New Law Engineers Unity
James Leibold
Executive Summary:
The new Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress gives legal form to Xi Jinping’s campaign to “forge a collective national consciousness,” transforming Xi Jinping’s ethnic policy agenda into a binding mandate across the entire Party-state.
The law further hollows out the older framework of regional ethnic autonomy by subordinating minority languages, cultures, histories, and identities to a singular, Han-dominated vision of the “Zhonghua minzu.”
Its most revealing feature is the scale of the machinery it mobilizes: schools, textbooks, museums, media platforms, families, cadres, budgets, security organs, and diaspora-facing institutions are all made responsible for producing the desired national consciousness. Unity is no longer treated as a social condition to be preserved, but as an administrative outcome to be engineered, monitored, and enforced.
Diversity remains part of the show in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), with colorfully dressed minority delegates once again on display at the annual National People’s Congress (Xinhua, March 8). At this year’s gathering, delegates passed a new Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress (民族团结进步促进法), a detailed, sprawling statute that turns the soft choreography of ethnic harmony into a harder legal architecture for ideological conformity.
State media presents the law as a landmark measure that turns the Party’s ethnic policy line into state law, consolidating the legal foundation for strengthening national cohesion, unity, and modern governance under Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership (Xinhua, March 12). The law does far more than promote harmony, however; it mandates Mandarin education and ideological loyalty to the CCP, expands reporting and surveillance, and even extends extraterritorial enforcement in ways that further hollow out minority autonomy and intensify the assimilation and repression of Uyghurs, Tibetans, and other non-Han peoples (China Brief, April 2).
The law’s deeper significance lies in the anxiety it betrays. Beijing does not trust the unity it proclaims. If national cohesion were secure, the Party would not need to legislate it, much less engineer it across every domain of social life.
Forging Consciousness
At the center of the law sits a familiar but deceptively vague linguistic formulation, officially translated as “fostering a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation” (铸牢中华民族共同体意识) (Xinhua, March 13). This softer rendering suggests the routine nation-building practiced by all modern states. But the original Chinese carries far more ideological charge.
The key lies in the active verb “铸牢.” The first character is metallurgical: to cast molten material into a mold. Paired with the second character, which denotes firmness, enclosure, and confinement, the phrase conveys controlled production: the deliberate casting and stabilization of identity under Party-state direction.
The object of this process, “中华民族,” is not a neutral synonym for “the Chinese nation.” In earlier policy frameworks, it coexisted with a plural system of 56 officially recognized nationalities (民族), each with a distinct identity and a nominal sphere of autonomy (People’s Daily, June 4, 1984). In the new law, that plurality is reconfigured into a singular civilizational subject, within which diversity is recoded into a hierarchical structure.
Finally, what is officially rendered as a “sense of community” (共同体意识) is better understood as a desired form of collective consciousness. While a “sense” may emerge organically, a “consciousness” (意识) must be shaped, tested, and evaluated. Read together, the phrase establishes a clear ideological grammar: the Han-dominated Party-state (the implicit subject) is tasked with forging a unified consciousness among the PRC’s heterogeneous population.
Three Registers of Unity
The law’s language rests on a set of unstable claims about the Chinese nation. The preamble presents the “Zhonghua minzu” (中华民族) at once as an ancient, continuous civilization stretching back 5,000 years; a modern political community forged through struggle since the late 19th century; and a still-fragile consciousness that must be manufactured through law, education, propaganda, and administration. These inconsistencies are revealing of how the Party narrates the nation across three registers.
The first register is deep history: the Party-state appears as the natural culmination of a long civilizational process, not a modern political construct. [1] The second is modern awakening: the nation exists in latent form, becoming self-aware only through the crises of the late Qing and the revolutionary struggles of the 20th century, before reaching its full potential under CCP leadership. By presenting itself as the agent of this awakening, the Party reconciles modern nationalism with claims of historical continuity. [2] The third register is present governance: the nation must be made, in Xi’s words, “visible, palpable, and effective” (有形有感有效) across institutions, emotions, and measurable policy outcomes (Xinhua, March 3).
