China’s National People’s Congress (NPC), the state legislature, will vote Thursday on a set of new laws agreed to in this year’s two annual sessions, including a law that will diminish the role of minority ethnic languages in the education system.
NPC delegates are expected to approve a new ethnic unity law, along with a new environmental code and the 15th five-year plan, the economic planning document for 2026-2030. Delegates have spent the last week debating bills proposed by Beijing, which they are certain to pass. The NPC, which is often described as a parliament of approval, has never rejected an item on its agenda.
Voting will be held in this year’s two sessions, simultaneous meetings of the NPC and an independent advisory body of the Communist Party, which are coming to an end. The main headline of this year’s meeting was the historically low GDP growth target for 2026, which China’s Premier Li Qiang announced on March 5. At 4.5%, it is the lowest growth target in decades and reflects Beijing’s changing priorities and the difficult domestic economic situation.
Aside from economic goals, the NPC is the forum in which Beijing’s policies become law.
A key policy of Xi Jinping, China’s president, is the “Sinicization” of China’s ethnic minorities, that is, assimilating their cultures as far as possible with that of the Han ethnic majority. Xi has said that China’s ethnic groups should be like “pomegranate seeds that stick together.”
To that end, China’s new ethnic unity law will require schools to use Mandarin by default, taking priority over minority ethnic languages such as Tibetan, Uighur and Mongolian.
The law also requires that Mandarin be displayed more prominently than ethnic minority scripts on public signs. Recent reports from Inner Mongolia, where there were protests in 2020 over the erosion of the Mongolian language, have suggested that some public signs have already been renovated to display Mandarin characters more prominently than Mongolian writing.
Yalkun Uluyol, China researcher at Human Rights Watch, said: “Many of the policy directives proposed in the new law already exist in practice in Xinjiang, Tibet or Inner Mongolia.” He said the law “is a blatant move by Beijing to legalize forced assimilation and political control.”
According to NPC Observer, a website that follows Chinese politics, the ethnic unity law has been treated with particular importance by the Chinese Communist Party. In 2025, the entire CCP politburo, led by Xi, discussed a draft law, something that had not been reported in four decades.
The NPC is also expected to approve a new ecological and environmental code, a unified framework that will repeal and replace several laws on pollution and environmental protection as China moves toward its “dual carbon” goals of peaking carbon emissions by 2030 and achieving net emissions neutrality by 2060.
The extensive draft includes chapters on waste management, pollution prevention and adaptation to climate change.
Li Shuo, director of the Asia Society Policy Institute’s China Climate Hub, said the code “represents a step forward in the development of China’s environmental legal system.”
“For decades, China’s environmental regulation has consisted of many separate statutes, which has led to fragmentation and (as new environmental issues such as climate change emerge) inconsistency. By elevating environmental protection to a codified legal framework, it signals that environmental governance is not just a political priority but a long-term legal commitment,” Li said.
The NPC will also vote on the annual budget, the government work report and the 15th five-year plan.
Additional research by Yu-Chen Li and Lillian Yang
