“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is just the latest reminder that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is an imperial state intent on exercising its will over diverse peoples and places with little natural connection to the metropole.
Like all imperial powers, Beijing is concerned about ensuring control of its distant outposts. This impetus explains China’s actions along much of its periphery, including in Tibet. To counter the inherent danger of minority ethnic populations defining themselves as something different and apart from the majority, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) called in 2014 for minority children to “study in school, live in school and grow up in school.” Via education — or, more accurately, indoctrination — the Party aims to transform Tibetan children into Mandarin-speaking, Party-loving citizens. Some describe these and related efforts as cultural genocide.
The forcible separation of children from their parents is one reason why China has been credibly accused of genocide in Xinjiang, where the Party locked upwards of a million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in concentration camps and subjected them to reeducation, torture, sexual violence, and forced sterilization. As in Tibet, in Xinjiang the Party has sought to subjugate the local population, eliminate the purported threat of separatism, and transform citizens — more like subjects — into patriots that hold the Party in their hearts.
Similar efforts have been underway elsewhere. In areas populated by Hui Muslims, for example, “Chinese authorities have decommissioned, closed down, demolished, and converted mosques for secular use as part of the government’s efforts to restrict the practice of Islam,” according to Human Rights Watch. In Inner Mongolia, in northern China, Beijing has outlawed books about Mongolian history and banned Mongolian as a language of instruction in primary and secondary schools.
The PRC’s imperial impulse likewise explains Beijing’s harsh crackdown on Hong Kong in recent years, where the metropole has sought not just to shut down dissent but to weaken, if not erase, the city’s unique identity. To China, unique minority identities — whether ethnic, religious, cultural, or linguistic — are threats. That is because for imperial powers, ruling legitimacy is built on force and coercion, not buy-in. China’s communist leaders believe Tibetans, Uyghurs, Hong Kongers, and other minority groups may accept the fact of Party rule, but are more likely than others to question the justice or rightness of that rule. To solve this problem, Xi Jinping is opting to eliminate these groups, whether through genocide or by destroying what makes them unique.
Conceiving of China as an imperial power helps to illuminate why Xi Jinping has set his sights on Taiwan. The Taiwanese people are, effectively, a minority population within what the PRC considers to be its borders. As with China’s oppressed people groups, Taiwan’s people have an identity, civic culture, society, and even languages that are all their own. What is more, they have successfully resisted the CCP’s efforts to extend its control over the island. This is a major problem for Xi Jinping because it undermines the Party’s right to rule in places where that rule is firmly established.
Taiwan, then, is not only central to achieving Xi’s dream of national unification. To the Party, Taiwan is key to preventing China from disintegrating. For if the Party’s rule is not legitimate everywhere within China’s supposed borders, it is legitimate nowhere. It turns out that annexation may be less about expanding the empire than about saving it. If so, the threat to Taiwan will only prove more pressing as China’s internal challenges mount.
Michael Mazza is a senior director at the Project 2049 Institute and a senior non-resident fellow at the Global Taiwan Institute.
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