China’s Greatest Weakness: Internal Conflicts with Ethnic Minorities

China’s 55 recognized ethnic minorities pose a challenge to the state’s vision of national unity, but not the one historical precedent suggests. Because China faces neither the wartime collapse nor the demographic balance that broke apart the Ottoman and Russian empires, this paper argues that the principal danger to China is the strategy the state has chosen of coercive assimilation. Four case studies are examined along a spectrum of that strategy, from the heavily coercive campaigns against the Xinjiang Uyghurs and Tibetans, to the recently completed linguistic assimilation of Inner Mongolia, and the near-total cultural absorption of the Manchu. Drawing on international organization documents, national legislation, census data, and scholarly studies, the analysis finds that assimilation has produced resistance rather than acceptance, that resistance now cooperates across ethnic lines, and that its internationalization has drawn sanctions and genocide designations. Alternative interpretations of the same record, including Beijing’s counterterrorism and development rationales, are weighed against the documentary evidence. The paper concludes that coercive assimilation imposes growing political and reputational costs on China, and that greater protection of minority rights and cultural identity would better serve the state’s own long-term stability.