China's National Unity Law: How Beijing Is Assimilating 135 Million People

China has a problem. Not with its economy, and not with its military, but with something far more complicated: people. About 135 million of them, to be exact. Despite making up a little under 10 percent of the country’s citizenry, non-Han Chinese add up to a population roughly the same size as Mexico’s. And every single one of those lives is about to change.

The reason is a brand-new National Unity Law, passed by the Chinese government and set to take effect in July 2026. It sounds reassuring enough — until you start reading the fine print. Beijing says the law is about ethnic unity and prosperity. Critics say it is about assimilation and silence.

Somewhere in the middle sits a very large argument, and the closer you look, the more questions emerge. Why is China cracking down on ethnic minorities? Is it sound political strategy for the Chinese Communist Party? And, perhaps most importantly, why now?

Some of the answers may surprise you. Despite the stereotype of a single, uniform Chinese identity, the reality on the ground is far more layered — and the law is designed to flatten exactly that complexity.

This is the story of how a single piece of legislation aims to fold dozens of distinct cultures into one, what it means for the communities caught in its path, and why Beijing believes the timing has never been better: the National Unity Law is less a celebration of diversity than a blueprint for erasing it.

A Country More Diverse Than You Think

You might not know this, but China is — sort of — quite diverse. Han Chinese make up over 91 percent of the population, accounting for well over a billion people. Yet because the overall population is so vast, even small ethnic minorities translate into millions of individuals. The Zhuang are the largest minority group in the country, and most people outside China have never heard of them.

They make up around 1.38 percent of the mainland population, which, according to the 2020 census, works out to roughly 19.5 million people — more than the entire population of countries like Chad or Romania.

Uyghurs account for a little over 0.8 percent, or just under 12 million people as of that same census — roughly a million more than live in Czechia. Altogether, China’s 55 officially recognised minority groups make up the other 8.9 percent of the population: roughly 135 million people. If non-Han Chinese had a country of their own, it would rank as the tenth largest on the planet by population. By sheer force of numbers, China is more diverse than the world tends to assume.

A Progress Bar, Not a Snapshot

Here is the crucial difference in perspective. Beijing does not view that 91 percent figure as a static measure of the Han population. It treats it more like a progress bar — a number to be pushed steadily toward 100. That single reframing helps explain why the National Unity Law exists at all, and what it is really designed to accomplish.

On paper, the goal is benign. The law is presented as a means to “promote unity” and integration among all 56 recognised ethnic groups, including the Han themselves. It seeks to do this through a mix of education, housing, and economic policies, all backed by a fairly strict legal mandate for anyone deemed to harm ethnic unity. The legislation was voted through at the National People’s Congress in Beijing — a body that has never rejected an item on its agenda.

The tally was 2,756 in favour, with just three against and three abstentions. It is, in practice, a rubber stamp, leavened only by a handful of dissenters. The measure takes effect in July.

So what is the harm? On the surface, promoting unity sounds unobjectionable. Who could be against unity? The trouble is that unity in the People’s Republic means something quite specific.

Unity, Redefined as Conformity

In much of the West, “unity” describes people working together despite their unique backgrounds and differences. In China, unity leans more toward conformity. There is the society-wide ideal, and there is each person’s ability to conform to it. If they cannot conform, the official logic holds, then either they need help — or they are trying to insult the ideal itself.

Within this national concept of unity, edges are sanded off, differences softened, and what emerges is a population expected to see itself first and foremost as part of a single Chinese identity.

For ethnic minorities, that means being expected to prioritise national identity first and ethnic identity second, if at all. Many observers call this “Sinicization,” a thread running through President Xi Jinping’s broader mandate since the mid-2010s. The term once referred narrowly to the Sinicization of religion, but it has since come to mean, in practice, “making things more homogenously Han Chinese.” Critics argue the new law is simply the latest attempt at the forced assimilation of ethnic minorities into an already dominant Han culture.

Beijing, by contrast, frames it as “integrated diversity” that will build unity and prosperity throughout the country. The gap between those two descriptions is where the entire argument lives.

The Classroom Front Line

The law is already proving contentious in regions with strong minority populations, and its most controversial component is the one covering education and language. The legislation now mandates that across all of China, children be taught in Mandarin from before kindergarten all the way to the end of high school. In most of the country this changes little. But in highly concentrated minority areas — Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang — students had previously been allowed to study much of the curriculum in their native languages.

