A New Law Heralds China’s Fraught Ethnic Future

{"title":"Beijing Just Wrote Assimilation Into Law — and Supply Chains Should Notice","body":"Foreign Policy is reporting on a new Chinese law reshaping ethnic policy, with the piece flagging Xinjiang and Tibet as the regions most directly affected and framing it as a marker of where Xi Jinping's approach to ethnic minorities is headed. The specifics of the statute aren't detailed beyond the headline, but the framing itself is the signal: this is being described as a turning point, not a routine administrative update.\n\nThe pattern here is familiar to anyone who's watched Beijing's ethnic policy evolve over the last decade: informal, ad-hoc control measures — surveillance in Xinjiang, language restrictions in Tibet — eventually get codified into formal law. That codification isn't a softening; it's the opposite. It's the state converting emergency-style administrative practice into permanent legal architecture, which makes it harder to reverse and easier to enforce