Adopted at the Second Session of the Sixth National People's Congress, promulgated by Order No.13 of the President of the People's Republic of China on May 31, 1984, and effective as of October 1, 1984

Preface

The People's Republic of China is a unitary multinational state created jointly by the people of all its nationalities. Regional national autonomy is the basic policy adopted by the Communist Party of China for the solution of the national question in China through its application of Marxism-Leninism; it is an important political system of the state.

Regional national autonomy means that the minority nationalities, under unified state leadership, practise regional autonomy in areas where they live in concentrated communities and set up organs of self-government for the exercise of the power of autonomy. Regional national autonomy embodies the state's full respect for and guarantee of the right of the minority nationalities to administer their internal affairs and its adherence to the principle of equality, unity and common prosperity for all its nationalities.

Regional national autonomy has played an enormous role in giving full play to the initiative of all nationalities as masters of the country, in developing among them a socialist relationship of equality, unity and mutual assistance, in consolidating the unification of the country and in promoting socialist construction in the national autonomous areas and the rest of the country. The system of regional national autonomy will have a still greater role to play in the country's socialist modernization in the years to come...

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