For Tibetans, China’s new law is assimilation dressed up as ‘unity’

On 1 July 2026, China’s National People’s Congress enacted the Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, a 65-article statute passed in March by a near-unanimous vote.

Beijing presents it as a modernising measure meant to bind the country’s 56 officially recognised ethnic groups into what officials call ‘a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation’.

For the roughly seven million Tibetans this law governs – and the 150,000 more living in exile – it looks like something else entirely: the legal codification of an assimilation project that has been under way for nearly two decades.