A Public Security Bureau in East Turkmenistan processes Uyghur prisoners
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, 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. Xi Jinping’s “Great Rejuvenation” contains a racist element that requires a homogenization of the entire Chinese population even if the measures to accomplish that involve cultural genocide and ultimately cultural extinction of minor cultures in China.
Let us examine the topic by focusing on forced assimilation of Uyghurs and Tibetans.
FROM MINORITY PREFERENCES TO MINORITY EXTINCTION
During the early communist era in China, Mao Zedong’s gameplan for ethnic minorities was to “recognize ethnic diversity into irrelevance” by embracing all ethnic identities in order to preempt threats of local nationalism to CCP political control. He believe that he could replace people’s devotion to their religion or culture or ethnic group with “Maoist thought.” However, over time Mao and his Han Chinese cadre 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.
The repression of minority groups during the Cultural Revolution was replaced in the 1980s after China implemented its open-door policy under Hu Yaobang. As discussed here, 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, as well as permission to exceed the national one-child policy in certain agricultural regions.
Enter Xi Jinping 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 assimilation of minority groups. In one of his periodic head-scratching pronouncements, Xi remarked while presiding over a group study session of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee 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 (2021-2030), which is a direct and 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 Mandarin Chinese in the classroom.
It should be noted that eliminating or reducing the use of a language – that is, “linguistic genocide” – “has frequently been used throughout history to systematically eradicate languages” and is one of the widely used tactics of forced assimilation and cultural extinction.
THE UYGHUR EXPERIENCE
Today in China, Han Chinese comprise over 90% of the total population. The approximately 108 million who are members of the 55 ethnic minority groups in China primarily occupy the fringe areas along China’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 three hundred years, Han Chinese have poured into East Turkmenistan. Many Uyghurs consider calling their province “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% are Uyghur, 40% Han Chinese, and 7% Kazakh, with the remainder a mixture of ethnic minority groups.
Several indigenous separatist organizations, including the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), have been seeking 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 1,000,000 Uyghurs have spent time in one of the 380 “detention camps” operating Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) harvesting cotton and performing other forced labor while being “reeducated” in Chinese culture.
According to a January 2022 report from the Congressional Research Service, the CCP has implemented forced assimilation, birthrate control, mass interment, and forced labor. The Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2022 summarized CCP repression in East Turkmenistan: “The 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 Plan for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet. The Tibetans signed the Plan under duress, and that opened 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 noted here, “according to the 2021 Freedom in the World Report by Freedom House, for example, Tibet scored 1 out of 100, ranking lower than other authoritarian regimes such as North Korea and Eritrea” in terms of human rights.
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 Jinping “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 noted 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.
Last December, the South China Morning Post noted that state-run Chinese media began using the name “Xizang” to refer to the Tibet Autonomous region 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. They don’t want anyone to use the word “Tibet” anymore.
As several China watchers have eloquently remarked, the CCP is accelerating its annihilation of Tibet: a death by cartography; the Sinicization of all Tibetan cities, rivers, lakes, and mountains; the desecration and militarization of the High Plateau by the PLA; the occupation of their land; their language banned; their monasteries razed to the ground; their god about to die without the possibility of reincarnation; and their culture destroyed through “assimilation with Chinese characteristics.”
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
As usual, deciphering Xi Jinping’s statements leads to a different reality than his spoken words, at least by civilized definitions of what words mean. While the Human Rights World 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 that basic human rights to minorities means the obliteration of ancient cultures. These are crimes against humanity.
The end.
Great and chilling article, Stu ! Gee, I wonder why we never see such detailed “reporting” and “journalism” in our biased mainstream media………
Sounds similar to Israel and the US trying to wipe out the Palestinians except in this case, there is no desire at all to assimilate. Human rights and international law is being ignored at the moment (Israel/Ukraine) and a couple of countries think international laws don’t apply to them!