This is the script for my video posted on June 23, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
There’s a good chance you’re familiar with the Chinese government’s oppressive treatment of ethnic minorities in places like Tibet and Xinjiang. But if we look far to the south we’ll find the Guangxi Autonomous Region, which hosts the country’s largest ethnic minority and is actively showcased by the Chinese government to exemplify what successful minority integration looks like. So why is Guangxi’s fate different from places like Tibet and Xinjiang, and what does China consider to be successful integration to begin with?
Guangxi is one of five provincial-level autonomous regions in the country, the others of which are Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Xinjiang, and Tibet. Under the 1984 Law of the PRC on Regional Ethnic Autonomy, these regions theoretically have expanded legislative rights, including the right to formulate their own regulations for self-government and to adapt central government policy to their local conditions. But in practice, this autonomy is held to strict boundaries. The same 1984 law affirms that these regions are inseparable parts of China and bans any act that undermines national unity, and the government drew administrative boundaries and promoted migration of the majority Han Chinese to keep minority political and cultural power in check. In Guangxi, Han Chinese are actually the majority.
But about a third of the population belongs to the Zhuang ethnic group. The Zhuang are China’s largest ethnic minority at about 20m people, and over 80% of those live in Guangxi. The Zhuang speak a language that’s related to Thai and Lao rather than Chinese, which makes sense when you consider their proximity to China’s southern neighbors. They use a Latin-based script created in the 1950s, and it appears on banknotes, signage, and official documents. But state support is thinner than it looks. Bilingual Zhuang education reaches only a small share of schools and usually shifts to Mandarin by the upper grades, and the language is in decline, especially in cities and in higher education where Mandarin dominates. Guangxi was a province of China under the Qing dynasty and the Republic of China but it officially joined the PRC in 1949, and in the 1950s it was slowly granted more and more autonomy until it became fully and officially autonomous in 1958.
China often refers to Guangxi and its Zhuang residents as the model of successful minority integration. The Zhuang are highly assimilated into Chinese culture and society, but this is in large part because the Chinese government made a conscious decision to make this happen. In fact, some academics even argue that the Communist Party formalized the Zhuang nationality under an ethnic classification project in the 1950s specifically with the goal to integrate them more effectively, because the term is effectively a catch-all for the diverse hill communities that lived in the region at the time.
Before 1949, the Zhuang, as they’re now known, were already heavily exposed to Chinese culture and government, and their lack of a cohesive religious or political identity that’s separate from China prevented the kind of resistance we’ve seen from the Uyghurs in Xinjiang and from the Tibetans. Consequently, the Chinese government hasn’t felt the need to exert religious oppression. The Zhuang are widely described as China's most assimilated minority, and for many individuals the clearest marker of ethnic identity is the official designation on their ID card and household registration, which states it explicitly. But that doesn't make them indistinguishable from the Han. Many retain the Tai language, distinctive dress and festivals, stilt-house architecture, and their own marriage and ancestor customs. Some scholars argue that what the Zhuang historically lacked was not cultural distinctiveness but a shared sense of being one people, which is exactly what the state supplied.
There are, of course, other minorities in Guangxi like the Jing, who are ethnically Vietnamese. There are the Miao, a group related to the Hmong of southeast Asia who are the largest minority group without their own autonomous region and span much of southern China. In total, there are dozens of distinct ethnic groups, and some like the Miao have resisted integration more than others.
Guangxi shares a land border with Vietnam, and in the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War, part of China’s attack came from this region. The PLA performed poorly in the war, but the conflict did not actually end in 1979. Border clashes continued through 1991, and Guangxi was a focal point for military operations, including hundreds of thousands of shells fired into Vietnam. Relations officially normalized between the two countries in November 1991 and China commonly downplays the war, but the people of southern China, including Guangxi, remember. Today there are two main border crossings between Guangxi and Vietnam. Cross-border trade has grown rapidly, as has criminal activity like drug smuggling, wildlife trafficking, human trafficking, and illegal labor migration.
Guangxi is also the only provincial-level region in western China with both an international land border and a sea coast, and it sits at the intersection of the Beibu Gulf Economic Zone, which is a major international economic corridor and the primary gateway for trade, logistics, and manufacturing cooperation between China and ASEAN. Guangxi’s capital of Nanning is the permanent host of the annual China-ASEAN Expo, and the region’s dynamic with ASEAN have made it indispensable to China’s geopolitical goals.
Nonetheless, Guangxi has stayed relatively poor. Its GDP per capita is only about 60% of the national average, largely because it’s close to the sea but its main river system, the Xijiang, flows east toward Guangdong’s Pearl River Delta rather than south to the Beibu Gulf, so southwestern cargo has been detouring through Guangzhou instead for decades. To reduce its overreliance on neighboring Guangdong and improve its own prospects, China has been building the Pinglu Canal since 2022 at a cost of about 10b USD. When it’s complete, the 134km inland waterway will connect the Xijiang river system directly to the Beibu Gulf. It’s set to open to navigation by the end of 2026, and it’s projected to have a transformative effect on Guangxi’s economy.
But in 2024, China announced a new baseline demarcation of its territorial seas in the northern Beibu Gulf that extends its internal waters up to about 50nm from the shore, despite the country’s delimitation agreement with Vietnam that has been settled since 2000. Vietnam has insisted that China respect the 2000 agreement and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, but China has dismissed the objection. The Gulf supports Guangxi’s substantial fishing industry and major ports, and though it doesn’t host naval bases, the land forces based in Guangxi could generate pressure or diversion along the Vietnamese border in the event of a conflict, and realistically Guangxi would serve as a logistical hub during any contingency in the South China Sea or Taiwan, particularly once the Pinglu Canal is complete.
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