Mongolians protest Beijing attack on language rights
https://themilitant.com/2020/09/12/mongolians-protest-beijing-attack-on-language-rights/
BY ROY LANDERSEN
Vol. 84/No. 37
September 21, 2020
REUTERS/ANAND TUMURTOGOO
Thousands of parents, students, teachers, herders and other toilers
protested at the beginning of September in cities across Inner Mongolia,
an autonomous region of grassland and desert in northeast China. They
were challenging moves by Beijing to teach key school courses in
Mandarin Chinese, not their native Mongolian, as has been the case for
decades. They see this attack as similar to that imposed against
Uighurs, Tibetans and other non-Han peoples. Above, protesters in
Ulaanbaatar, capital of neighboring Mongolia proper, an independent
country, hold placards in Mongolian in solidarity Aug. 31.
Many parents and students only found out after school started that
primary and secondary school courses in core subjects — language and
literature, morality and law, and history — would no longer be taught in
Mongolian or have textbooks in that language.
In online videos, rows of uniformed schoolchildren could be seen
protesting, chanting “Our mother language is Mongolian!” and “We are
Mongolian until death!” Parents faced riot police as they went to take
their children out of school. The school boycott ended after several
days as parents were threatened with loss of their state jobs.
The Chinese authorities published wanted lists of protesters they had
identified from pictures taken by surveillance cameras and arrested
hundreds.
“Almost every Mongolian is opposed to the revised curriculum,” Hu, a
32-year-old herder from the Xilingol region in Inner Mongolia, told
Agence France-Presse.
Mongolian has long been recognized as an official language alongside
Chinese in this strategic region, which borders Mongolia and Russia.
With the government encouraging relocation of Han Chinese to Inner
Mongolia, the 6 million Mongols there are now less than a fifth of the
population.
Beijing has fanned Han nationalism and restricted minority languages in
the name of “ethnic unity” and “ideological security.” More than a
million Uighurs in Xinjiang, an autonomous region west of Inner
Mongolia, have been forcibly detained in “reeducation” camps.
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Robert G. Ingersoll
“Progress is born of doubt and inquiry. The Church never doubts, never
inquires. To doubt is heresy, to inquire is to admit that you do not know—the
Church does neither.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll,
