For Tibetans, China’s ethnic minorities law is assimilation dressed up as ‘unity’

On 1 July 2026, China’s National People’s Congress enacted the Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, a 65-article statute passed in March by a near-unanimous vote. Beijing presents it as a modernising measure meant to bind the country’s 56 officially recognised ethnic groups into what officials call ‘a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation’. For the roughly seven million Tibetans this law governs – and the 150,000 more living in exile – it looks like something else entirely: the legal codification of an assimilation project that has been under way for nearly two decades.

Dhundup Gyalpo joined the Tibetan civil service in January 2000. He also studied Chinese in Taiwan for two years. Over the past two decades, he has served as head of the health education and media section of the Health Department; editor of TibetNet/Tibetan Bulletin; research fellow at the Tibet Policy Institute; secretary of the Office of Tibet in Taipei, Taiwan; and secretary of the Bureau of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in New Delhi. Since March 2026, he has been serving as the Representative of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Pretoria, South Africa.

Tibet as the testing ground The Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress did not appear out of nowhere. Researchers tracking Chinese ethnic policy have traced its core ideas back to pilot regulations first imposed in the Tibet Autonomous Region and Tibetan-populated prefectures of Sichuan, Yunnan and Qinghai, beginning in about 2009 – in the aftermath of the 2008 uprising that swept the Tibetan plateau. What started as a regional experiment has now become national law.

That history matters because it quietly inverts an older promise. China’s 1984 Law on Regional Ethnic Autonomy pledged to let minority regions “manage their own internal affairs”. The new law doesn’t repeal that statute; it leaves it standing as an empty shell while building a wholly different framework – assimilation dressed in the language of “unity” and “mutual embeddedness” – on top of it. A law that openly abolished Tibetan autonomy would invite international condemnation. A law that simply out-legislates it achieves the same result with far less friction.

Beneath its warm vocabulary the statute’s operative provisions are stark:

Language. It enshrines Mandarin as the primary language of education and public life, reinforcing a system in which an estimated 80% of Tibetan children already attend state-run boarding schools, often far from home and taught largely in Mandarin;

The home front. Article 20 requires parents to teach children to “love the Chinese Communist Party” and treats anything “detrimental to ethnic unity” as prohibited – reaching directly into what families may say to their own children;

Demographic engineering. The law’s call for “mutually embedded community environments” formalises resettlement programmes that have already affected an estimated 3.36 million Tibetans since 2000, including hundreds of thousands moved through village relocation and labour-transfer schemes;

Criminalising dissent.