By: Aaron Glasserman
September 30, 2024
Over the past decade, international media and organizations have revealed Beijing’s draconian policies in the northwestern region of Xinjiang and a host of measures intended to assimilate so-called “minority nationalities” (少数民族) throughout the country. Why do ethnic minorities make China’s leaders so nervous? Over 90 percent of the country’s total population belongs to the Han majority, and, while the remaining population of roughly 125 million is large in absolute terms, it is divided into 55 formally recognized “minority nationalities,” which are themselves quite diverse in culture, language, size, and geographical distribution. If demography cannot explain Beijing’s anxiety about the “national question” (民族问题)—the official Chinese term for the country’s ethnic diversity—what can? Three sets of concerns make this an especially sensitive area of policy for the party-state: territorial control, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ideology, and bureaucratic politics.
Territorial Control
For Chinese officials, a basic problem is that minorities are concentrated in the country’s large and resource-rich borderlands. As Mao Zedong said in 1956, “We say China is a country vast in territory, rich in resources and large in population; as a matter of fact, it is the Han nationality whose population is large and the minority nationalities whose territory is vast and whose resources are rich.”
The relative weakness of Han cultural influence and central government control over large swaths of the frontier has also exacerbated Beijing’s fears of losing territory to foreign adversaries and local independence movements. Much of the far north, south, and west of what is today the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was conquered by the Qing dynasty in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the CCP still sees these regions’ integration with the core regions as a work in process. China’s “Century of Humiliation” is usually understood as referring to China’s subjugation to Western and Japanese colonial domination between the mid-19th century and the founding of the PRC in 1949, but the period also witnessed a weakening of central control over the frontiers: Mongolian independence in 1912, a Soviet-supported Uyghur nationalist movement in Xinjiang, and British challenges to Beijing’s already tenuous control over Tibet.
In the 1950s and 60s, the new PRC regime remained fearful of foreign influence in its peripheral provinces. In the five so-called national “autonomous regions” (自治区), as well as in many dozens of lower-level autonomous areas, titular nationalities (e.g. the Zhuang in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region) were guaranteed representation in local government, public employment opportunities, and the right to use their own language in official contexts and adapt central policies and legislation to suit local conditions.
At the same time, the Chinese state drew administrative boundaries and promoted Han migration to keep minority political and cultural power in check. The Mongol, Hui, and Zhuang autonomous regions in Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, and Guangxi, respectively, have had significant Han majorities since their establishment. The Han population of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has increased dramatically since the 1950s, and the Uyghurs now make up just a plurality rather than a majority of the region’s ethnic composition. Today, the Tibet Autonomous Region is the only provincial-level autonomous unit where the titular nationality remains the local majority.
In recent decades, Beijing has promoted economic development and increased state capacity in the borderlands, but new media and transnational contacts have helped bolster ethnic consciousness among certain minorities. The perceived role of minority nationalism in the break-up of the Soviet Union sharpened Beijing’s anxiety over ethnic separatism, while concerns about the spread of Islamist political movements and jihadi violence have been used to justify greater repression of Muslim religious practices. As recent calls to “stabilize and secure the frontier” make clear, the CCP remains uneasy about its control over the country’s remote and ethnically diverse regions.
CCP Ideology
In the classic Chinese Communist worldview, ethnic policy is a balancing act for managing a long-term process of assimilation, or what Party theorists refer to as “ethnic fusion” (民族融合). The CCP is supposed to guide the development of socialism for all of China, but because the population comprises different nations or “nationalities,” each with its own culture and at a particular stage of development (the Han officially being the most “advanced”), progress cannot be uniform, and minorities must receive extra support to achieve material equality. Only then will the differences between nationalities begin to fade away.
Moreover, if the CCP too aggressively imposes its “advanced” culture on minorities, it will provoke a backlash, alienating minorities, strengthening their minority ethnic consciousness, and imperiling China’s overall integration. Accordingly, the CCP must give minorities enough room to flourish as distinct nationalities—for example, by enabling them to use their own languages, develop their own culture, and participate in government, especially in the autonomous areas—without fostering separatist sentiment or abandoning the long-term goal of communism and ethnic fusion.
