As Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation Sjoerd Sjoerdsma prepares to lead a Dutch trade mission to Beijing and Shanghai, Dutch public broadcaster NOS has published an important piece of reporting that deserves the attention of Dutch policymakers before they sit down across the table from their Chinese counterparts.
The NOS article, titled “Alleen nog les in het Mandarijn: China perkt ruimte voor minderheden verder in” (“Only Mandarin lessons: China further restricts space for minorities”), lays out in stark terms what China’s new “ethnic unity” law means in practice for Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongolians and other communities the Chinese state labels as “ethnic minorities.” We encourage everyone following Minister Sjoerdsma’s trip, and anyone who cares about human rights in China, to read it in full.
The law, formally adopted by China’s National People’s Congress in March with an overwhelming majority, entered into force this week. Beijing presents it as a tool to promote unity, social harmony and a shared national identity. Experts interviewed by NOS see it differently: as the next step in a long-running campaign to suppress ethnic minorities, now written permanently into law.
In practice, the article explains, the law cements Mandarin as the dominant language nationwide. Children as young as three may now only be taught in Mandarin rather than in their own languages, including Tibetan or Uyghur. Parents who nonetheless teach their children their mother tongue risk a visit from the authorities, and human rights organisations report neighbours informing on one another simply because Mandarin was not being spoken at home.
NOS traces this back to the 1951 annexation of Tibet and decades of policy aimed at making minority populations “more Chinese,” a process that has accelerated sharply under Xi Jinping. The article recalls that more than a million Uyghurs have been held in so-called re-education camps, that the Mongolian language has effectively been banned in schools in Inner Mongolia, and that religious and cultural expression among minority groups has been steadily curtailed.
As Human Rights Watch researcher Yalkun Uluyol tells NOS, none of these measures are new. What the new law does is make them permanent and formal, converting what were once informal or “undesirable” acts into codified crimes, a pattern the article compares to how Hong Kong’s protest movement was first policed through ordinary regulations before the National Security Law made mass arrests of lawyers, protesters and journalists possible.
Perhaps most alarming for a European audience is what NOS reports about the law’s extraterritorial reach. It criminalises behaviour by individuals or organisations, wherever they are in the world, that is deemed to “undermine ethnic unity and progress” or “sow ethnic division.” The article cites the case of Zhang Yadi, a 23-year-old student arrested last year for “sowing division” after she took part, while studying in France, in a platform promoting the Tibetan language. She was detained during a visit to see her parents in China.
That is why, in the lead-up to this visit, International Campaign for Tibet Europe joined a coalition of Uyghur, Mongolian, Hong Kong and Tibetan organisations in submitting a petition to the House of Representatives’ (Tweede Kamer’s) Foreign Affairs Committee, meeting with MPs to press parliament to take a firmer stand. As we reported at the time (see our earlier coverage, drawing on EU4Tibet’s report on the petition), the coalition asked parliament to:
The NOS article gives weight to every one of these demands. A law that pushes Mandarin-only education on Tibetan and Uyghur children, and that can follow diaspora members like Zhang Yadi across borders, is not a matter the Netherlands can treat as a footnote to trade talks.
We continue to urge Minister Sjoerdsma to raise this law directly with Chinese officials in Beijing and Shanghai, and to ensure that human rights concerns are placed on record in any official readout of the visit, not sidelined by commercial interests.
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