These registers reveal a tension at the heart of the law. The nation is treated simultaneously as a historical fact, a political achievement, and an ongoing administrative project. The need to continuously “forge” consciousness suggests that unity is neither as ancient nor as secure as official narratives claim. Rather than expressing the confidence of an already consolidated nation, the law reads as an effort to stabilize a national community the Party still does not trust.
Totalizing Governance
The new law turns “forging a collective consciousness” from a slogan into an administrative mandate. It distributes responsibility across the Party-state’s core governing domains, beginning with education. Schools at all levels must integrate the forging mandate into teaching, curriculum design, and textbook review. Language policy is folded into the same framework: Mandarin (普通话) becomes the primary medium of instruction, while minority languages are formally protected but practically subordinated in public usage and institutional life (China Brief, March 27).
This logic extends into cultural and public spaces. Museums, heritage sites, exhibitions, tourist sites, and even urban and architectural design are directed to display shared Chinese cultural symbols and a standardized image of the Chinese nation. The result is the regulation of how history and belonging are encountered in everyday life.
The law then reaches into social and private life. Media organizations, publishers, and online platforms must produce and circulate content aligned with the forging mandate. Parents and guardians are also required to educate minors to identify with the Party, the state, and the Chinese nation, while avoiding ideas deemed harmful to ethnic unity. The family becomes another site of ideological formation. And through separate provisions on overseas Chinese and extraterritorial enforcement, the law projects this logic beyond the PRC’s borders.
Finally, the law moves the forging agenda into the state’s administrative and security machinery. County-level and higher governments must write ethnic unity work into development plans, annual targets, and budgets, and integrate it into cadre training, evaluation, and promotion. Ethnic affairs are also folded into the “comprehensive national security concept” (总体国家安全观), with provisions for monitoring, early warning, and the management of “risks and hidden dangers.”
These provisions transform a political slogan into a governing system. Education, culture, media, family life, cadre management, budgeting, and security work are all made to serve the production of a unified national consciousness. In doing so, it shifts ethnic policy from a framework of limited autonomy and cultural management into one of social engineering.
Conclusion
The Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress recasts national cohesion as an object of governance. Unity is now treated as something to be actively produced, measured, and secured across the Chinese Party-state’s educational, cultural, and security institutions.
By folding ethnic affairs into national security, the law expands the scope for surveillance and intervention in domains previously treated as social or cultural. It reinforces language standardization and symbolic integration in borderland regions such as Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia, while extending ideological management into digital platforms and diaspora-facing spaces.
The Party is explicit about what is at stake. It insists that the Chinese nation is not an imagined community but a “historical inevitability and historical fact” (历史必然和历史事实) (Qiushi, February 1, 2024). Yet the very need to legislate, operationalize, and continuously forge a desired consciousness suggests otherwise: a confident nation does not need to manufacture national consciousness. Only a nervous one does. [3]
This article originally appeared in China Brief Notes. Check it out here!
James Leibold is an Associate Professor and Head of Department at La Trobe University in Melbourne Australia, and an expert on ethnic policy and ethnic conflict in contemporary China. He is the author and co-editor of four books and over thirty peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, and a frequent contributor to the international media on these topics.
Notes
[1] For a convincing, erudite critique of this myth of continuity, see (among other works) James Millward, “Sinicisation, the tribute system and dynasties: Three concepts to justify colonialism and attack non-Sinitic diversity in the People’s Republic of China,” Istituto Affari Internazionali Papers, 25 July 2023.
[2] The concept of “awakening” the nation became a constant refrain throughout the Chinese revolution. See John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture and Class in the Nationalist Revolution. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
[3] See also James Leibold, “Forged souls, broken lives: Xi Jinping’s ‘soul-casting’ project in Xinjiang and beyond,” Melbourne Asia Review, 23 (September 2025), https://www.melbourneasiareview.edu.au/forged-souls-broken-lives-xi-jinpings-soul-casting-project-in-xinjiang-and-beyond/.