Chinese authorities have mandated that as of September 1, primary and secondary school subjects in Inner Mongolia, including history, politics, and language, be taught in Mandarin, removing the Mongolian language from the core curriculum. The decision to gradually replace the Mongolian language with Chinese continues to spark protests in some local areas.
According to the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center in New York, on September 1, 2020, the first day of the new school year, Mongolian schools throughout Southern Mongolia were empty, and students and teachers went on strike to protest the change in curriculum.
The Associated Press quotes students at a high school in Hulunbeier who stormed out of the school that day. A large number of armed police later arrived and tried to send them back to class. The high school student said that while it doesn’t affect them directly right now, it will have a huge impact on their future.
A video posted by the Southern Mongolia Human Rights Information Center shows an angry crowd gathered outside the school, with students and parents protesting the authorities’ new rules. The related protest, which began late last week, reached a maximum of several thousand people. The protest began late last week.
Mongolian human rights activists abroad often refer to the area the Chinese government calls the “Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region” as “Southern Mongolia” and the northern part of Mongolia as “Northern Mongolia. They argue that Southern Mongolia also includes the hundreds of thousands of Mongolians living in Liaoning, Heilongjiang, and Jilin.
Enkhbatu, director of the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center, told VOA earlier that Chinese authorities have long pursued a policy of eliminating Mongolian language education in Southern Mongolia.
According to VOA, parents in Inner Mongolia have expressed their displeasure that elementary school in the country, which used to start learning Chinese in the third grade, are now teaching Chinese classes from the first grade, with the exception of the Mongolian language classes, which are all taught in Chinese.
China’s Inner Mongolia region is the only part of the world where the traditional Mongolian language is used, as neighboring Mongolia has adopted the Cyrillic alphabet, which was used under Soviet influence.
Protests in some parts of Inner Mongolia have sparked a response from neighboring Mongolia. Former Mongolian President Tsakhia Elbegdorj tweeted on Tuesday (September 1), “We need to stand in solidarity with Mongolians in their efforts to preserve their mother tongue and scriptures in China. Learning and using the mother tongue is an inalienable right of all people.”
In the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar, some people gathered outside the Chinese embassy on Monday to protest China’s replacement of Mongolian language instruction with Chinese.
This is the year that Chinese authorities are aiming to make Mandarin Chinese universal across the country. China’s Ministry of Education and other ministries and commissions released the “Thirteenth Five-Year Plan for the Development of the State Language and Script Industry” in 2016, which aims to basically popularize the national common language (or Mandarin) throughout China by 2020, comprehensively improve the level of language and script informationization, and comprehensively enhance the ability of the language and script industry to serve the country’s needs. The standardization of China’s national education is considered a major policy push under the leadership of Chinese President Xi Jinping, focusing on promoting loyalty to China and the Communist Party.
In an online response to a question, education authorities in Inner Mongolia said the changes to language teaching “reflect the will of the Party and the state and the inherent merits of Chinese culture and the progress of human civilization.
China’s Ministry of Education and Ethnic Affairs Commission did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment, Reuters reported on Wednesday.
On Monday, a video of the protest appeared on the Chinese social media site Sina Weibo, but has since been deleted.
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