“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.
US President Donald Trump has gotten off to a head-spinning start in his foreign policy. He has pressured Denmark to cede Greenland to the United States, threatened to take over the Panama Canal, urged Canada to become the 51st US state, unilaterally renamed the Gulf of Mexico to “the Gulf of America” and announced plans for the United States to annex and administer Gaza. He has imposed and then suspended 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico for their roles in the flow of fentanyl into the United States, while at the same time increasing tariffs on China by 10
With the manipulations of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), it is no surprise that this year’s budget plan would make government operations difficult. The KMT and the TPP passing malicious legislation in the past year has caused public ire to accumulate, with the pressure about to erupt like a volcano. Civic groups have successively backed recall petition drives and public consensus has reached a fever-pitch, with no let up during the long Lunar New Year holiday. The ire has even breached the mindsets of former staunch KMT and TPP supporters. Most Taiwanese have vowed to use
As an American living in Taiwan, I have to confess how impressed I have been over the years by the Chinese Communist Party’s wholehearted embrace of high-speed rail and electric vehicles, and this at a time when my own democratic country has chosen a leader openly committed to doing everything in his power to put obstacles in the way of sustainable energy across the board — and democracy to boot. It really does make me wonder: “Are those of us right who hold that democracy is the right way to go?” Has Taiwan made the wrong choice? Many in China obviously
About 6.1 million couples tied the knot last year, down from 7.28 million in 2023 — a drop of more than 20 percent, data from the Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs showed. That is more serious than the precipitous drop of 12.2 percent in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the saying goes, a single leaf reveals an entire autumn. The decline in marriages reveals problems in China’s economic development, painting a dismal picture of the nation’s future. A giant question mark hangs over economic data that Beijing releases due to a lack of clarity, freedom of the press