Largely unnoticed, the Communist Chinese government has dropped a cultural bombshell. “On March 12 [2026], China’s legislature adopted the Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, a sweeping new statute that codifies Beijing’s approach toward China’s 56 officially recognized ethnic groups. The law punctuates a decades-long shift towards aggressive assimilationist policies.” Unity is in. Diversity is out. At first the media left it unnoticed, but now the bombshell has detonated in Western multicultural politics. The Council on Foreign Relations explains:
The new law’s core concept is captured in the term zhulao (铸牢) – to “forge” or “cast” metal – and its instruction that “forging the communal consciousness of the Chinese nation” is core to the Party’s ethnic policies. As James Leibold has pointed out, this phrasing reflects a hardening of Beijing’s political line under Xi Jinping, It is explicitly written into the Party’s Charter at the 19th Party Congress in 2017 – aimed at “melting” subnational and ethnic identities into a shared collective one.
This is a sharp departure from the framework of the 1984 Regional Ethnic Autonomy Law, which explicitly provided for education in minority languages and warned against majoritarian (i.e., Han) chauvinism in an effort to reset ethnic relations in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. In contrast, the new 2026 law has no such warning, mandates pre-school education in Mandarin, directs government authorities and private firms to “give prominence” to the display of Chinese characters over minority languages in public settings, and instructs them to promote the “forging of national identity” as a component of all official work on families and family education.
Under the new Chinese law, ethnic cultures will be gradually worn away. “It mandates that all children should be taught Mandarin before kindergarten and up until the end of high school. Previously students could study most of the curriculum in their native language such as Tibetan, Uyghur or Mongolian.”
"The law is consistent with a dramatic recent policy shift, to suppress the ethnic diversity formally recognised since 1949," Magnus Fiskesjö, an associate professor of anthropology at Cornell University said in a university report. "The children of the next generation are now isolated and brutally forced to forget their own language and culture."
The long hand of the CCP will reach out to silence dissentrs. China claims the right to prosecute separatist groups and traitors to the Chinese state wherever they may be in the world. Reuters reported that "China has a right to target people outside of its borders who contravene its new law on ethnic unity, a senior official said on Wednesday, adding that this was in line with international practice, and was legal and necessary.” That has sparked alarm in Chinese-claimed Taiwan, in particular because it could give Beijing another legal basis to go after Taiwanese it views as separatists. Rights groups have also complained that China has tried to used Interpol "red notices" to try to get foreign governments to arrest people abroad it wants to try for political offenses at home.
The ethnic unity law represents the biggest and most powerful Communist Party on earth's rejection of a fundamental tenet of multiculturalism. For decades, Western leftists have assumed protected minority identities; ethnic rights and cultural self-determination were all part of the progressive canon, an integral part of being "on the left." Now that is no longer true.
One wonders what all the Antifa activists serving long sentences for attacking immigration agents will think, or what the intersectionality gurus in academic departments will say when they realize that the Communist Party of China has betrayed them. How will they react when it dawns on them all that multiculti doctrine is now officially heretical to Communism?
Cries of pain from liberal Western organizations were quickly forthcoming following Beijing’s action. Groups such as Human Rights Watch warned that China’s law provided a broad legal framework for forced assimilation. Eight UN human rights experts addressed a letter to the Chinese government expressing deep concern. The European Parliament formally condemned the legislation, demanding its repeal and warning of serious consequences for EU-China relations. A highly controversial aspect of the legislation is its extraterritorial reach, which allows authorities to hold individuals and organizations outside China accountable for undermining ethnic unity or promoting separatism.
The reason for the progressive concern was obvious. China’s ethnic unity law drove a stake right through the heart of the “legitimacy” underpinning mass migration, open borders and affirmative action policies that the liberal Western political establishment so favors. It potentially undermined the moral basis for multiethnic social policy in the West. The Chinese ethnic unity law, Japan's new immigration policies, South Africa's "kill the farmer, kill the Boer" were powerful refutations of the argument that only white supremacists favored stricter immigration policies. If anything, they suggested that postwar Western civilization was the least racist in recorded history, until it started destroying itself through an excess of radical empathy.
It may take a while to sink in, but Xi Jinping's betrayal of the doctrine of identity is potentially as devastating as Molotov's pact with Ribbentrop. That historical about-face led to the collapse of the anti-fascist morality front to which so many activists had pledged their souls. Communists worldwide were forced into a traumatic ideological about-face, suddenly forced to justify an alliance with their sworn enemy to keep in tune with Moscow. Many left the movement entirely over this moral compromise. While Beijing’s Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress has not yet had time to cause a similarly corrosive effect, it has the potential to do so. Given China’s policy turn, it is getting increasingly more difficult to deny that opinion may be turning against identity politics even in its former strongholds.
