The problem of local languages versus the great imperial language is common to all empires, and by extension to almost all large countries. Under the Romans, men and women from the outer provinces were inevitably confronted with Latin as a foreign language, despite its being the language of the central government and of the educated classes everywhere within the imperial boundaries. The same applied to English in India under British rule, and even within the UK itself minority languages were frowned on. The usually liberal Victorian critic and poet Matthew Arnold supported the suppression of Welsh in schools in Wales on the grounds that speaking English put students into contact with the modern world, and gave them a broader, more international outlook.
The pendulum has now swung strongly in the other direction. Local languages are prized, and their loss seen as equivalent to extinction in the biological sphere. But the problem for individuals brought up to speak one language, but finding themselves surrounded by a much larger group speaking another, one that’s the language of the central government and so, by implication, of social advancement in many spheres, remains real.
Minority Education in China is published in Hong Kong. When I was living there in the 1990s, this problem was particularly acute. Schools either used English as the medium of instruction, or they used Cantonese, and there was enormous pressure from ambitious Chinese parents to get their offspring places in the English-language institutions. It was strongly believed that with proficiency in English students would automatically succeed and make money in the working world. As a former teacher, l felt that children should grow up discovering the world, and themselves, using their mother tongue, as I had done. But it was impossible to prove that the parents who wanted their children to attend English-language schools didn’t have a point. They may have been money-grubbers at heart, but they also may just possibly have had the outlook of Matthew Arnold.
From reading this book, a collection of essays by academics and educationalists, it appears that children who have grown up speaking a minority language in the PRC can opt to attend schools that teach in Mandarin, choosing occasional lessons in their mother tongue, or they can opt to attend schools teaching in their local language, with Mandarin as an important course subject.
Theory and practice, however, are not always the same. Firstly, there is a political dimension, with Mandarin representing patriotism and national unity, and the minority languages of restive regions such as Tibet and Xinjiang being associated with separatism. And secondly there are teachers and others who view the minority tongues, in any region, as essentially “backward”.
In Tibet, one contributor argues, Beijing’s aim of getting everyone to have nine years of basic education has been successful just because it has allowed Tibetan to be the language of instruction for the first six years. Drop-out rates increase sharply after that. Minority students (7.81 percent of the undergraduate total) often struggle at university, we learn, though with dramatic exceptions. By contrast, Koreans living in China manage to achieve higher academic success rates at all levels than the average for the country as a whole.
A form of positive discrimination is practiced, giving students from ethnic minorities additional points in the system that leads to university entrance. This system appears to have a maximum of 750, with ethnic minority students being allotted anything from 5 to 160 (for Tibetans) extra points. A scandal erupted in 2009 in Chongqing, Sichuan Province, when the highest-scoring liberal arts Han student in the entire municipality, and others, falsified the racial background on their identity cards so as to qualify for an extra 20 points. The whole system became the subject of intense debate on the PRC Internet, with much hostility to any favorable treatment at all of citizens who were supposed to be equal, but only equal, under the law.
The Internet and social media in general have been forces working in favor of the big world languages, and so against small minority ones. Several writers here raise this point, though without predicting any long-term outcome, or considering that this is how the world tends to develop, Internet or no Internet.
In areas where there are many minorities, and where outside the cities they predominate, the task facing the authorities can be enormous. In Xinjiang Province, for example, the earliest type of primary and middle schools post-1949 were organized around a single ethnic group, with Uighur, Han, Kazakh, Mongolian, Kirgiz and Xibo schools. Today these have been amalgamated into Minority Schools, Han Schools and Joint Minority-Han Schools, with all the schools in the city of Urumqi, for example, falling into the last category.
This mixed type of school, of course, also aims to reduce inter-ethnic tensions in future generations. But the reality is, it seems, that, though attending the same school, Han and minority students largely study separately, with the minority students congregating in the bi-lingual and minority languages classes.
And as another contributor points out, whereas Uighur was once a lingua franca among the various ethnic groups in Xinjiang, today the flow is in one direction only — towards Chinese, with pressures on all minorities to learn Mandarin, but no interest whatever among Han residents in learning Uighur. No doubt the Beijing authorities are happy to see this as a development towards “national unity,” but it does cast doubts on their declared interest in educating and advancing all ethnic groups on an equal footing.
This volume is clearly extremely important, and even authoritative, containing as it does essays from academics in Beijing, Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong, plus one working in Shanghai but an expert on Mongol affairs. It appears balanced, though with an emphasis on the needs of the minorities. It’s edited by two scholars from La Trobe University, Australia.
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