A new Chinese policy pushing Han Chinese over minority languages has Tibetan and Uyghur Canadians concerned about what it means for family and community affected by the law.
A new law in China reinforcing Han Chinese identity at the expense of minority groups such as Tibetans and Uyghurs has rattled community leaders in Canada, who say Beijing is using it to recast their decades-old struggle as a purely domestic matter.
The Ethnic Unity and Progress Law, which took effect July 1, formalizes a shift that has been underway in China for close to a decade, pushing ethnic minorities toward what the state calls a single Chinese nation. Advocates call it Han Chinese assimilation: legal pressure on Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Inner Mongolians to prioritize Chinese over their own languages, layered on years of forced relocation, family separation, and labour policy already reshaping those communities.
“If they seriously considered us and inner Mongolians as Chinese, then they should also have rights to speak their languages. Especially, it’s already promised within the Chinese Constitution,” said Sherap Therchin, executive director of the Canada Tibet Committee. “[T]hen, they should also have the right to speak their own languages.” Article 4 of China’s constitution guarantees ethnic groups the freedom to use and develop their own languages, a guarantee the new law appears to directly contradict.
The new law, he said, contradicts those prior commitments while giving Beijing a legal basis to describe foreign criticism as interference in an internal affair.
...
After publication [of the law], Global Affairs Canada said Canada continues to raise human rights concerns about China at international forums, and pointed to sanctions imposed in recent years on individuals and entities tied to rights violations in Xinjiang and Tibet.
Former deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland spoke out against the new Chinese law at a security forum in Taiwan this week.
The law took effect July 1. The next day, a Tibetan man, Lobga Rangzen, self-immolated in front of the United Nations headquarters in New York, the first such protest incident on American soil. In a final message hours before his death, he called on China to repeal the law, on Tibetans not to give up the cause, and on exile communities to stay united and not forget the people still living under Chinese rule.
...