As a father of a child, he recently refused to send his child to class to express his dissatisfaction with the full implementation of Chinese language education in Inner Mongolia. Three weeks ago, Hu Baolong was detained by Tongliao City police and is now under arrest by the prosecutor’s office.
In late August and early September of this year, tens of thousands of students and parents in the cities of Tongliao, Ordos, and Hohhot launched strikes and protest rallies against the authorities’ efforts to strengthen the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language, but were dispersed and arrested by the authorities. A month later, Hu Baolong, an ethnic Mongolian lawyer who was involved in human rights activism, was arrested.
Numin, a Mongolian living in the United States, told Radio Free Asia on Wednesday that she heard the news from Hu Baolong’s sister: “I called his sister directly, but she didn’t want to talk about it, so I couldn’t tell her over the phone. Some parents of local students in Tongliao said that (authorities) arrested him in order to calm the parents’ anger. About ten days ago, I asked Baolong if he had been arrested, and she (his sister) said yes. The group said he was prosecuted and approved by the prosecutor’s office.”
Hu Baolong is the head of the Tongliao Mengga Li Law Firm, a law firm that provides legal services to ethnic Mongols. Nuo Min, who used to work at Hu Baolong’s law firm, told the station, “We were also making a legal website in Mongolian at the time, and at that time, our website was the only legal website in Inner Mongolia. At that time, he represented Batu Zhangga, and just because he represented that case, he was not allowed to leave the country after that.”
Tongliao police detain eight people on charges of provoking trouble
According to the Tongliao Mongolian community, a total of eight people, including lawyer Hu Baolong, who was arrested in early September, have been detained on suspicion of “provoking and provoking trouble,” for opposing Chinese language teaching. It is reported that Hu Baolong has recently been approved for arrest by the Tongliao City Procuratorate.
Hu Baolong was contacted by the authorities on September 4, before he was arrested, and the authorities accused him of “leaking secrets” outside the country: “Hu Baolong is protesting because his children are entering elementary school this year. He was protesting against ‘bilingual education’ as a father and a parent. Another person said he was arrested for passing on information to people outside the country. His messages were on WeChat, ordinary messages that are known to the general public.”
Kubis said that his conversations with Hu Baolong did not involve information about Inner Mongolia: “When we contacted him, we also talked about daily affairs, not about secret matters or sensitive topics. The move against him was a suspicion that he was protesting against the parents of students in Tongliao.”
Hu Baolong graduated from Inner Mongolia Normal University with a degree in Mongolian literature and was involved in the 1989 student movement. After pursuing a career as a lawyer, Hu Baolong represented Inner Mongolian dissident Batu Zhangga and prominent Mongolian rights writer Gao Yulian (deceased) in her case.
Tara, a Mongolian, told us about Hu’s involvement in China’s democracy movement: “He joined the student movement in 1989, and he later founded a law firm in Tongliao and had his own company. He is a freedom advocate, a Chinese dissident, and he has been denied permission to leave the country, and the repression against him persists. This time he is explaining bilingual education to the public at WeChat.”
Hu Baolong founded the Mongolian law firm Mongolian Lawyers in 2000, which is determined to protect the legal rights of Mongolians. He has been invited as a guest on Inner Mongolia TV’s Mongolian-language “Legal First” program, which provides legal advice to herders. and was informed that the Tongliao City Public Security Bureau had placed him on the list of persons who could not leave the country.
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