China enforces education policy replacing Mongolian language with Mandarin, protests erupt

On September 2, the ethnic Mongolians in China flooded the streets with demonstrations against the new Chinese education policy that favours Mandarin teaching, barring the Mongolian language, an ANI report confirmed. The Chinese government instructed replacement of the Mongolian language medium in at least three subjects in elementary and middle schools in the Inner Mongolia region, stirring public angst and grievances. Ethnic Mongolians, including students and parents, came out on the streets to demonstrate fury against China’s new bilingual education policy, that they said, “endangered” their culture.

"We Mongolians are a great race as well. If we accept teaching in Chinese, our Mongolian language will really die out,” ANI quoted a 39-year-old Mongolian parent as saying in a telephonic conversation from her home in Xilinhot, a city in Inner Mongolia.

“We senior students were talking and we thought we had to do something,” a student, Narsu, who participated in the protests was quoted by AP saying.

He stressed, “Although this doesn’t directly affect us now, this will have a huge impact on us in the future,” adding, the controversial policy by the Chinese will extinct the language.

In footages of the protests that emerged online, students and concerned Mongolians brandished the school and university textbooks demonstrating the wiping out of the Mongolian language from the education system. In coded attire that depicted “students”, demonstrators clad in blue and white uniforms shouted slogans, “Mongolian is our mother language! We are Mongolian until death!” All the while flashing placards with messages of preservation of their traditional language.

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In an attempt to standardize curriculum at universities and schools with Chinese education, the CCP has been accused of replacing Mongolian-language textbooks to eradicate the provincial languages by the protesters. As per state-run media reports, students claimed that the classes at Hohhot, the provincial capital, as well as in the cities of Chifeng and Tongliao and Xilin Gol prefecture were now conducted with new national textbooks in Chinese.

Revealing about the enforcement of the Chinese culture on Mongolians by the authorities, a mother of a kindergarten student in Hulunbuir was quoted by AP as saying that she encountered police forces and metal barrier in front of her child’s school. She had hence decided, to keep her kid away from the institution. “Many of us parents will continue to keep our kids at home until they bring Mongolian back in those classes,” she said. In 2017, the Chinese ruling Communist Party created a committee to overhaul textbooks for the entire country and pushed Chinese language textbooks, according to a news agency report.

China's “ethnic wiping” of Mongolians

On September 1, the Inner Mongolia regional education bureau issued a statement, saying, the changes were limited to three areas of subjects namely literature, politics and history, according to an ANI report. Further, it informed that the Mongolian and Korean lectures in other subjects would remain unchanged. "The existing bilingual education system has not changed," the bureau said in the statement, cited by ANI. However, protesters accused authorities of “ethnic wiping” of the Mongolians in the Inner Mongolia region since 2011."Our way of life has already been wiped out. So what is left is just Mongolian language -- it is the only symbol left of Mongolian identity. That is why Mongolians are rising up and protesting these policies," director of the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Centre, Enghebatu Togochog, head of an exile group based in New York said. 

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