China’s Push to Limit Mongolian Language Sparks Protests

(Bloomberg) --

Chinese government efforts to replace the language of instruction in schools in Inner Mongolia appear to have backfired, prompting parents and students to boycott classes and take to the streets in protest, videos from human rights activists showed.

One video posted to YouTube by the New York-based Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center showed middle school students breaking through police barricades. In another, students lined up and shouted demands. The rights group said the video was shot at the Naiman Mongolian Middle School in Tongliao, in the eastern part of Inner Mongolia.

The students were chanting “Let us Mongolians strive to defend our Mongolian culture,” the group said.

The unrest was prompted by changes to teaching methods in the autonomous region to make Chinese the language of instruction, instead of the Mongolian currently used in many schools in the area. The gradual rollout began Tuesday with language and literature classes for selected grades, and will cover two other subjects -- morality and law, and history.

“Minority-language education is now being replaced by a new model of ‘bilingual education’ in which Chinese is the language of instruction and minority languages are at most a topic of instruction, one hour a day,” Christopher P. Atwood, a professor of Mongolian and Chinese Frontier & Ethnic History at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in an online post this week.

Atwood said the introduction of the new model to Inner Mongolia had “sparked perhaps the largest wave of protest in almost three decades” in mainland China.

Students are leading the charge and a boycott of Inner Mongolia schools is also underway, according to the Information Center’s director, Enghebatu Togochog. A “majority” of parents are not sending their kids to school, while others have demanded that their children be released from dormitories after finding out about the new language rules, he said. When some schools refused to follow the parents’ wishes it led to clashes, Togochog said by phone from New York.

“I heard that students are really angry and hundreds of students gathered in front of many different schools,” Togochog said. “They are demanding the authorities to reverse the plan and urging the people to fight for their right to use their mother tongue.”

A Tuesday search of Weibo, one of China’s main social networks, didn’t reveal any videos of protests. It is common for political demonstrations to be censored in China.

‘Nothing Else to Lose’

Local education authorities said in a statement on Monday that Mandarin would only be used to teach the three subjects that are part of the rollout, and that the current bilingual system of instruction had not been changed.

Inner Mongolia has until now taken a liberal interpretation of bilingual education compared with restful regions including Tibet and Xinjiang -- where authorities rarely openly announce their intentions to influence the medium of instruction but just do it anyway -- said Robbie Barnett, professorial research associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

“This is such a strange and abrupt shift,” Barnett said of the developments in Inner Mongolia.“I think what we may be seeing with this issue is that flexibility for the local areas is getting less and less.”

Xi Wuyi, a Marxist scholar at the state-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, suggested on Weibo that the decision to review the language of instruction in Inner Mongolia was prompted by a directive by President Xi Jinping. Xi has urged the overhauling of education in the three subjects where changes have taken place in Inner Mongolia in a bid to “safeguard ideological security.”

Tongliao, located in the eastern part of Inner Mongolia, has a significant ethnic Mongolian population. But Togochog said the unrest was region-wide and that it involved people from across society, encompassing herders, office workers and teachers.

“The Mongolian language is the only symbol of Mongolian identity,” he said. “If we lose the language we have nothing else to lose.”

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With assistance from Bloomberg