Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Dong Fang/Public Domain
A NEW CHINESE LAW that codifies ethnic policy under the rule of Xi Jinping has led to warnings that its passage will lead to further repression against Taiwan.
In particular, the new law makes the claim that China is a multiethnic state in which harmony has been achieved between differing ethnic groups. This is framed as the Zhonghua Minzu (中華民族), enshrining a notion of Chinese civilizational race that includes the 56 officially acknowledged ethnic groups in China.
Nevertheless, the law has been criticized as furthering Han dominance, effectively forcing differing ethnic groups to assimilate into the Han majority. The law, too, specifies punishments for disrupting ethnic harmony, leading to the possibility of further reprisals against individuals termed secessionist or otherwise advocating against racial integration.
The law already takes place in the context of the mass imprisonment of Uyghurs in camps that are termed “vocational schools”, extensive surveillance of Uyghurs through technological means, as well as attempts to stamp out Tibetan culture and language through the use of boarding schools. As with many such laws the world over framed as in the interests of multiethnic harmony, the new law proves simply a banal form of colonialism in the interests of the Han majority. If there has been more international attention on the situation faced by Tibetans and Uyghurs, the situation faced by the more than fifty ethnic minorities that there is a relative lack of focus on is also important.
It is unclear as to whether the law has any specifically new policy objective in mind that is separate from what is already directed toward ethnic minorities, or simply intended to shore up or consolidate existing laws. As Taiwanese Indigenous are considered ethnic minorities by the Chinese government, they could potentially face targeting under this new law. Indeed, China already conducts extensive outreach to Taiwanese Indigenous in the form of United Front efforts intended to depict ethnic minorities in China as benefiting from the rule of the CCP and suggesting that Taiwanese Indigenous could have similar benefits through unification with China. This dovetails with the extensive clientelist and patronage networks that the KMT has historically maintained in Indigenous communities, as well as more generally in rural communities, as a system of social control that dates from Taiwan’s authoritarian era.
The new law on ethnic policy also, in this sense, resembles national security legislation in Hong Kong against secessionism. The Hong Kong national security law was passed in the wake of legislation that would have allowed for Hongkongers to be sent to China to face charges, prompting massive protests. What proves especially dangerous about the national security law is its far-ranging application beyond China’s borders. Pro-independence or simply pro-democracy Taiwanese have viewed themselves at risk of being targeted by the national security law.
It is less clear whether the new ethnic law would be used to target Taiwanese, in a similar lens. As the majority of Taiwanese are Han, China does not usually use the framework of ethnic policy to target Taiwan. Still, China’s claims of sovereignty over Taiwan are historically co-extensive with its claims of sovereignty over ethnic minority groups, in that it draws on similar history to make these claims. And China appears to be increasingly moving toward “civilizational” framings for its discourse of sovereignty over Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang, and other contexts. Either way, the new law shows that conditions in China continue to be repressive and, even as Chinese authorities attempt to depict ethnic minority groups as prosperous, as happy “singing and dancing peoples” in a colonial lens, it should be clear that religious, cultural, and linguistic repression continues from the Han majority.