That allowance is now set to be stripped back even further than it already had been.

There are loose parallels elsewhere. Several US states once experimented with mandating English over Spanish in schools, but most of those measures were eventually repealed because they were impractical and did not help children learn. China does not share those hangups, for a simple reason: this is not really about education. It is about control.

The danger is a gradual erasure of these languages as students move through the schooling system year after year. That is a highly effective way to hamper the growth and development of minority cultures, setting back groups already disadvantaged within China’s social structure. It severs a historical throughline that has held those cultures together across generations — the means by which oral storytelling traditions, religious ceremonies, and wider cultural touchstones like music get passed down. As Magnus Fiskesjö, an associate professor of anthropology at Cornell University, put it in a university report: “The children of the next generation are now isolated and brutally forced to forget their own language and culture.”

The Bilingual Path Beijing Chose Not to Take

Beijing argues that the policy serves students, insisting it is important for minority children to learn Mandarin because it improves their future job prospects. That claim is, on its own terms, true. A meaningful share of the world beyond China will eventually need some Mandarin for business, and minority citizens stand a better chance of finding work anywhere in the country if they can fluently speak the lingua franca.

But fluency in Mandarin does not require a monolingual education system. Children are remarkably good at learning languages; across the world, kids speak one language at home and another at school and become fluent in both. Bilingualism is supposed to be an employable skill — the kind of thing employers value. There may even be important future roles, such as managing engineers for regional infrastructure maintenance, that require knowing both languages.

Beijing understands all of this, and it knows it would be straightforward to keep and even strengthen a bilingual system if it wished to. It has chosen not to.

By codifying Mandarin’s dominance in the classroom, the state signals to minority groups that all those hypothetical future jobs requiring a regional language are moot — because everyone will be speaking Mandarin anyway. The government is effectively declaring that these languages will have no long-term use, which makes teaching in them pointless from its point of view. The official explanation for the shift was to ensure curricula and textbooks met a high standard.

But even a cursory look at the updated course materials makes the intention clearer: setting a standard for the information Beijing deems “correct.” And what counts as correct is, of course, up to the Chinese Communist Party.

Pouring Water Into the Champagne

Other parts of the law stipulate economic and infrastructure development programs for minority regions. On the surface, that too sounds positive. But the greater jobs and opportunities flowing into these areas come with a side effect: the regions are then flooded with Han Chinese arriving in large numbers to find work. Those workers often spend years in majority-minority areas and settle there, gradually diluting native populations — like pouring water into a full glass of champagne until barely any champagne remains.

The dilution works in both directions. Other incentives encourage ethnic minorities to relocate and take jobs elsewhere through various exchange programmes. To flip the metaphor, that is like pouring the full glass of champagne into a lake, spreading it out until you can no longer tell it was ever there. Divide and conquer is a tale as old as time.

Beijing waves such accusations away, insisting the law is crucial for “modernisation through greater unity” and a stabilising presence delivered through prosperity. That is the carrot. By now, you can sense a stick was always coming.

A Law Vague Enough to Mean Anything

The new law introduces a legal basis to prosecute parents or guardians who instil views in children that could have a “detrimental” effect on ethnic harmony. This is precisely how the Chinese Communist Party tends to write its laws — vague enough to mean almost anything, at the discretion of those in authority.

In principle, such a provision could be applied responsibly, to police genuinely harmful conduct like spreading extremist anti-Han sentiment or stopping anti-minority messaging in schools. But it could just as easily be turned on praying to one’s god, speaking a native language in public, or maintaining cultural traditions. Ultimately, it is the government that decides what counts as detrimental to ethnic unity, and China’s track record skews oppressive when it comes to its minorities. Because, once again, this is not about justice.

It is about control.

In theory, there would be little wrong with a law like this if China had robust frameworks and political principles in place to counter ethnic discrimination. But that is not the case. In practice, the Chinese government itself is the main driver of that discrimination. The Communist Party says it embraces different ethnicities, and the constitution states that all ethnicities have the right to speak their own language and to self-rule.

Neither claim holds up in reality. China has a long history of extensively oppressing its ethnic minorities — to the point that major human rights organisations have accused the government of genocide. To understand how far that goes, it helps to look at how “unity” plays out on the ground.

