China's Model: Building a Common National Identity Across a Vast Multiethnic State

The Chinese constitution opens its account of the state with a phrase that does a great deal of work: the People's Republic is a unified multi-ethnic state. Both halves are load-bearing. Unified commits the state to a single political and cultural centre. Multi-ethnic concedes that the population it governs is not one people. Every major identity policy of the past seventy years is an attempt to hold those two words together.

The scale makes the attempt worth studying regardless of one's view of it. Fifty-six ethnic groups are officially recognised - the Han majority and fifty-five others - spread across territories with radically different languages, scripts, religions and histories of incorporation. No other state has tried to build a common national identity across that much variation while also running the largest continuous bureaucratic tradition on earth.

The two instruments

The architecture has two components that pull in opposite directions, deliberately.

The first is regional ethnic autonomy. Codified in the 1984 Law on Regional Ethnic Autonomy and applied through autonomous regions, prefectures and counties, it provides for local government led by members of the titular nationality, and for the use and development of local languages and customs. On paper it is a system of recognised difference.

The second is linguistic standardisation. The 2000 Law on the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language established Putonghua and standardised characters as the national norm for education, broadcasting, government and public services. It built on two mid-century reforms whose scale is easy to underestimate: the simplification of characters and, in 1958, the adoption of Pinyin romanisation as a teaching tool. Together these made a written tradition of extraordinary difficulty teachable at national scale, and mass literacy followed.

The tension is structural. One instrument protects local linguistic life; the other promotes a common one. Which prevails at any moment is a policy choice, and the choice has moved.

The script as a unifying technology

There is a feature of the Chinese case with no close parallel elsewhere, and it predates the modern state by two millennia.

The Chinese writing system is not phonetic. A character carries meaning rather than sound, which means that speakers of mutually unintelligible varieties - Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, Wu and others, differing from each other roughly as much as Romance languages do - can read the same text. Written Chinese has functioned as a unifying medium across spoken diversity since the Qin standardisation of the script in the third century BCE.

This gave Chinese state-building a resource that European nation-builders lacked entirely. Where a French or Italian state had to manufacture linguistic unity by suppressing regional speech, the Chinese state inherited a written unity that had survived every dynastic collapse. Twentieth-century reforms extended access to it rather than creating it.

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It also explains why script policy is treated as a matter of national integrity rather than technical convenience, and why the standardisation of characters was pursued with such determination even as it opened a lasting divergence with traditional-character usage in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.

The concept doing the reconciling

The idea meant to hold the two instruments together is Zhonghua minzu - the Chinese nation as an overarching community encompassing all fifty-six groups. In recent years official formulations have placed increasing emphasis on forging a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation, a phrase now central in party and state documents on ethnic work.

The framing is genuinely different from European civic nationalism. It does not ask minorities to abandon their identities in favour of a neutral citizenship; it asks them to understand those identities as components of a larger civilisational whole with a continuous history. It is, in that sense, closer to Morocco's layered preamble than to the French republican model - with the significant difference that the layers are ranked and the centre is not negotiable.

Heritage policy carries the same logic. China holds one of the largest sets of UNESCO World Heritage inscriptions in the world, and an extensive body of intangible heritage listings covering calligraphy, opera forms, craft techniques and regional practices. Many of these are minority practices, and their inscription is presented as evidence that the multi-ethnic claim is substantive. Critics read the same inscriptions differently - as the selection of cultural expressions that are politically safe, aesthetic rather than institutional, and detachable from the language and religious practice that gave rise to them.

Where it is contested

The direction of travel has drawn sustained criticism, and a magazine reporting this field has to state what the criticism is rather than gesture at it.

The clearest documented flashpoint came in Inner Mongolia in 2020, when a change to bilingual education policy shifted several subjects from Mongolian to Chinese-medium instruction. It prompted school boycotts and public protest - unusually visible, and widely reported. Parallel changes to language-of-instruction policy have been reported in Tibetan and Uyghur areas.

Beyond language policy, international bodies, foreign governments and human rights organisations have alleged coercive assimilation in Xinjiang, including mass detention, restrictions on religious practice, and residential schooling that separates children from families. The Chinese government rejects these characterisations, describing its programmes as vocational training, counter-extremism and poverty alleviation, and disputes both the evidence and the motives of those making the claims. The disagreement is factual as well as political, and this magazine does not resolve it here. What can be said without controversy is that the balance between the two constitutional instruments - autonomy and standardisation - has shifted markedly toward the second, and that this shift is the substance of the dispute.

The demographic variable

There is a second pressure on the model that has nothing to do with ethnicity.

China's population entered decline, with the first officially reported annual fall in decades announced for 2022, following a long fertility decrease that the end of the one-child policy did not reverse. Ageing is proceeding rapidly. A state whose legitimacy has rested substantially on delivered growth now faces a shrinking workforce supporting a growing retired population.

This matters for cultural policy in a way that is under-discussed. Continuity projects are expensive - heritage programmes, language institutes, cultural production, the enormous infrastructure of national narrative. Fiscal pressure tends to concentrate spending on whatever is deemed most essential, and in a centralising system the most essential is rarely the minority programme.

What the case contributes

Read comparatively, China supplies the clearest available example of a proposition that smaller states also face: that recognition and integration are not naturally compatible, and that a constitution can promise both without specifying the exchange rate between them.

It also supplies a caution. The instruments of cultural continuity are not morally self-justifying. A language academy, a heritage designation, a national curriculum and a standardised script are tools. They can sustain a threatened tradition or displace one, and the same ministry can do both in different provinces in the same year. Anyone who argues - as this magazine does - that states should take cultural transmission seriously has to accept that the argument cuts in more than one direction.