For years, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has pushed ethnic minority groups like Tibetans and Uyghurs to adopt an identity rooted in Chinese nationality and allegiance to the ruling Communist Party.
Now, that push has been codified into a sweeping new law that reaches into classrooms, neighborhoods and homes – and gives Beijing the right to target people outside of its borders that it believes violate its rules.
The statute, officially known as the Ethnic Unity and Progress Promotion Law, came into effect on July 1. It bans acts that “undermine ethnic unity or create ethnic division” among China’s 56 officially recognized ethnicities, which include a Han Chinese majority that makes up over 90% of the country’s 1.4 billion people.
In my -admittedly limited - experience, the bast majority of people are nice, good people. Doesn’t matter where they come from, what the color of their skin is, what their culture is, most people are decent and just want to make it through the day. Just the other day I was in a city where a football world cup match was playing and the streets were filled to the brim with people from all countries, all walks of life, all partying together. I saw 10 people from every “color” and gender and what not, all playing “keep the ball up”. Everyone was wearing a T-shirt from a different country and it didn’t matter, everyone was there to enjoy themselves.
Its usually a tiny portion of narcissistic assholes with psychopathic tendencies that feel the need to get more money, more power, who always end up pushing bullshit like this. It’s always a form of “I want more wealth or power so if I make another minority group look bad, I can divide and conquer and become even bigger!”
I think that if we simply remove the option to become super powerful that things finally will turn around. That means world wide wealth caps for one, nobody richer than, say, ten million dollars, anything over that goes to taxes. And for two, it means also capping the power that politicians have.
Once everyone is more or less equally powerful, and there are no more incentives to push for more wealth, that 1% if you will, will no longer have the power to push those narratives that one is better than the other, they won’t be able to spread lies as easily anymore and why even try if you can’t get rich or powerful anymore?
I think that is the thing that will turn this around for humanity, we need to stop the rich and powerful