Sinicization in Practice: Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang

The Chinese government has pursued policies aimed at folding minority groups into a broader national identity since the late 2000s, particularly after unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang. But what Beijing now describes as Sinicization — and the more restrictive policies that come with it — accelerated sharply from the mid-2010s under Xi Jinping. The shift was especially pronounced after the 2014 Kunming knife attack, carried out by Xinjiang separatists, which left 29 people dead and 130 injured.

Predictably, it is the regions with the largest minority populations where Beijing has moved hardest to restrict rights: Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang. There are other, smaller regions with their own diverse mixes of ethnic groups facing discriminatory laws as well, but three of the largest groups — Mongolians, Tibetans, and Uyghurs — illustrate the pattern most vividly.

In Inner Mongolia, the ethnic Mongolian population has faced repression that closely mirrors what the National Unity Law now formalises. In 2020, rare protests broke out against measures reducing the amount of teaching done in Mongolian in favour of Mandarin — a familiar story. Parents were angry, and some even pulled their children out of school in protest, viewing the change as a threat to their cultural identity.

But demonstrations in the People’s Republic tend to end one way, and authorities swiftly moved to crack down on dissent. Other regional laws have included changing public signs to display Mandarin characters more prominently than Mongolian script, underscoring a clear ethnic hierarchy as far as Beijing is concerned. Comparable changes were mirrored in Xinjiang in 2017 and Tibet in 2018.

Tibet: Reincarnation by Permission

Speaking of Tibet, the Chinese government has built up a thicket of laws over the years as it works to slowly absorb the region it annexed in the 1950s. Religion is not the Communist Party’s favourite institution, but it tolerates some faith — subject to central government approval. If you are going to practise religion, you are going to practise it Beijing’s way.

Tibetan Buddhist institutions must operate under state-approved religious bodies and supervision. Monks and nuns face travel restrictions that prevent them from delivering Buddhist teachings abroad. Bans are placed on displaying images of the Dalai Lama. Some monks have been arrested and monasteries taken over.

And, in one of the more striking assertions of state authority over spiritual life, the government has made it illegal to reincarnate without official permission. The cumulative effect is a religious tradition managed, monitored, and constrained at nearly every turn — the same logic of control that animates the language provisions, applied to faith.

Xinjiang: The Darkest Edge of the Policy

It is in Xinjiang, and among the Uyghur Muslims, that the harshest policies are found. Around one million Uyghurs are currently held in detention centres, or “re-education facilities” as Beijing prefers to call them, across the region. Discussions of China’s human rights record here inevitably draw insistent claims that the reports are fabrications and invitations to “come and see for yourself.”

But independent scrutiny already exists: official reports from the UN’s human rights office (OHCHR) describe crimes committed against minorities — and Uyghurs specifically — that may constitute crimes against humanity. International human rights organisations have likewise accused China of grave violations.

The triggers for detention can be astonishingly minor. Praying outside, fasting during Ramadan, teaching children to read the Quran, or even growing a beard have all been used to arrest innocent Uyghurs, alongside countless other small infractions that have led to incarceration. There is no due process. People can be held arbitrarily for days, weeks, or months before seeing a judge — and some never see one at all.

Some are released within a month; others remain in re-education facilities indefinitely. Travelling abroad, or even speaking with someone outside the country, can be enough to bring officials to the door. Xinjiang functions largely as a police state, dense with checkpoints and cameras capable of recognising faces and tracking movement. Uyghurs are subject to mass surveillance in their homes, their cars, and their technology.

Surveillance, Harvesting, and the Limits of “Unity”

The surveillance extends to the body itself. Many Uyghurs have had their data harvested, including biometric data. Reports describe an ongoing campaign of organ harvesting tied to Uyghurs in detention. The evidence cited is circumstantial but striking: waiting times for certain organ transplants in China are a fraction of those almost anywhere else in the world, even though Chinese citizens are not organ donors at higher rates than people elsewhere.

Beijing claims the forced organ harvesting of executed prisoners ended in 2015 — it has made similar claims before, including regarding Falun Gong members. But reporting from outlets such as Radio Free Asia in 2024 stated that the campaign continues. Holding a million people in detention while keeping them alive, critics argue, effectively stores them like an organ farm, available to “harvest” at will.

