The Next Phase of China’s Minority Crackdown

When the People’s Republic of China was founded, in 1949, it was explicitly a multinational state. Although Han Chinese make up more than 90 percent of the country’s population, China’s constitution and subsequent laws grant minority nationalities autonomy in specific regions and promise them collective agency as “masters of their own homes.” For decades, the party-state’s official bargain—honored unevenly and often violated—was that national unity would be best secured by recognizing difference and granting minorities limited territorial, linguistic, and political autonomy within China, rather than by forcing them to be absorbed into Han culture. As of July 1, however, national…