Dr Bulag on the changing meaning of ‘minority nationality’ in China
Dr Uradyn E. Bulag has been researching for many years on ethnicity and nationalism in Inner Asia, and in particular on China’s policies towards ethnic minorities. Here, he reflects on recent traumatic events in his native Inner Mongolia.
In the course of less than three weeks from late August to mid-September 2020, some 300,000 primary and middle students went on strike throughout China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Joined by their parents, teachers, and even education officials, they protested against a new curriculum which replaced Mongolian textbooks for three core humanities subjects—Chinese, Politics, and History—with so-called ‘nationally compiled textbooks’ written in Chinese. At the same time, Mongolian was replaced as the medium of instruction by Mandarin Chinese, now renamed the ‘national standard spoken and written language’. According to the new policy, by 2022 all three basic subjects will be taught in Mandarin Chinese. If implemented, it would amount to eliminating the core of the Mongolian language-medium education, part of China’s Nationality Education system (minzu jiaoyu), a right sanctioned by the Chinese Constitution.
Thanks to the relative openness of the social media app We-Chat in Inner Mongolia, the protests and the consequent crackdown unfolded before the eyes of domestic and international viewers: Mongol students in boarding schools storming out of classrooms and gated campuses to the cheers of anxious parents waiting outside; police in full riot gear wading in to capture students and send them back to schools; over 300 Mongolian employees of Inner Mongolia Radio and TV, official mouthpieces of the CCP, signing a joint statement opposing the new policy, vowing that they would not send their children back to school until the Mongolian language was reinstated as the medium of instruction.
These were the most important protests in China since the 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests, but they met a similar doom. By the middle of September, the government announced restoration of order after sacking numerous Mongol officials, arresting lawyers, and hunting down thousands of protesting parents, whose photos had been circulated to the public to help capture them with a bounty of 1,000 yuan for each identified ‘suspect’. This was followed by complete media lockdown, with silencing of all posts about Mongol education rights and bilingual education and bloggers either summoned or visited by State Security personnel. As of today, at least 11 Mongols have committed suicide. The victims included a government official, a primary school principal, teachers, and parents, as well as a teenage student. A reported 8,000–10,000 people remain in some form of police custody.
These protests may seem like a flash in the pan, but they have wider significance, and links with events in Tibet and Xinjiang, which I have tried to analyse in my recently-published article in The China Journal.