Uyghur students study Mandarin beneath a portrait of Mao Zedong at a school in Hetian, Xinjiang, in 2006. China’s push to make Mandarin the nation’s sole language rests on an old Marxist premise – that minority cultures sit a rung lower on a ladder toward “civilisation” (Photo by Servais Mont/Getty Images)
Beijing’s new “common language” law doesn’t sound so common
China’s bid for one national language rests on an old idea – that some cultures remain less developed – and coincides with a push for global status.
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|Beijing’s new “common language” law doesn’t sound so common
Beijing’s new “common language” law doesn’t sound so common
For more than a century, China’s governments have sought one official language understood by everyone, used in public business, conducive to the sense that their population shares the sort of political identity associated with a “nation”. Late Qing constitutional reforms made Mandarin (Opens in new window) the “national language”. The 1911 revolution brought new leaders hoping to “circulate Mandarin Chinese … all over the Republic of China”. Mao Zedong, in power after 1949, accelerated centralisation (Opens in new window). His program merged spreading Mandarin with simplifying characters and working ideological meanings into them.
In 1994, China’s state mandated Mandarin proficiency tests for teachers, broadcasters, and actors and launched a campaign (Opens in new window) to link “speaking Mandarin with being educated and cultured.”
Learning “Chinese” as a language is a heterogenous bucket. 150 dialects or languages were spoken in the province of Yunnan alone in 2009 (Opens in new window). Some 45% (Opens in new window) of China’s far northwestern region Xinjiang speaks Uyghur.
Global power starts with internal unity, seems to be the argument.
Rule of law is a vague idea in China, and sometimes it takes only a new sense of what is politically popular, not what is legal, to push language restrictions. Without explaining the rationale, public security bureaus have imprisoned or surveilled (Opens in new window) teachers advocating Tibetan in schools and removed (Opens in new window) songs with phrases like “I am a Mongolian” from online venues.
However, laws institutionalise campaigns, reduce recourse, and signal state priorities – with two new ones coming into effect in 2026.
There used to be exceptions for ethnic minorities. But a March 2026 law revised (Opens in new window) China’s ethnicity policy, declaring (Opens in new window) non-Mandarin language instruction “no longer necessary”. That change came with other efforts at absorbing the 9% of China’s population not registered as Han into the Han population: housing policies that facilitate ethnic mixing, for example.
A Tibetan-Mandarin bilingual class in Damxung County, Xizang, 2023 — the kind of instruction a 2026 law has since declared unnecessary (Sun Fei/Xinhua via Getty Images)
Why starts with ideology. No matter how far China has gone towards “capitalism with Chinese characteristics”, its state remains a Marxist institution. Between 1992 and 2007, 27 universities added (Opens in new window) schools of Marxism.
How is Marx related to language policy? Marx prescribed an inevitable historical evolution from “primitive” society through feudalism, capitalism, eventually to communist society; each had greater technological capacity and different labour relations. This view of historical “progress” persists among China’s leaders, who shifted (Opens in new window) elementary-school textbooks in 2022 to promote a story of Chinese “civilisation” evolving from “primitive society” in the “prehistoric period.”
This view maps onto a state-driven sense that ethnicity pairs with “degree of primitiveness”. Tourists come to Wengding Village (Opens in new window) because it is “the last primitive tribe in China.” The People’s Dailycelebrates (Opens in new window) the spread of Internet to “the Dulong people,” whose “isolated” location has prevented evolution from a “primitive … lifestyle”. When someone sped by on the road in Qinghai, my taxi driver told me it was probably one of the area’s Tibetans, who tended to be backwards. So ethnicity goes with degree of primitiveness in China, and primitiveness goes with where you are on the progression towards communist “civilisation”. In this context, the March 2026 ethnicity law (Opens in new window) was not only on “Promoting Ethnic Unity” but also on “Promoting Progress.”
China’s been en route to Communism since 1949. So why now? Sometimes states tighten language policies during periods of international expansion. Defunct with the French Revolution, the Academie Française returned with Napoleon, as he reached for Europe. As the Soviet Union spread into imperial Russia’s old periphery, it sought to integrate central Asian and eastern European subjects in part through co-opt-and-conquer language policies. Efforts to “standardise the Japanese language” in the mid-to-late 1800s accompanied (Opens in new window) annexation of Korea and Taiwan.
Certainly, China’s language policies respond in part to domestic worries (Opens in new window) that difference could make a case for separation. As one of my Chinese classmates informed me in 2024, religion in Xinjiang isn’t spiritual; it’s being used for separatism. By 2020 (Opens in new window), in Inner Mongolia, not using Mongolian in school was a “political duty.” In 2019, Xi Jinping felt the need to tell (Opens in new window) Nepal’s prime minister that “anyone attempting to create division in any region of China will only end up with pulverized bodies and crushed bones”.
But tightened language policy also parallels widened aims abroad. China’s state places language policy in the context of “Cold War” dynamics, a phrase that only emerged (Opens in new window) to imply US–China relations at the 18th and 19th Party congresses in 2012 and 2017 (Opens in new window). Mandating Mandarin use in schools, broadcasts, publications, and other domains fights (Opens in new window) “servile imitation of foreign models,” this argument goes. China pushed towards the Global South with the Belt and Road Initiative around the same time (2013 onwards). Thus, language homogenisation has come along with an effort by China’s state to elevate itself (in the Soviet Union’s image) to the status of a global pole in a bipolar world. Global power starts with internal unity, seems to be the argument.
How long that logic holds is a separate question. The Soviet Union went through similar policies, and native-language literature movements (Opens in new window) responded to them in the 1970s and 1980s. Will China’s policies bend language to politics, or will it be the other way around?
Sophia Charles is a graduate student with long-term interests in nationality-related topics, grassroots politics, and social organisation in modern China and Soviet Russia. She graduated in 2024 from Harvard, where she studied History and Physics, along with learning Chinese and Russian.
