Mandarin forced on Mongolian children as China changes language policy
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Beijing — 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 show.
One video posted to YouTube by the New York-based Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Centre 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 used in many schools in the area. The gradual rollout began on Tuesday with language and literature classes for selected grades, and will cover two other subjects — morality and law, and history.
“Minority-language education is 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 and 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 centre’s director, Enghebatu Togochog. A “majority” of parents are not sending their children 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 ...
One video posted to YouTube by the New York-based Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Centre 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 used in many schools in the area. The gradual rollout began on Tuesday with language and literature classes for selected grades, and will cover two other subjects — morality and law, and history.
“Minority-language education is 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 and 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 centre’s director, Enghebatu Togochog. A “majority” of parents are not sending their children 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 ...