For years, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has pushed ethnic minority groups like Tibetans and Uyghurs to adopt an identity rooted in Chinese nationality and allegiance to the ruling Communist Party.
Now, that push has been codified into a sweeping new law that reaches into classrooms, neighborhoods and homes – and gives Beijing the right to target people outside of its borders that it believes violate its rules.
The statute, officially known as the Ethnic Unity and Progress Promotion Law, came into effect on July 1. It bans acts that “undermine ethnic unity or create ethnic division” among China’s 56 officially recognized ethnicities, which include a Han Chinese majority that makes up over 90% of the country’s 1.4 billion people.
Example: Many Americans don’t speak their native tongue.
That’s because English is the national language and the lingua franca. People adopt and use it out of their own will. There’s no systematic policy in place that punishes people for speaking a different language with the intent of erasing them.
Intent or not, the outcome is there. You think the Irish immigrants decided on their own to forget their home language? They were derided as non-white and their language was part of that non-white identity.
No, intent is EVERYTHING. That’s literally what defines a genocide as one. People choosing to adopt a language out of their own volition because it’s more convenient is just natural assimilation that comes with immigration. It only become cultural genocide when the state passes laws that punishes the use of one language and mandates the use of another by force with the intent of erasing the former by replacing it with the latter.
So if the government passes those same laws without the intent of genocide then it isn’t genocide? Like China is saying the intent is harmony, not genocide.
The intent of the laws is what’s up to interpretation. A lot genocides don’t have an explicit policy like the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide. A lot tend have policies where the real intentions are hidden under some sham cover. That’s why historians and other academic researchers examine policies by how they’re implemented and enforced rather than how politicians or the state market them as.