The largest ethnic minority in Xinjiang, a region in China's far north-west. The Uyghurs are at the centre of what is probably the largest system of state-imposed forced labour the world has seen since the Holocaust, affecting at least a fifth of the Uyghur and Kazakh population in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The forced labour taints international supply chains for solar modules, clothing, cars, electronics, chemicals and critical minerals. China denies any such repression has ever taken place.
In the decades after 1949, schools in autonomous regions such as Xinjiang and Tibet were permitted to teach main subjects in their local languages. That space narrowed in the 1990s with the introduction of "bilingual education". After 2000 such teaching grew more institutionalised. On his first visit to Xinjiang as China's leader in 2014, Xi Jinping said that mastering Mandarin would make it easier for local children to find jobs and help them "contribute more to promoting ethnic unity". In 2017 the government ordered minority students to "master and use" standard Mandarin, seeking it employed in 95% of classrooms nationwide. Across many minority regions, subjects such as maths and literature are now taught in Mandarin, despite some protests from parents who fear their children are losing their mother tongue—and with it, an important part of their identity.
A growing trend on Chinese social media involves nang yan wen, or "naan Mandarin"—a way of writing and talking named after Xinjiang's staple flatbread that mimics how some Uyghurs pronounce Mandarin. Videos tagged with the term amassed more than 1.7bn views on Douyin (TikTok's sister app in China) in the first ten months of 2025. Mocking regional accents has long been a pastime within China—Mao Zedong himself famously spoke Mandarin (putonghua) with a thick Hunan accent—but state media and online influencers deploy naan Mandarin in ways that blur the line between comedy and condescension.
Many children from minority groups now primarily speak Mandarin, so jokes about pronunciation truly sting. Minorities, and in particular those who carry a Xinjiang hukou (household registration), face regular police checks and frequent discrimination. As one user from the region complained online: "I'm not a child or a pet for you to tease. I spent years learning Mandarin so we could speak as equals."
A "law on promoting ethnic unity and progress", heading for a vote in China's parliament in 2026, would formalise the suppression of ethnic distinctiveness. The law requires Mandarin to have precedence over minority languages in schools and in official communication, mandates that different ethnicities live in mixed communities, and creates a new legal basis for prosecuting anyone who opposes the party's definition of ethnic harmony—including parents who instil "detrimental" views in their children. Rights groups have documented the detention of more than a million Muslims in Xinjiang in a mass re-education campaign, while mosques have been destroyed.
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