Before the Law

Within hours, AP, NBC, ABC News and dozens of other outlets published analyses framing the law as a new phase in Beijing's ethnic policy.

When the People's Republic was founded in 1949, the Constitution defined China as a "unitary multi-nationality state" — 统一的多民族国家. Fifty-five ethnic groups were officially recognized. Each was classified as a 民族 (minzu) — a nationality with territorial autonomy, language rights, and political representation. The system was imperfect, but the principle was clear: diversity was acknowledged.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party faced a fundamental question: stripped of communist ideology, how does a Chinese-dominated party legitimately govern dozens of distinct nationalities? Scholars Hu Angang and Hu Lianhe provided the answer. Their "Second Generation Ethnic Policy" took the American melting pot as a model and the Soviet collapse as a warning, arguing for the active elimination of ethnic differences.

What did the second generation discard? Regional autonomy was recast not as a right, but as a security risk. Minority languages were no longer protected cultural heritage, but obstacles to national unity. Preferential policies were no longer historical redress, but seeds of separatism. Ethnic fusion was redefined as a matter of national security.

Under Xi Jinping, that architecture is being dissolved. The 55 nationalities are no longer treated as political subjects with collective rights. They are being reclassified — conceptually and legally — as components of a single body: 中华民族共同体, the "Chinese nation community." The shift from 民族 (minzu, nationality) to 族群 (zuqun, ethnic group) strips away territorial and political claims. What remains is culture as folklore, permitted only insofar as it reinforces the unity of the whole.

What followed was a decade of systematic escalation. The phrase was written into the 19th Party Congress report in 2017, then into the Party Charter, then into the Constitution. In 2021, it was declared the "guiding principle" of all ethnic work. By 2023, Xi extended it to "all work in ethnic regions." Each escalation was not a policy debate. It was an order.

In September 2020, the policy moved from documents to reality. Chinese authorities replaced Mongolian-language textbooks with Mandarin versions in Inner Mongolia's schools without warning. Thousands of Southern Mongolians protested. They were met with a crackdown and re-education campaigns. Since then, the term "蒙古族" (Mongol ethnicity) has begun to vanish from China's public discourse.

Our database tracks 20 provincial party newspapers alongside People's Daily. When we measure how frequently each newspaper uses the phrase "铸牢中华民族共同体意识" relative to People's Daily, a clear pattern emerges: the regions China designates as "autonomous" amplify the central signal far more than any other provinces. The places with the least political autonomy produce the most propaganda.

This is not a coincidence. When we overlay the ethnic minority population share of each province against its propaganda amplification ratio, the correlation is visible without a regression line. The higher a province's ethnic minority population share, the more intensely its party newspaper amplifies the central propaganda signal. The state calibrates its messaging intensity to the ethnic composition of its audience.

The Ethnic Unity Promotion Law does not stand alone. In January 2026, China amended the Common Language Law to expand Mandarin use in public life — the linguistic arm of the same campaign. And Article 61 of the new law grants the Chinese government the right to hold individuals or organizations outside China legally accountable for "damaging ethnic unity." This extraterritorial clause echoes the National Security Law imposed on Hong Kong in 2020, under which authorities issued bounties for 34 overseas activists. For the full text of Article 61 and legal analysis, see NPC Observer and ChinaAid.