in the Global South and projects such as the BRI.
Along the way, China actively seeks to redefine internationally formulated norms and terms, including human rights, democracy, sovereignty, human values and progress, to suit its own world order.
Tianming, ‘mandate of heaven’ or the divine legitimacy to rule, is replaced by a secular, performance-based legitimacy, in which the mandate comes from the party’s ability to create economic growth and stability. It also takes away people’s ability to retract the mandate and grants a permanent historical mandate to rule, as the party will take China along the path of great rejuvenation. China today considers its unchecked ‘developmental’ projects to qualify as state benevolence, warranting gratitude and capitulation.
For the culturally rich and proud Tibetans, who have securely embodied their civilisational richness, cosmology and a world order that extends beyond life, the biggest 20th-century colonial force simply does not cut it. While China is taking off the veil of its colonial design, Tibetans are putting on the armour of their civilisational richness and identities as Tibetans to withstand and rise above this colonial inundation.
