China’s National People’s Congress this week approved a sweeping new law titled the Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress.  

Marketed by Beijing as a measure to foster “unity” among the country’s 55 officially recognized ethnic minority groups, critics — both inside and outside China — warn that it represents a significant legal entrenchment of policies that have long sought to assimilate, suppress, and control ethnic and religious minorities across the country. 

Passed on March 12 and signed by President Xi Jinping, the new law will take effect on July 1. It mandates broad implementation of what the Chinese state calls a “strong sense of community of the Chinese nation” across government bodies, schools, enterprises, and social organizations. Mandarin Chinese is prioritized as the language of instruction and public life, effectively diminishing the official space for minority languages such as Uyghur and Tibetan. 

Although framed as a measure to promote “progress” and “common prosperity,” outside observers argue the legislation cements an assimilationist agenda that undercuts minority identity and autonomy. Anthropologists and analysts note that the law expands the legal basis to restrict religious, cultural, and political activities of ethnic minorities and could be used to criminalize dissent or cultural expression as separatism. 

China is known to have forced abortions on its citizens, sterilized women without their consent, and murdered religious minorities to sell their organs on the black market. In many cases, religious communities are targeted for this type of mistreatment. Christian home churches are an attempt to escape government scrutiny, but even they are often raided and their members arrested on charges of working against the interests of the state. 

China is a world leader in the use of technology to surveil and repress its citizens. While the full extent of its surveillance apparatus is unknown, research has shown that it operates a system that aims to track every citizen’s movements to gain insight into their loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). From mundane details like what a person wears to broader observations about who they associate with, the system tracks and understands each citizen’s loyalty. 

Chinese government officials use the data captured by this system to track and control those it deems a danger to the state. Notably, this includes anyone associated with the unregistered house church movement and anyone else who wishes to practice religion outside the confines of state-run institutions such as the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association. 

Focused Campaigns of Repression 

For years, China’s government has carried out one of the most extensive systems of political repression against ethnic and religious minorities in the world, notably in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.  

Since 2014, and especially after 2017, the CCP has detained more than 1 million Turkic Muslims — primarily Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other groups — in internment camps without legal process under the pretext of counterterrorism and “reeducation.” 

Reports and leaked data show that mass arbitrary detention, forced labor, family separation, surveillance, and severe curtailment of religious practice form the core of this system.  

A United Nations Human Rights Office report confirmed that the scale and nature of these abuses — including cultural erasure, forced indoctrination, and family separations — constitute systematic violations of human rights and possibly crimes against humanity. 

China’s assimilationist policies extend far beyond Xinjiang, affecting Tibet and other minority regions as well. For decades, Tibetans have faced intrusive restrictions on religious practice, surveillance of monasteries, limits on monastic education, and suppression of Tibetan-language publications and expression. 

The drive toward homogenization includes promoting Mandarin in schools and public life, controlling monasteries’ governance and leadership, and expanding state propaganda that portrays Tibetan culture as backward. Scholars and activists view this as part of a broader strategy of Sinicization — the systematic reshaping of minority culture into a Han-majority, CCP-led narrative. 

Implications for Religion and Identity 

Chinese authorities insist that these measures are necessary for national security, social stability, and economic development. Officials uniformly reject criticisms, framing international concerns as foreign interference in internal affairs. 

However, human rights organizations, foreign governments, and minority advocates argue that the law and the underlying policies are not about “unity” but about erasing cultural diversity and consolidating political loyalty to the CCP. 

The ethnic unity law consolidates an ideology that places loyalty to the CCP and to Xi Jinping at the apex of national identity. This approach dovetails with broader trends in China’s governance: merging ideological conformity with political power, minimizing autonomy, and perceiving independent religious and cultural life as inherently threatening. These dynamics echo China’s historic use of Sinicization policies to control religious expression and ethnic identity — from crackdowns on independent Christian churches to detention of Uyghur and Tibetan religious leaders. 

Rather than safeguarding diversity, China’s latest ethnic unity law appears to provide a legal veneer to long-standing policies of coercive assimilation and repression. In a political environment where religion and ethnicity remain closely intertwined with cultural identity, such legal codification poses grave risks to the rights of millions of Uyghurs, Tibetans, and other minority communities. As Beijing moves forward with this law, observers warn that the space for religious and cultural freedom will shrink even further, solidifying a model of governance that treats any form of independent identity as a threat to the state.