China tells its minorities to integrate or face consequences with sweeping new law | CNN
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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.

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.

  • treesartlife@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    16 days ago

    Define integrate. I live in a country that I wasn’t born in. Obviously, I follow the laws, but I don’t owe anyone to change my personality. I eat whatever the fuck I want, dress the way I want, etc. I’m allergic to narrow-mindness because it implies low intelligence, among other things

    • ALoafOfBread@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      16 days ago

      Here’s the wiki article on the law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_on_Promoting_Ethnic_Unity_and_Progress. Some stuff makes sense - like economic modernization of regions with many minorities (especially poor regions), and teaching Mandarin in schools so that everyone is formally taught Mandarin, preserving cultural works and texts of minority groups. Other stuff seems repressive, like the broad enforcement section, the extremely broad reach of the law into all public and private institutions, legislating what various actors can/can’t teach the youth if it might harm Chinese ethnic unity. Very ethnostate-coded stuff on the whole, not great.

      “Chapter I… tasks the whole of government and society to achieve these goals, mandating general obligations on a wide range of public and private actors such as … the military.”

      “Chapter II, titled Building a Shared Spiritual Home, lays out the ideological characteristics … requiring fostering identification with ‘the great motherland, the Chinese nation, Chinese culture, the Communist Party of China, and socialism with Chinese characteristics’ through patriotic education … and promotion of ‘Chinese cultural symbols and image of the Chinese nation’. It also codifies the predominance of Standard Chinese (Putonghua) in public life … and requires that Chinese characters be displayed more prominently than minority scripts if both must be used in public.”

      “It tasks the Ministry of Education and the National Ethnic Affairs Commission in developing textbooks regarding ‘the community of the Chinese nation’ … It vows to support the standardization, digitization, and preservation of minority texts. It broadly requires media, internet service providers, families, among others, to promote the CCP’s ethnic policy … while prohibiting them from ‘instilling in minors ideas detrimental to ethnic unity and progress’.”

      “Chapter V and VI concern the enforcement mechanisms … permits citizens to report conduct that ‘undermines ethnic unity and progress’ … Procuratorates may initiate public interest litigation when any such conduct also ‘undermines national interests or the public interest’. It generally leaves penalties to be imposed under other applicable laws. It also asserts jurisdiction over foreign organizations and individuals that ‘commit acts targeting the PRC that undermine ethnic unity and progress or create ethnic division’.[7] The law empowers the state to pursue those outside of China perceived as undermining notions of ethnic unity.”

      • marcos@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        16 days ago

        It’s quite standard fascist discourse:

        Point to real problem that everybody wants to solve; declare that some policy they want (almost always some kind of racism) is the only solution; do some genocide as the means of implementing the policy.

          • WoodScientist@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            15 days ago

            “Define how this policy targeting the cultural extermination of a racial group is racist. Please be precise. I need nits to pick.”

            They weren’t handing out many brain cells the day you were born, were they?

            Genocide apologist.

            • marxismtomorrow@lemmy.todayEnglish
              0·
              15 days ago

              Please, and I do mean this, please read the fucking text of the law.

              This is the opposite of cultural extermination. This explicitly defines cultural and language protections wherein the protected groups are required to have their language and culture and history in schools.

              You illiterate cunt.

              • stickly@lemmy.worldEnglish
                0·
                15 days ago

                Alexa, what is definitional narrowing? The act of dictating what rights are allowed and preserved while giving the state authority to punish anything they deem outside those boundaries.

                “This law is setting up ghettos where the jews explicitly get to live and explicitly defining what parts of their culture they can practice, it’s literally good for them”

                Dumbass mf

      • marxismtomorrow@lemmy.todayEnglish
        0·
        15 days ago

        The reason this law is written this way is because of the US funded and armed East Turkestan movement that has killed hundreds of men women and children and dozens of police over the last 30 years.

        That is the ‘ethnic policy’ that no, East Turkestan, a “country” invented in the 1990s by white people that were upset their spy networks in China kept getting executed, is not real and is not a part of Chinese history or culture. Because the East Turkestan movement used propaganda that said the evil Chinese Communists invaded East Turkestan (literally several millennia before communism came to China) randomly and out of the blue and stole away the people of turkey and their land (that just has happened to have been on every single western map of China ever made).

        The “ethnicity” is Chinese. All people in China, Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Yue, etc are Chinese. There are sub ethnicities like Uyghur, but they are Chinese.

        This law is to reduce racism and radicalism.

        • ALoafOfBread@lemmy.mlEnglish
          0·
          15 days ago

          I am definitely sympathetic to the defense against foreign dissent-manufacturing. I don’t doubt that is a serious issue.

          But, ethnicity and nationality are separate things. Being a Chinese citizen does not make one ethnically Chinese - or in this case Han Chinese. I think what you are calling “sub-ethnicity” here is just what people mean by “ethnicity”. And what you’re implying is “ethnicity” is just “nationality”.

          Though I think the CCP is trying to establish the concept of a Zhonghua Minzu (中华民族) or “Chinese Nation/Ethnic Group” - which is an artificial nationality intended to create a unified Chinese nationality out of the 56 ethnic groups recognized in China - maybe that’s what you mean? Either way, that doesn’t fit the typical anthropological definition, in my opinion.

          To the extent that it reduces racism, that is good. To the extent that it limits free practice of culture and true, non-US-State-Dept sponsored, free speech, I’d say it’s overly draconian.

          I am not a Chinese legal expert and have not read the full law, nor do I fully understand the context. So I withhold full judgment and don’t value my opinion too highly.

          • no_name_dev_from_hell@programming.devEnglish
            0·
            15 days ago

            Ethnicity is a crap word created by the western political discourse to undermine the developing countries.

            In many regions of the world, people don’t identify via their ethnicity l, but their tribes or their religion (e.g. middle east before 1930ish). You don’t see the average westoid liberal defend those rights tho.

    • Jeena@piefed.jeena.netEnglish
      0·
      16 days ago

      Same here (I’m on my 3rd migration) and after 5 years I still don’t even speak the language, which is embarrysing but also just fact.

            • FlyingCircus@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0·
              15 days ago

              And not just “dealing with it.” Ending it by increasing regional economic opportunities, infrastructure projects, increasing access to healthcare and education, and thereby effectively eliminating poverty, the root cause of most crime, including terrorism. Oh, and all of that without impacting the Uyghur peoples’ culture or religion.

              At least, that’s what the rest of the world outside of America, Europe, and Israel say.

              https://www.qiaocollective.com/education/xinjiang?rq=Xinjiang

              • HM King Charles III DG FD@feddit.ukEnglish
                0·
                15 days ago

                And not just “dealing with it.” Ending it by increasing regional economic opportunities, infrastructure projects, increasing access to healthcare and education, and thereby effectively eliminating poverty, the root cause of most crime, including terrorism.

                As far as I am aware, that’s what China has been doing for decades… Possibly even better than the west, although we did have a head start and healtchare and education is still better in places here than some parts of China. But they’re progressing.

                Oh, and all of that without impacting the Uyghur peoples’ culture or religion.

                Depends how you define impact. Islam is protected under the Chinese constitution. Uyghur culture is still celebrated, I’ve even seen Uyghur food stalls and restaurants with signage in the Uyghur language well away from Xinjiang. Whenever I watched it, state media seemed to make a point of telling everyone that the day of that reporting was a special festival for the Uyghur people and detailing some of their traditions. It seemed like a far cry from what I heard from western media.