There are 56 ethnicities in China—and 55 are getting squashed
China wants its minorities decorative, but not distinct
Illustration: Hanna BarczykCHINA’S PARLIAMENT is not known for its debates.
Meeting for roughly ten days every March, it exists to approve, not to question.
But what it lacks in disagreement, it makes up for in colourful dress.
The Great Hall of the People, where it convenes, becomes a parade of elaborate costumes.
On March 5th, its opening day, Chaguan first spotted a man in a black cape with fiery swirls.
Next, a woman in a jangly silver crown twice as large as any worn by King Charles.
Then more and more: flowing garments, dense embroidery, splashes of dark red, bright pink and deep blue.
They are the minority—literally.
China, in the official telling, has 56 separate ethnicities.
Parliamentary representatives who are Han, the dominant ethnic group, generally attend in grey and black business attire.
But many delegates drawn from the other 55 ethnicities stand out.
Yang Lianying, a Miao woman, was beaming in a floral headdress.
“It is not convenient for my normal work,” said Ms Yang, who usually serves as a doctor in the south-western province of Yunnan.
“During the parliament, I wear it every day.”
The pageantry will come to a dreary intersection with the actual proceedings of the parliament.
A new law heading for a vote will formalise a sweeping project to erase much of what remains of ethnic distinctiveness in China.
Based on precedent, more than 95% of delegates, including the minority members themselves, will dutifully back it.
It is a grim milestone in the Communist Party’s harder-line approach to ethnic politics, born of fear that the bigger minority groups were proving too hard to control.
In the 1950s China accorded its minorities—about 9% of the population—a range of privileges.
“56 flowers, 56 ethnic groups”, as a popular song once put it.
Although official propaganda often portrayed minorities as exotic mascots, they were given a degree of latitude.
They could travel fairly freely, follow many of their religious precepts and educate children in their own languages.
The hope was that this would foster development and loyalty.
Over the decades, though, outbursts of violence and protest in Tibet, Xinjiang and, to a lesser extent, Inner Mongolia persuaded the party that even relative autonomy had failed.
China started to move in the opposite direction in the late 2000s.
Under Xi Jinping, the process has dramatically accelerated.
He has pushed harder and faster than his predecessors, willing to launch whatever crackdowns he believes are needed to shore up party rule.
The result has been a wrenching and sometimes deadly process. Instead of emphasising differences between groups, the party now speaks of them as together forming the “community of the Chinese nation”.
Textbooks devote less content to the 56 separate groups.
And when Mr Xi talks of them, it is about their unity.
That might sound warm and inclusive.
In practice the shift has looked more like aggressive assimilation than enlightened tolerance.
In Tibet authorities have arrested monks, taken control of monasteries, packed young children off to boarding schools and forced locals to denounce the Dalai Lama.
In Xinjiang rights groups have documented the detention of more than a million Muslims in a mass re-education campaign, while mosques have been destroyed.
In Inner Mongolia officials have crushed protests against making Mandarin the main language of education.
The “law on promoting ethnic unity and progress” will codify many of these changes.
Among its provisions, it requires Mandarin to have precedence over minority languages in schools and in official communication; it calls for “new social customs”, including barring anyone from blocking marriages on identity grounds; and it mandates that different ethnicities should live in mixed communities.
The law also creates a new legal basis for prosecuting anyone who opposes the party’s definition of ethnic harmony, including parents who instil “detrimental” views in their children.
Uncomfortably for critics in the West, there are some parallels between China’s approach to minorities and those of other countries.
For people who say its Mandarin-first policies are discriminatory, look at France, where schools have long placed limits on regional languages.
The end of affirmative action in America’s university admissions has an analogue in Chinese provinces that have stopped awarding extra points to minority students in the gaokao university-entrance exam.
And Denmark’s “anti-ghetto” law aims to resettle minorities in mixed communities. In a “what-about” contest, China’s defenders already have their ammunition.
All for one
In the real world, away from the scorched earth of social media, there is a real policy question, albeit not one that China’s parliament is debating.
Will the smothering and suppression of minority languages, religions and customs actually get the party what it wants?
Could China have found a durable solution to the challenge of governing a multi-ethnic state by granting greater autonomy to its minority groups, rather than giving them less and less space?
China never seriously considered such a relaxation.
In the party’s view, suppression is the path to national unity and stability.
What is not known—and may not be known for decades—is whether it is also storing up resentments that may eventually erupt.
For now the direction is clear.
The party embraces its minorities in the most superficial sense: it likes their singing, their dancing and, of course, their dress.
Beyond that, deeper displays of ethnic identity are not just frowned upon but proscribed by law.
Leaving one session, Chaguan asked a representative from Inner Mongolia, in a glorious blue silk robe, whether she had seen any policies that would be specifically helpful for Mongolians.
“I haven’t,” she said, before quickly adding, “but forging a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation is the guiding thread, and that’s good for all minorities.”
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