Ideology has never straightforwardly dictated policy, and in the post-Mao era, the CCP has shifted from communist notions of class struggle toward the pursuit of market-enabled economic development. Yet the concept of ethnic fusion has survived, offering a framework for balancing conformity and diversity that suits the Party’s self-conception as directing and managing social, economic, and cultural change. As the CCP has increasingly looked to Chinese tradition to justify its rule, internal ethnic diversity has become more problematic, and assimilation more urgent. In 2021, Xi Jinping set “forging consciousness of the community of the Chinese nation” as the primary goal of ethnic work, to be achieved by promoting the “contact, exchange, and blending” of all nationalities. The central leadership continues to pair repression with economic development and affirmative action policies to incentivize and facilitate integration.
Ethnic policy, in other words, remains a balancing act calibrated according to the theory of ethnic fusion, even as the Party—ever improving its ability to surveil and control—feels increasingly confident that it can push assimilation forward while managing the risk of a potential unrest.
Bureaucratic Politics
A third factor has to do with the institutional setup of the PRC, which includes a network of offices at various levels of government dedicated to implementing and monitoring ethnic policy.
These institutions—known as the “minwei system” (民委系统) and what I will call the Ethnic Affairs Bureaucracy (EAB)—were established in the early 1950s in response to reports of widespread disregard for ethnic policy.1 Many local cadres were apparently unsure about what respecting minorities’ “special characteristics” and other directives meant in practice. Some were even contemptuous of the whole notion of ethnic policy, which required slowing down land reform and other elements of the regime’s revolutionary agenda in ethnic minority regions. The EAB was expanded to ensure minority customs were accommodated and special provisions (such as reducing the use of violence or ensuring that minority-owned land was redistributed to members of the same minority) were made, all while economic development and propaganda facilitated ethnic fusion in the long term.
In practice, however, bureaucratization has exposed ethnic policy to the political pressures and institutional competition that affect the rest of the Chinese state. Scholars have documented how distrust and the need to signal loyalty to the leader produce witch hunts and policy radicalization. This general tendency is particularly acute for ethnic policy, which already involves slowing and modifying the regime’s socioeconomic agenda in minority areas.
The careers of officials affiliated with the EAB depend on the perceived value of their work. When that value is redefined in terms of a radical political agenda, the risk of punishment incentivizes EAB officials to adopt increasingly ambitious ethnic policies aimed at accelerating ethnic fusion. For example, during the Anti-Rightist Campaign and Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, fear of being labeled a “rightist” and “counterrevolutionary” drove EAB officials to push for accelerated ethnic fusion through aggressive assimilationist measures like forcing minorities to abandon their traditional dress, violate their dietary customs, and speak and study only Mandarin.
The tragic irony is that the CCP’s attempts to institutionalize even limited protections for minorities’ cultures and customs backfire in the face of the ideological inquisitions, which periodically take shape in the PRC and are indeed integral to its authoritarian political system. In an environment in which “the Party leads all,” de-politicization of ethnic work becomes difficult as the issue is established as a discrete domain of governance that is bureaucratized and a fixture of political discourse.2
In the context of Xi’s centralization of power, in which displays of personal loyalty have become indispensable for political survival and promotion, the costs of being accused of obstructing or stalling ethnic fusion have likely never been higher. Moreover, because the EAB operates throughout the country, even in counties with a small proportion of minority nationalities, the resulting paranoia is pervasive.
Conclusion
To understand what is driving Beijing’s anxieties about the “national question” and its increasingly assimilationist ethnic policy, it is not enough to look at geopolitics and concerns about territorial integrity and control. It is also essential to consider the CCP’s ideology, which offers a theoretical justification for assimilationism, and the country’s authoritarian political system, which fosters fear and pushes policy to the extremes.
Dr. Aaron Glasserman is a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania and a 2023-24 China Fellow at the Wilson Center.