When the People’s Republic of China was founded, in 1949, it was explicitly a multinational state. Although Han Chinese make up more than 90 percent of the country’s population, China’s constitution and subsequent laws grant minority nationalities autonomy in specific regions and promise them collective agency as “masters of their own homes.” For decades, the party-state’s official bargain—honored unevenly and often violated—was that national unity would be best secured by recognizing difference and granting minorities limited territorial, linguistic, and political autonomy within China, rather than by forcing them to be absorbed into Han culture.

As of July 1, however, national integration through forced cultural assimilation is the law of the land. The constitution still defines the country as a multinational state, but the passage of the Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress marks a decisive turn away from the promise of territorial autonomy. It codifies the coercive project to create a Chinese national community in which minority peoples can exist only insofar as they serve Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s vision of China—a vision rooted in the belief that commonality is better than diversity and that national cohesion requires a single shared Chinese cultural and linguistic identity.

The new ethnic unity law did not introduce the policy of assimilation; for more than a decade, Xi has been replacing minority-language education with Mandarin Chinese instruction, increasing the party’s control over religion, and recasting minority histories as strands of one continuous Chinese civilization. But this approach is now consolidated in national legislation enacted by the full National People’s Congress, signaling that Beijing regards it as a matter of fundamental state importance and enshrining it with the highest legal authority. And the law distributes responsibility for implementing these policies across all levels of the state and throughout society.

Beijing’s campaign of cultural dispossession will now become more deeply embedded in bureaucratic practices and institutional structures, which are difficult to dislodge or change. Even if a more liberal leader were to one day succeed Xi, reviving autonomy would require a complete bureaucratic, political, and cultural overhaul. For the foreseeable future, therefore, Beijing has closed the door on peaceful coexistence, locking itself instead into a more hostile and zero-sum relationship with the minority groups whose cultures and languages it once accommodated.

China’s official policy, inspired by the Soviet model of national-territorial autonomy, recognizes 56 formally equal nationalities within the country. Its constitution promises to protect the rights and interests of all minority nationalities and grants them territorial autonomy in areas where they live in concentrated communities. A 1984 law formalized the protections and accommodations granted to minority groups as part of this territorial autonomy. In areas as varied as Xinjiang in the far northwest and Yunnan in the country’s southwest, minority groups were entitled to use their own languages as the medium of instruction in schools and maintain their own traditions, cultures, and religious practices. Even when these protections were violated, the law maintained the principle of collective rights for China’s non-Han nationalities.

But Xi began systematically dismantling the foundations of this system soon after he became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012. His move to dismantle territorial autonomy is often explained as a response to episodes of unrest that broke........

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