Reports have since emerged alleging that China sells some of these organs to Gulf states at a premium, since recipients there often prefer organs from fellow Muslims. And it does not end there: mass sterilisations, sexual assaults, violent abuse in detention camps, the separation of children from parents, the destruction of mosques, the arrest of senior Uyghur figures, forced labour, and what observers describe as attempted genocide all form part of the record.

So ask the obvious question: does any of this sound like “ethnic unity”? For all the platitudes surrounding the National Unity Law, Beijing’s actions do not match its words — and people judge by what they see more than by what they hear. If state control of minorities is where the law begins, what the Uyghurs are experiencing is where it can end: forced assimilation into the dominant Han culture. With minorities facing arbitrary execution, it strains belief that the CCP is genuinely troubled by the smaller incidents of discrimination the law claims to address.

It is rather like declaring yourself a strict vegan on a wedding invitation and then eating raw beef in the reception bathroom. The law can say whatever it likes; that does not mean the party intends to apply it consistently. Beijing, predictably, denies any and all allegations of crimes against humanity.

So Why Is China Doing This?

If the government intends to break its own law so brazenly, why bother passing it at all — and why now? The answer is that the legislation aligns neatly with current Chinese domestic and foreign policy.

On the domestic front, the core goal is to manufacture a countrywide sense of a unified national community that reinforces the narratives of the state. It is about weaving the Communist Party, Chinese socialism, and a particular reading of history into the national fabric until they become the default — ensuring that the country’s identity, sovereignty, and statehood are bound up with the party itself. That project is far easier to advance when there are fewer dissenting voices from ethnic minorities the state has not treated well.

Because, as the pattern keeps suggesting, it was never really about unity. It was about control.

James Leibold, a professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne, describes the law as “mobilizing all aspects of the party, state and society to forge a single national consciousness. In Xi’s China, there is very little room left for diversity of culture, language, identity, or even thought.”

The more homogenous the state and the populace become, the more stable the country is to govern, free of ethnicity-based frictions and faultlines. Beijing views Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet as national security weaknesses, so, from the party’s perspective, the policy makes the country safer over time — at the expense of those it represses. Creating an “enemy within” can also rally a population around its flag and leadership with patriotic fervour, deepening loyalty to Beijing.

The Foreign Policy Dimension

That loyalty and control could prove pivotal in the event of a large-scale war, which is where foreign policy enters the picture. According to analysts who spoke to the South China Morning Post, Beijing has framed ethnic governance as part of a broader ideological struggle with the West, using legislation both to manage internal risks and to counter external attempts to politicise its policies. An editorial in Qiushi, the ruling party’s leading theoretical journal, captured that motivation: “While the foundation for a Chinese national community is solidifying, ideological struggles in the ethnic field remain complex and acute, and the risk of international forces interfering in and undermining China’s ethnic unity should not be underestimated.”

In other words, China is consolidating internal cohesion and promoting a narrative of national unity partly to reduce the risk of foreign actors exploiting domestic divisions or inflaming ethnic grievances. Beijing will have to tread carefully, though. Heavy-handed suppression can backfire, hardening resentment and producing a quieter, more entrenched resistance that may prove costly in a crisis. There is a practical strategic logic to a shared language as well: if disaffected groups were ever turned, operating in a distinct tongue could make their communications harder for the state to monitor or intercept — a dynamic seen throughout history.

Why Now? The Five-Year Plan and Taiwan

The question of timing is, in a sense, misleading. The National Unity Law is being codified now, but many of its statutes rest on legal frameworks that already existed within China. What changes is that, because these provisions are now part of official national legislation, they can be applied in a standardised, widescale, and permanent fashion. That permanence is the point.

The timing also tracks with China’s other priorities. The economy is starting to slow; it is nowhere near collapse and still posts substantial annual GDP growth, but the conditions of the boom years have faded. Tellingly, the same day the National Unity Law passed, China also approved its 15th five-year plan, covering 2026 through 2030.

That window is critical given widely cited timelines for a potential invasion of Taiwan in 2027 or 2028 — and the less Western attention on a coming invasion, the better, from Beijing’s vantage point. The two pieces of legislation are intertwined: the plan’s financial objectives benefit minority regions economically, while the PRC frames Taiwan as a rogue Chinese province whose eventual annexation would “complete” national reunification, feeding the same unity narrative. Tellingly, the law allows foreign organisations or individuals to be held legally responsible for actions targeting China, such as inciting an ethnic minority revolt.

