(TibetanReview.net, Oct30’23) – Comprehensive efforts should be made to promote standard spoken and written Chinese language and the use of unified state-compiled textbooks, China’s official Xinhua news agency Oct 28 cited President Xi Jinping as saying Oct 27, calling on China’s top decision making body to promote high-quality development of the Party’s work on ethnic affairs in the new era. He has also called for population mobility in the ethnic minority regions, stressing these in the name of “forging a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation”.
The call underlines China’s ongoing campaign to assimilate in the name of Sinicization the ethnic minority regions of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) which has seen Tibetan being replaced by Mandarin Chinese as the sole medium of instruction in schools across greater China. It has also seen around a million Tibetan children being separated from their parents and cultural environment to be groomed in a Sinicization schooling system.
Xi made the remarks on Friday (Oct 27) while presiding over a group study session of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, the report said.
Efforts should be made to let people cultivate the awareness that people from all ethnicities are in the same community, where they share weal and woe and stick together through thick and thin, Xi was cited as saying.
Commending the new historic achievements in the Party’s work on ethnic affairs since the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012, Xi has said the Party’s important thinking on strengthening and improving the work had been formulated, and a new frontier had been opened in adapting Marxist ethnicity theories to the Chinese context and the needs of the times.
Noting the new circumstances and tasks in the Party’s work on ethnic affairs since the 20th CPC National Congress in 2022, Xi has said no ethnic group shall be left behind in building a great modern socialist country in all respects.
He has urged a focus on building modern Chinese civilization, aiming to lay a solid spiritual and cultural foundation for forging a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation.
Xi has also stressed strengthening the education of the Party’s theories, lines, principles, and policies among people of all ethnic groups, and promoting the creative evolution and innovative development of fine traditional Chinese culture.
Clearly suggesting the dilution of the ethnicity of the ethnic minority regions of the PRC, Xi has called for more exchanges and interactions among different ethnic groups, with efforts being made to “promote population mobility and integrated habitation among various ethnic groups, in a bid to continuously foster ethnic unity and progress”.
Party committees and governments at all levels should adhere to the correct and distinctively Chinese approach to handling ethnic affairs, and officials should make their due contributions to ethnic unity and progress, Xi has said, making it clear that officials will be judged for their contributions in the above fields of ethnic work.