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China tells its minorities to integrate or face consequences with sweeping new law
(edition.cnn.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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I think we both agree China needs to avoid balkanization and excessive pluralism if they want to remain stable long term. I think that's the Chinese view of their own situation as well.
Even if you teach the local language people leave due to urbanization and don't teach their kids. Your community grows smaller and smaller and eventually it's just hundreds of people speaking that language or practicing that culture, or nobody at all because they all grew old and died.
It is going to happen, it's not theory here. This policy is a lot more fair than residential schools in Canada or forced spelling and accent training from the French Academy to homogenize France. The end result is broadly similar though and so is the intention behind it.
It's going to eventually be like the UK with hundreds of dead dialects and a dozen dead languages spoken by a tiny minority of people.
Minorities in China are going to have a choice to speak their language at home in much the same way that I have a choice about being employed.
So all modern attempts at 'reviving' or spreading local language and culture should be stopped, since it's clearly a lost cause and useless. We should inform Ireland immediately that their their record spread of Irish has been a lie and they should just give up and learn English only and abandon their cultural roots because a lemmy.zip user said all attempts at preserving language is doomed to fail unless you have ten bazillion micronations that never trade..
That's not what I'm saying. I'm just being realistic here... Plus is reviving these old languages in the UK going to threaten English? Absolutely not, which is why it's allowed. If at any point a secondary language threatened the primary trade language of a nation somehow, there would be policy to resist it. Are Londoners going to learn Gaelic? Well that's how the Irish felt when they were colonized by the British. The Irish certainly aren't going to speak only Gaelic. They'll know English as well, which is good enough for the British.
Also an understated part of this whole debate I haven't focused on too much is how dialects are culture. Each region or town had its own dialect and local customs even if they were ruled by the same king or emperor in premodern times. It's not a coincidence that European separatist movements can be divided among dialects of a language, like Catalinian separatism from Spain.
That's also what lead to literal Balkanization as well. Shared languages and dialects deciding cultural borders when a nation fractures.
Even the revival of Gaelic or Welsh doesn't undo the destruction of industrialization homogenizing a nation. You've already permanently lost the regional or local culture of each town and it'll never come back. There wasn't a single "Welsh" or "Gaelic" language prior to English replacing it, just like there wasn't one version of English prior to industrialization. The concept of a universal national language only practically became a thing with the advent of railroads. Otherwise people didn't move around enough to need a nationwide common tongue. One of the few exceptions to this is ironically China, which had a strong centralized bureaucracy and education system that taught the Imperial language.
It's just a natural consequence of modernization. It just happens, and now China is making a concerted effort to accelerate it and guide it. They teach simplified Mandarin so everyone reads and speaks the same trade and work language. It's what every other nation has done, and it's going to happen the same as how French, English, German .etc all displaced local or regional dialects and cultures into extinction.