Elsewhere in the five-year plan, China’s 2026 GDP growth target was set at a historically low 4.5 percent, reflecting a broader economic malaise that has dogged the country since COVID. For better or worse, the National Unity Law also pushes Western attention toward ethnic policy and away from that economic strain.

A Legacy, and a Gamble

No one can speak directly for Xi Jinping’s motivations. But the vision of a fully unified national identity would cement his legacy among the great leaders of Chinese history. The strategic benefits, however, may matter even more in the long run.

The world is, to put it mildly, uncertain. The global order built up over nearly a century is fraying; rules are shifting and conflict is rising. As the United States looks less reliable to others, Beijing may position itself as a more predictable long-term partner — and internal friction is the last thing a rising power wants while projecting external strength.

Alternatively, China may be consolidating power at home before embarking on world-changing events like an invasion of Taiwan and the war that would follow. The law could even be a pre-emptive crackdown by a government anticipating regional instability, especially in less ethnically homogenous areas.

So, why now? Because of a combination of national security concerns, long-term stability, ideological consolidation, legacy planning, and bureaucratic standardisation.

And here is the uncomfortable reality: Beijing is winning. It is succeeding in implementing policies that push that progress bar higher and higher over time. As for building out a single national identity, it has very nearly done it. Across China today, only in Tibet and Xinjiang are Han Chinese not the majority ethnic group — and given everything described here, how much longer will that hold?

China is on track to achieve the social conformity it desires. But the ultimate question is whether total social conformity equals total political unity. Do not hold your breath. It is important that Beijing understands what success here will not fix: language does not equal loyalty, repression does not always mean stability, and the internal crackdowns of today will create the enemies of tomorrow.

The PRC is nearing the end of a bold plan decades in the making, and whether it ultimately works, only time will tell. But one thing is certain. A government may demand unity, but it never tastes as sweet as when it is earned.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is China’s National Unity Law? It is a piece of national legislation passed at the National People’s Congress and set to take effect in July 2026. Officially, it aims to “promote unity” and integration among all 56 recognised ethnic groups, including the Han, through education, housing, and economic policies, backed by a strict legal mandate against those deemed to harm ethnic unity. Critics describe it as a vehicle for forced assimilation of minorities into the dominant Han culture.

How many people does the law affect? China’s 55 officially recognised minority groups make up roughly 8.9 percent of the population — about 135 million people. That is a population that, on its own, would rank as the tenth largest country in the world. Groups range from the Zhuang, the largest minority at around 19.5 million people, to the roughly 12 million Uyghurs.

Why is the education and language provision so controversial? The law mandates that children across China be taught in Mandarin from before kindergarten through the end of high school. In minority regions such as Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang, where students previously studied much of the curriculum in their native languages, this represents a sharp rollback. Critics warn it risks a gradual erasure of minority languages — and the cultural traditions carried through them — as successive generations pass through a Mandarin-only system.

What does “Sinicization” mean in this context? Sinicization originally referred to bringing religion in line with state expectations, but it has broadened to mean making things “more homogenously Han Chinese” in practice. It has been a thread of Xi Jinping’s agenda since the mid-2010s, accelerating after the 2014 Kunming knife attack, and underpins the more restrictive policies affecting ethnic minorities.

What is happening to Uyghurs in Xinjiang? Around one million Uyghurs are held in detention centres that Beijing calls “re-education facilities.” UN reports describe possible crimes against humanity, and human rights organisations allege grave violations, including mass detention without due process, pervasive surveillance, biometric data harvesting, mass sterilisations, forced labour, the destruction of mosques, and reports of ongoing organ harvesting. Beijing denies all such allegations.

How does the law connect to Taiwan and China’s economy? It was passed the same day China approved its 15th five-year plan (2026–2030). That window overlaps with commonly cited timelines for a potential invasion of Taiwan in 2027 or 2028, which the PRC frames as completing national “reunification.” Consolidating domestic cohesion and shifting Western attention toward ethnic policy — and away from a slowing economy with a historically low 4.5 percent 2026 growth target — both serve Beijing’s broader strategy.

Why is Beijing pursuing this now rather than years ago? Many of the law’s statutes draw on legal frameworks that already existed; what is new is their codification into permanent, standardised national legislation. Analysts attribute the timing to a mix of national security concerns, long-term stability, ideological consolidation, legacy-building for Xi Jinping, and bureaucratic standardisation, all converging at once.