The following article by Carlos Martinez, co-editor of Friends of Socialist China, responds to the coordinated storm of condemnation that greeted the entry into force on 1 July of China’s Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress – a campaign that seeks to revive the discredited “Xinjiang genocide” narrative and extend it to Xizang (Tibet) and beyond.
Carlos examines what the law actually says, and contrasts China’s record on minority rights – rising life expectancy, the elimination of absolute poverty, and the protection and flourishing of minority languages – with the treatment of minority communities in the West.
He traces the long history of Western sponsorship of separatism in China, from the CIA’s two-decade Tibetan programme to the National Endowment for Democracy’s funding of exile groups today, and locates the current hysteria in the failure of the propaganda war: as polling shows steadily warming attitudes towards China, particularly among the young, the ideologues of the New Cold War are increasingly desperate to re-toxify China’s image. What China is building is strength through unity in diversity; what its adversaries want to see is disunity and disintegration.
On 1 July, China’s Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress came into force – the country’s first comprehensive national law on ethnic affairs, adopted by the National People’s Congress in March.
Within days, a remarkably well-coordinated storm of condemnation had been whipped up: denunciations from Washington and Brussels, a resolution in the European Parliament, and a wave of media coverage announcing that China had ordered its minorities to “assimilate”. The thoroughly discredited “Xinjiang genocide” narrative is being dusted off and relaunched – this time with Xizang (Tibet) added to the charge sheet for good measure.
What does the law actually say? It stipulates that upholding national unity and ethnic solidarity is the responsibility of all Chinese citizens, and it prohibits discrimination and suppression against any ethnic group. It strongly re-affirms the right of all peoples to use and develop their own spoken and written languages. It directs central and local government to strengthen infrastructure, industry, public services and environmental protection in minority regions, and to ensure that no ethnic group is left behind in China’s modernisation.
As such, it continues a long-standing programme of what would be called, in Western terminology, affirmative action: preferential university admissions for minority students, bilingual education, protected minority-language broadcasting, and formal autonomy arrangements from Inner Mongolia to Yunnan – to which one might add that China’s national minorities were exempt from the one-child policy throughout its existence. Altogether, strange provisions indeed for a programme of persecution.
Western media hysteria
When the law took effect, CNN’s headline announced: “China tells its ethnic minorities to integrate or face consequences.” The law’s stated aim of “promoting extensive exchanges, interactions and integration among all ethnic groups” – the ordinary vocabulary of any multiethnic society that takes cohesion seriously – was rewritten in the grammar of an ultimatum.
And the word “assimilation”, imported wholesale into the coverage, is not a neutral term. In the Western lexicon it is shorthand for specific, documented crimes, associated above all with Anglo-Saxon settler colonialism: the residential school systems of Canada and the US; the stolen generations in Australia; the forced adoptions and forced religious conversions; languages beaten out of colonised peoples – a model the Japanese empire faithfully replicated in occupied Korea. Nor was any of this confined to the colonies. Generations of schoolchildren in Wales were shamed and beaten for speaking their mother tongue, a wooden “Welsh Not” hung around the neck of the last child caught using it – which goes some way to explaining why the language question has stood at the heart of the Welsh national movement.
In reaching for the word “assimilation”, then, Western journalists are mapping their own countries’ historical guilt onto China – the verdict delivered before any evidence is presented.
China’s record
China’s actual record on the treatment of its minority nationalities is a matter of public record, and it is a record few countries can match.
In Xinjiang, average life expectancy has risen from 30 years in 1949 to around 77 today. The Uyghur population grew from 10 million to 11.6 million between 2010 and 2020 – an increase of 16 percent, compared with 2 percent growth for Xinjiang’s Han population over the same period.
In China’s eight-year campaign to eliminate absolute poverty, which declared victory in 2021, all 420 poverty-stricken counties in ethnic autonomous areas were lifted out of poverty – more than 31 million people in the autonomous regions alone. Young people in Xizang and Xinjiang enjoy fifteen years of publicly funded education; documents of the National People’s Congress are published in seven minority languages; dozens of radio and television stations broadcast in minority languages.
And far from the colonial pattern of wealth being extracted from the periphery to the centre, the flow of resources runs the other way: Xinjiang and Xizang rank among the highest recipients of central government transfer payments per capita in all China – Xizang first, at more than double any other autonomous region or province.
On the question of language – supposedly the smoking gun of “assimilation” – the facts again point in the opposite direction. When Xizang was liberated in 1951, its illiteracy rate stood at 95 percent; today the completion rate for nine-year compulsory education is 98 percent, and Tibetan has been taught as a core subject – and widely used as a medium of instruction – throughout those seven decades. Xinjiang publishes newspapers, books, and radio and television in six languages: over 50 newspapers and 120 periodicals appear in minority languages, and more than 5,000 episodes of television are translated into them every year. Inner Mongolia maintains some 1,900 minority-language schools teaching around 420,000 students – and in China the classical Mongolian script has been preserved in daily use.
