Tens of thousands of people in an ethnic Mongolian region of northern China have joined rare protests and school boycotts against a new curriculum they fear will wipe out their minority culture, residents said yesterday.
The policy change in Inner Mongolia means all ethnic minority schools in the remote region are now required to teach core subjects in Mandarin rather than Mongolian, echoing similar moves in Tibet and Xinjiang to assimilate local minorities into the dominant Han Chinese population.
“Almost every Mongolian in Inner Mongolia is opposed to the revised curriculum,” said a 32-year-old herder from Xilingol League, who gave his surname as Hu, warning that Mongolian children were losing fluency in their mother tongue.
“In a few decades, a minority language will be on the verge of extinction,” he said.
Tensions flared across the vast grassland region bordering Mongolia and Russia after the policy was announced by the Inner Mongolia Education Bureau on Wednesday last week.
Mass demonstrations, with hundreds of parents and students facing off against police, have erupted across the region, according to video clips provided by residents, while thousands of students have boycotted classes.
“There are at least tens of thousands of people protesting across Inner Mongolia,” said Baatar, a 27-year old herder in Hinggan League who refused to give his real name out of security concerns.
“Many parents are protesting outside schools, some with a few thousand parents outside, as well as ordinary people protesting on the street,” he said.
Enghebatu Togochog, director of the New York-based non-governmental organization Southern Mongolian Human Rights Organization, called the protests a “civil disobedience resistance movement” that has spread throughout Inner Mongolia, home to more than 4 million ethnic Mongolians who make up 16 percent of the region’s population.
“Parents are refusing to send their children to schools that use Chinese as the only language of instruction,” he said.
WeChat messages and photos of petitions against the policy written in the traditional vertical Mongolian script have been mass-censored by authorities in recent days, he added.
The education bureau did not respond to faxed requests for comment.
It claimed in a Monday post that the number of Mongolian-language teaching hours remained unchanged.
It is the only region left in the world that uses the traditional Mongolian script, as neighboring Mongolia adopted the Cyrillic alphabet under Soviet influence.
For decades, the region’s bilingual curriculum for ethnic minority schools offered a full range of subjects taught in Mongolian, as well as Mandarin, English and Korean classes.
Hu said that he and many other Mongolians had become fluent in Mandarin while preserving their native language through this system.
Mongolians on Monday held a protest in the Mongolian capital against the move to Mandarin-only lessons in the neighboring Chinese region.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese