NEW YORK - Several high-profile promotions and demotions signaled that officials’ political survival depends on personal loyalty to Xi and that aggressive implementation of his policies is key to career advancement, according to Foreign Policy journal.

Among the officials garnering Xi’s support is Pan Yue, who was elected as a full member of the CCP’s Central Committee. Since last June, Pan has been head of the State Council’s National Ethnic Affairs Commission, which is responsible for policy concerning China’s “minority nationalities,” the 55 officially recognized ethnic groups who collectively represent around 8.9 percent of the total population.

Pan’s election to the Central Committee suggests that the Xi administration’s hard turn toward assimilationism will likely continue and perhaps intensify.

Since the beginning of Xi’s second term in 2017, measures related to “managing” ethnic minorities have run the gamut, from destruction of what officials deem “foreign” architectural elements such as mosque domes and the removal of Arabic signage on restaurant awnings and storefronts to the imposition of Mandarin as the sole language of instruction for certain subjects in some schools.

Repression has been most severe in Tibet and Xinjiang, where local populations have been subjected to extreme restrictions on movement, constant surveillance, mass internment, and—as has been reported of Uyghur women—forced sterilization. Pan did not initiate these policies, but he is poised to extend and expand them.