China's Latest Depredation
Why Xi Jinping appears to be running out of time.
With the world’s attention elsewhere, China has dropped all pretext to its oppression. This change feels like more than mere opportunism. There appears to be a sense of urgency on the part of China’s president Xi Jinping.
At the beginning of July, China’s Communist Party (CCP) enacted the Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress.
A March 26, 2026 Council on Foreign Relations paper stated: “On March 12, China’s legislature adopted the Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress (Chinese; English translation), a sweeping new statute that codifies Beijing’s approach toward China’s 56 officially recognized ethnic groups. Substantively, the law enshrines a decades-long shift towards aggressive assimilationist policies. Structurally, it reflects a deepening merger of Party ideology and state law that is becoming increasingly prevalent under Xi Jinping.”
Said Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director Sarah Brooks about the new law: “Chinese authorities have human rights obligations requiring them to protect minority communities and their cultures, but this law does the opposite. Rather than celebrating difference, it is about pushing ethnic groups such as Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Mongolians to adopt a single, state-defined national identity dominated by Han Chinese culture. Unity’ in this context is not harmony between different communities—it is political and ideological alignment with the Chinese Communist Party. Rather than protecting diversity and equality, the law requires conformity.”
The CCP’s treatment of the Uyghurs has been labeled genocide by both Democratic and Republican administrations. Protests over the CCP’s treatment of Tibetans go back even further, and its actions have been called cultural genocide.
Internal repression has been a fact of life under the CCP, not just for the ethnic minorities under its control but for all who disagree with its policies, including of those living abroad. It merely changes in severity; it never disappears. This new “ethnic unity” law, however, signals an ominous change in severity and scope.
It carries the overtones of other disastrous CCP policies—notably, the One Child Policy. Also, the CCP’s suppression of religion: Both the Uyghurs’ and the Tibetans’ identities are strongly defined by their religious practices. However, this new law takes these to a new, targeted, unabashed, and unprecedented level.
Of course, the CCP’s aggressive nature extends well beyond individuals under its sway and China’s borders.
Its belligerence and aggression abroad come so regularly that they become lost in their own repetitive cadence: India, Australia, Philippines, Japan, Taiwan, the CCP’s creation of manmade islands. Its Belt and Road Initiative ostensibly promises development but delivers dependency. Its relations with the world’s pariahs—North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Russia, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, and Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela—are well known. And there is mounting evidence of the CCP’s meddling in the internal affairs of other nations, notably in the U.S. with its funding of leftist groups here.
Any pushback has only been used as justification for more aggression.
Internally, there was the takeover of Hong Kong with the CCP’s unilateral abrogation of its promise (”one country, two systems”) to the former British colony. Jailing of dissidents is continual: as in the case of Hong Kong businessman and politician Jimmy Lai. There is no religious freedom; there is increased surveillance. During Covid-19 (not including the increasing evidence that Covid-19 originated from a lab leak there and was covered up, thereby allowing it to spread globally), the CCP’s lockdowns were so draconian that China’s long-suffering citizens began revolting against them.
None of this is new. Again, only the scale and scope seem to be. And the sense of urgency.
Xi Jinping is a second Mao Zedong. Far from hyperbole, this is an image and a parallel Xi clearly wants to nurture. With his elevation to Mao’s status almost a decade ago, it is clear that Xi does not intend to leave office.
However, Xi Jinping is 73 years old. Mao was 82 when he died; however, in 1971, when Mao was just 78, Lin Biao, Mao’s heir apparent, plotted an assassination attempt on Mao. Uneasy is the head that wears the crown. Uneasier still the head that never intends to relinquish the crown.
Even Mao, who was and is revered above all the CCP’s leaders, had enemies.
Xi certainly has enemies as well. Xi’s purges of officers (always for “corruption”) certainly call to mind those of Mao’s past.
All these aggressive moves—at home and abroad, within society and the military, against ethnic minorities and Chinese dissidents—leave a sense of urgency. Why would Xi feel the urgency the CCP is now exuding?
After his death, Mao’s successors (principally Deng Xiaoping) led China away from the disastrous hard line course Mao had set for it. Instead, it not only joined the trend of communist and socialist countries that were stepping back from socialism’s economic failures in hopes of saving their political regimes; it leapt ahead of it.
While virtually the entire socialist and communist cadre of states would fail, and then fall, with their milquetoast market efforts, China’s more aggressive one would save the CCP from itself. China moved toward market reforms in many areas; it also moved away from Mao’s legacy. The success that market reforms yielded also tarnished Mao’s and the CCP’s legacy.
Of course, the communists never let go. And they never intended to.
Since Xi took the CCP’s tiller in 2012 (and became China’s president in 2013), he has increasingly turned toward the doctrinaire communist legacy. At the same time, he has accumulated power unrivaled since Mao.
It is not strange that Xi would therefore remember the lesson of Mao and his successors. It is equally unsurprising that he would wonder what will happen in a post-Xi China.
Like Mao, Xi has a mixed legacy at best. He also lacks Mao’s accomplishments of defeating the Kuomintang (KMT) and creating modern China. Xi also inherited the CCP’s horrendous one-child policy, which has bequeathed China a huge demographic problem.
The economy that once looked certain to overtake the U.S.’s is now seeing itself falling behind. Like the military, it too is rife with corruption; it also has excess capacity and failing SOE businesses that must be propped up. The Chinese people do not consume but save; so, unlike the U.S., China cannot finance its economy with internal demand.
The CCP’s internal and external actions leave them increasingly isolated. It sees its recent inroads in Latin America being rolled back. Its oil supply is clearly vulnerable. Its allies are diminishing, and its remaining ones are diminished: Russia is involved in a war that is bleeding it to death. Cuba is on the verge of collapse. Venezuela’s Maduro was toppled, and that nation (and its oil) foreclosed to it. There is a rising number of conservative regimes in Latin America. Al-Assad is gone in Syria. Iran is under siege.
Opposing allies that once looked docile are increasingly activated: Japan and other nations in the Pacific. Even NATO is devoting more money to its defense to neutralize any potential Russian threat, thus freeing up the U.S., which just moved a carrier group in support of the Philippines.
Xi wants to cement his rule while he is still in power. He wants to ensure his trajectory for China continues. Doing so means time is of the essence. So, the CCP is now taking things a step further and quickening the pace of its steps. Genocide is now not even hidden in their new “ethnic unity” law.
China is getting more belligerent as Xi feels the need more urgent with his time growing shorter. Mao’s shadow grows longer. The result is that there is no longer any pretext: There must be bald-faced repression at home and aggression abroad.
Those falling under the seduction of Zohran Mamdani’s Siren song about socialism’s warm embrace of collectivism would do well to look closely at Xi’s actions at home and abroad, to the ethnic peoples within China and to the Han majority. Socialism’s promised “warmth” can turn quite cold and premeditated; the promised embrace can turn into an increasingly tight squeeze. Mamdani’s wannabe socialists should remember what socialism and communism’s embrace has looked like historically. If they need a reminder, China is giving the world a refresher course.
J.T. Young is the author of the recent book Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America's Socialist Left, published by RealClear Publishing. Follow him on Substack.
Oh dear me. The CCP has decided to "unify china". What next?