It is true that every child in China now learns Standard Chinese (“Mandarin”), the common national language – just as every child in Wales learns English – for the simple reason that command of the lingua franca facilitates educational and career success. Teaching a common language – as well as, and in common with, foreign languages – alongside minority languages is not cultural erasure, however; it is a sensible educational policy.
A case of projection
Now consider the record of China’s chief accuser. The United States was built on the dispossession and near-extermination of its indigenous peoples – a population of many millions reduced to a quarter of a million by the start of the twentieth century, through massacre, forced removal and deliberately spread disease.
Well into the 1970s, Native American children were taken from their families and placed in boarding schools where their languages were forbidden, under the explicit slogan of the schools’ founder: “Kill the Indian, and save the man”. That is what forced assimilation actually looks like. The consequences persist: Native Americans live on average more than five years less than other people in the US, and suffer the country’s highest poverty rates.
The story is no better for the descendants of enslaved Africans. From slavery through Jim Crow to the era of mass incarceration, black people in the US have been second-class citizens. The land of the free maintains the largest prison population in the world – some two million people – with black Americans incarcerated at roughly five times the rate of whites. Black households hold a fraction of the wealth of white households; black mothers die in childbirth at several times the rate of white mothers; and the police killings that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement continue essentially unabated. If Washington’s politicians are searching for a systematic violation of minority rights to denounce, they need not book a flight to Urumqi.
Extraterritorial reach
Much of the outrage has focussed on the law’s supposedly sinister “extraterritorial reach” – its provision that overseas organisations and individuals engaging in ethnic separatism targeting China can be held legally accountable. The hypocrisy here is stark. The US applies its sanctions legislation to every country, company and bank on the planet; it claims jurisdiction over any transaction conducted in dollars; it kidnaps the elected President of Venezuela.
But there is a deeper point: China’s concern about foreign-sponsored separatism is not paranoia; it is history. From the late 1950s, the CIA armed, trained and financed Tibetan insurgents – running a training camp in the Colorado mountains and keeping the Dalai Lama’s operation on an annual subsidy of 180,000 dollars – in a programme that ran for two decades. Today the baton has passed to the National Endowment for Democracy, which, as Kyle Ferrana documents in Why the World Needs China, “spends millions of dollars per year to foment unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang through NGOs composed of exiles and expatriates, whose reactionary leaders are expected to form new comprador governments” should China ever be broken apart – funding it boasts about openly. A state that legislates against externally funded separatism is not persecuting its minorities; it is looking at its adversaries’ budgets and acting accordingly.
Anti-China propaganda falling flat
Why the sudden storm, and why now? Part of the answer is that the propaganda war is going badly. Western publics – above all young people – are increasingly unconvinced. Pew polling published in April found that favourable views of China among Americans have nearly doubled since 2023, with a third of under-50s viewing China positively and only a fifth regarding it as an enemy; a recent Politico survey found that young people in Canada, Britain, France and Germany would rather their country depend on China than on Trump’s America.
Millions of visitors are taking advantage of visa-free entry from 77 countries and reporting back – on TikTok and elsewhere, under the banner of “chinamaxxing” – that the dystopia they had been promised turns out to have high-speed trains, safe streets, thriving Uyghur restaurants and dancing in the parks. The hysteria over the ethnic unity law is, in part, a panicked attempt to re-toxify China’s image before the narrative slips out of control altogether.
The deeper motive is strategic. Xinjiang is a key gateway for the Belt and Road Initiative and the heart of China’s world-leading solar and cotton industries; Xizang commands the water towers of Asia. Those who dream of halting China’s rise understand perfectly well that its strength rests on its unity – and Yugoslavia stands as a terrible warning of what the dismemberment of a multiethnic socialist state means for its peoples: a prosperous socialist federation of many nationalities, held together by a common project, was recast abroad as a prison of oppressed minorities; ethnic grievance was amplified and armed from outside; and the country was broken along the very fault lines its enemies had spent years widening. What followed was not liberation but a decade of war, ethnic hatred and economic ruin, from which the successor states have still not fully recovered. Much the same could be said of numerous parts of the former Soviet Union.
What China is building is strength through unity in diversity: in the words of Global Times, “ensuring that people of all ethnic groups truly enjoy equal political rights and jointly exercise their role as masters of the country, and achieving common unity and struggle among all ethnic groups, as well as shared prosperity and development”. What the West wants to see in China is disunity and disintegration. The new law is designed to ensure it never gets its wish.
None of this means China’s ethnic policy is beyond discussion, of course. But that discussion should proceed from evidence rather than atrocity propaganda, and those leading the chorus of condemnation might first consider whether those in glass houses should be throwing stones.
Malcolm X warned us long ago: “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” Sixty years on, his words remain the best possible commentary on the manufactured hysteria over China’s ethnic unity law.
