The Chinese Government is now openly accelerating the forced assimilation of Tibetans
For years, the Australia Tibet Council has been warning about the systemic Chinese Government plan to eliminate Tibetan language and culture. Now, with China recently passing its “Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress” the Chinese Government has laid bare its authoritarian turn away from any pretence of ethnic autonomy and toward enforced assimilation.
China is accelerating a sweeping campaign to erase Tibetan language, culture, and identity — and it is now being embedded directly into Chinese law.
These “ethnic unity laws” are a far-reaching statute that codifies Beijing’s increasingly aggressive assimilation policies toward Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongolians, and other non-Han peoples.
The law represents the culmination of a policy shift that has intensified under Xi Jinping for more than a decade. Beijing is abandoning even the veneer of ethnic autonomy that formally existed in earlier decades, and replacing it with what scholars describe as “second-generation ethnic policy” — a system designed to weaken ethnic distinctions and force a single, state-controlled Chinese national identity.
For Tibetans, the consequences are already devastating. As Tibetans worldwide and in Australia have been warning — this will result in a cultural genocide in Tibet.
Mandarin Chinese is now mandated as the language of instruction from pre-school onward. Authorities are directing schools, institutions, and even families to promote “national identity” above ethnic and cultural identity. Tibetan-language education and community-run cultural initiatives are being restricted or shut down.
Parents describe heart-breaking changes in their children within months of entering state-run schools. One Tibetan mother said her five-year-old daughter stopped speaking Tibetan shortly after beginning preschool and began insisting: “I am Chinese, not Tibetan.”
Tibetan children are losing the ability to communicate with parents and grandparents in their mother tongue. Families speak of a growing rupture between generations as language, stories, spiritual traditions, and cultural memory are severed.
Developments raise alarm internationally —UN experts express serious concern
In a formal communication to the Chinese government, several United Nations Special Rapporteurs expressed “serious concern” over policies aimed at the “acculturation and assimilation of the Tibetan culture into the dominant Han Chinese majority.” The UN experts warned that these measures may violate fundamental rights relating to language, culture, religion, and education. You can read the UN’s communication to China here.
China’s leaders call this “ethnic unity”. But unity imposed through coercion, forced assimilation, and the destruction of language, culture and identity is not unity at all.
The international community cannot remain silent while Tibetan identity is systematically dismantled. Australia Tibet Council will continue to demand that the Australian Government speaks out against the cultural genocide of Tibetans at every forum available.