Commentary
Forced assimilation into the dominant Han culture in China has been an on-again-off-again practice for centuries. To the Han Chinese who control the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Han culture is Chinese culture, and forced assimilation is a means of achieving national unity and enhancing domestic security and control of all Chinese people.
CCP leader Xi Jinping’s “Great Rejuvenation” contains a racist element that requires a homogenization of the entire Chinese population, even if the measures to accomplish this involve cultural genocide and, ultimately, cultural extinction of minority cultures in China.
Let us examine the topic by focusing on the forced assimilation of Uyghurs and Tibetans.
From Minority Preferences to Minority Extinction
During the early communist era in China, Mao Zedong’s game plan for ethnic minorities was to “
recognize ethnic diversity into irrelevance” by embracing all ethnic identities to preempt threats of local nationalism to CCP political control. He believed that he could replace people’s devotion to their religion, culture, or ethnic group with “Maoist thought.”
However, over time, Mao and his Han Chinese cadres became distrustful of Chinese minority groups because the expected assimilation into the CCP’s vision of a people united under communism failed to materialize, and major purges were conducted in Inner Mongolia and Tibet that targeted and decimated ethnic minorities.
In the 1980s, China implemented its open-door policy under Hu Yaobang. According to University of Tokyo professor Hirano Satoshi, as part of a decentralization agenda to jumpstart the Chinese economy, Hu “adopted a
minority preference policy” that included building ethnic schools to provide minorities with education in their own languages instead of Mandarin. The policy also included preferential university admissions for minorities and permission to exceed the national one-child policy in certain agricultural regions.
In an op-ed published by The Japan Times, the professor noted that “ethnic schools and preferential treatment of minority students were intended to increase the number of Communist Party members and senior officials ... and companies among ethnic minorities so that they could contribute to uniting and developing the Chinese nation at higher levels.”
“In this sense, we can’t say Hu’s minority preference policy renewed the relationship between the Han Chinese and ethnic minorities,” he said.
Enter Xi and his “Great Rejuvenation,” which ultimately involves a return to Mao-era political and cultural controls, especially an enhanced centralization of political power in the CCP that includes the assimilation of minority groups. In one of his periodic head-scratching pronouncements,
Xi remarked while presiding over a group study session of the CCP’s Politburo last fall that “a scientific and sound theoretical system for the Chinese national community needs to be established” while “stressing that efforts must be made to integrate Marxist ethnicity theories with China’s specific realities and fine traditional culture.”
Apparently, some of those “Marxist ethnicity theories” were manifested in the
China National Program for Child Development (2021–30), which is a direct attempt to forcibly assimilate the 55 minority groups into “Chinese (Han) culture.” Rather than being taught in their own languages, ethnic minority students are now forced to read and write in Mandarin in the classroom.
It should be noted that eradicating or reducing the use of a language—that is, “
linguistic genocide”—has been a recurrent method throughout history for systematically eliminating languages and is one of the widely used tactics of forced assimilation and cultural extinction.
The Uyghur Experience
Today,
Han Chinese make up more than 90 percent of the total population in China. The approximately 108 million people who are members of the 55 ethnic minority groups in China primarily occupy the fringe areas along the country’s northern, western, and southern periphery. Two of the biggest targets of the CCP’s forced assimilation campaign have been East Turkmenistan and Tibet.
Over the past 300 hundred years, Han Chinese have poured into East Turkmenistan. Many Uyghurs consider calling their region “Xinjiang”—which is Mandarin for “
new frontier”—to be a gross insult against their culture and history, which predates the Han Chinese aggressors/colonizers by hundreds of years. Of the approximately 25 million people there today, some 45 percent are Uyghur, 40 percent are Han Chinese, and 7 percent are Kazakh, with the remainder a mixture of ethnic minority groups.
Several indigenous separatist organizations, including the
East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), have sought to establish a separate political entity in Central Asia. The CCP considers ETIM to be a terror group to be eradicated. The CCP is sweeping the region with a big broom to suppress all such groups, as at least 1 million Uyghurs have spent time in one of the
380 “detention camps” in Xinjiang harvesting cotton and performing other forced labor while being “reeducated” in the CCP’s doctrines.
Human Rights Watch’s
World Report 2022 stated: “Chinese authorities are committing crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang. Abuses committed included mass arbitrary detention, torture, enforced disappearances, mass surveillance, cultural and religious persecution, separation of families, forced returns to China, forced labor, and sexual violence and violations of reproductive rights.”
The
Human Rights Watch World Report 2024 notes that “Xinjiang authorities are forcibly assimilating Uyghurs, including through the Sinicization of Islam,” as well as “targeting of cultural and religious practices, family separation, arbitrary arrests and detention, rapes, torture, and enforced disappearances.”
This is what “assimilation with Chinese characteristics” means to Uyghurs: the eradication of their culture at the hands of the CCP.
The Tibetan Experience
For centuries, Tibet was historically independent with its own theocratic government under the political and spiritual leadership of the Dalai Lama. That all changed in 1951, when the CCP presented a Tibetan delegation to Beijing with the Seventeen Point Agreement for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet. The Tibetans signed the document under duress, opening the door for the forced assimilation of Tibet that continues to the present day.The CCP considers all aspects of the Tibetan identity—including Tibetan Buddhism, language, history, and heritage—as threats to the CCP’s “Great Rejuvenation” and brutally suppresses all aspects of Tibetan culture. The result has been relentless persecution of the Tibetan people. As per the 2021 Freedom in the World Report by Freedom House, Tibet scored 1 out of 100, placing it lower in human rights rankings than authoritarian regimes such as North Korea and Eritrea.
According to the
Human Rights Watch World Report 2022, the Chinese communists “stepped up coercive assimilationist policies [by announcing] that kindergartens in ethnic minority areas must use Chinese as a medium of instruction.” The report further noted that Xi “emphasized the subordination of minority identities to a single national identity at the national ‘Ethnic Work’ conference,” with emphasis on Tibet.
The
Human Rights Watch World Report 2024 further notes that “authorities in Tibetan areas enforced severe restrictions on the freedoms of religion, expression, movement, and assembly” while “cash rewards are offered to citizens prepared to inform on others” who disobey CCP laws and policies.
In December 2023, the
South China Morning Post reported that Chinese state-run media began using the name “Xizang” to refer to Tibet after China’s State Council released a white paper implementing the change. The communists are apparently hell-bent on wiping all vestiges of Tibetan culture—including their very name—from history and
don’t want anyone to use the word “Tibet” anymore.
Concluding Thoughts
As usual, deciphering Xi’s statements leads to a different reality than his spoken words, at least by civilized definitions of what words mean. While the Human Rights Watch reports continue to expose ongoing cultural genocide that is the essence of “assimilation with Chinese characteristics” in East Turkmenistan and Tibet, Xi has the audacity to
publicly stress that in order “to forge a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation, efforts should be made to let the people cultivate the awareness that people from all ethnic groups are in the same community, where they share weal and woe and the same future and stick together through thick and thin, and life and death.”
The CCP’s pursuit of domestic tranquility through forced assimilation of basic human rights to minorities means the obliteration of ancient cultures. These are crimes against humanity.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
