Beijing’s Big Problem in Inner Mongolia

In early September, Inner Mongolia was host to a rare sight in China: Mass public protests. The catalyst was a new policy requiring the use of Chinese language textbooks – and thus Chinese language teaching – in three courses previously taught in Mongolian at bilingual schools. The change might seem minor, but put in the context of China’s new approach to ethnic minorities, it was worrying enough that Mongolians took to the streets to show their anger.

“Our mother tongue is Mongolian, and we will die for our mother tongue!” protesting students shouted.

What Is the New Policy?

The new policy, announced shortly before the start of the school year, took a gradual approach, although that was not enough to forestall strong public resistance. Classes in language and literature, “morality and law,” and history would be taught in Mandarin Chinese using new state textbooks. The changes would take effect over the next three years, starting with the language and literature course in 2020, the “mortality and law” class in 2021, and finally history in 2022.

Notably, the new policy does not ban Mongolian language education. But, as Christopher Atwood of the University of Pennsylvania explained for the Made in China Journal, the practical impact will be less time for teaching in Mongolian:

Mongolian language classes have been promised to continue alongside “language and literature” (Chinese) and the remaining classes—currently mathematics, sciences, art, music, and physical education—will continue to be taught in Mongolian. But the policy documents envision the new subjects being given greater prominence in the curriculum and taught at lower levels. At the same time, there is also a promise of no increase in school hours. Thus the share of the class hours for the “local classes’” per week is being reduced in order to increase the class hours for the “national classes’,” which cannot but reduce the hours conducted in Mongolian.

Gegentuul Baioud, a linguistics Ph.D. who herself went through school in Inner Mongolia, explained that the new policy is a threat to the traditional method of bilingual education in the region. In the past, most school subjects were taught in Mongolian, with Chinese language courses – in other words, the primary language of instruction is Mongolian, with Chinese as a second language. The new policy would gradually flip that on its head. “In the new mode, this Chinese-medium education will be complemented by a Mongolian language and literature course,” Baioud wrote for Language on the Move. “This is dubbed a second type of bilingual education but it is, in essence, monolingual, Chinese-medium education.”

Baioud further noted that the new policy comes at a time when bilingual education is already fading. “In today’s Inner Mongolia, less than 40% of Mongol parents choose Mongolian bilingual schools for their children; the rest enroll their children in mainstream Chinese schools,” she pointed out. It seems that the language was already naturally fading in prominence, with economic considerations driving parents to give their children an edge through Chinese-only education. The fear is that the push to increase Chinese language instruction, even at nominally bilingual schools, will be a death knell for the Monoglian language in the region.

“What is the point of destroying the Mongolian language and culture that is already staggering toward the brink of extinction and to whose speakers barely anyone pays any attention?” Baioud lamented.

Language and China’s Revamped Ethnic Policy

The answer to her question lies in the broader changes to China’s ethnic policies under Xi Jinping. As James Leibold, an associate professor at La Trobe University, has described in several essays for the Jamestown Foundation, a major shift has been underway in China since the early 2010s.

At the forefront of this new approach are scholars Hu Lianhe and Hu Angang, who together co-authored “over a dozen papers” on “social stability” and ethnic policies, according to Leibold. Their main argument is that China needs a new, “second generation” ethnic policy – one that seeks to encourage (or, more cynically, force) the assimilation of ethnic minorities into the Han culture that dominates China. The two Hus argue that previous policies, including bilingual education as well as special benefits offered to ethnic minorities, overly encouraged a distinct sense of ethnic identity. They believe such an identity poses a direct threat to the cohesion of the Chinese state, and thus to the “social stability” the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) values over all else.

Their preferred policy, which was put into practice under Xi, involves taking away special treatment for ethnic minorities and instead encouraging “ethnic mingling”: attending the same schools, living in the same areas, and migration to (by Han Chinese) and from (by Uyghurs, Tibetans, etc) regions historically dominated by ethnic minorities. The end goal, in Leibold’s words, is “to attenuate ethnic consciousness and forge a new sense of shared national belonging.”

That campaign has seen its most extreme manifestation in the now infamous crackdown on Uyghurs. “[W]hat is happening in Xinjiang is the leading edge of a new, more coercive ethnic policy under Xi Jinping’s ‘New Era’ of Chinese power, one that seeks to accelerate the political and cultural transformation of non-Han ethnic minorities,” Leibold wrote. Now that campaign has come to Inner Mongolia.

It is exactly this context that is most frightening. After all, one of the earliest stages in China’s crackdown on the Uyghurs in Xinjiang was an assault on education in the Uyghur language. By the mid-2010s, China was promoting “bilingual education” that gave Chinese place of precedence, with marginal instruction in Uyghur. A similar process unfolded even earlier in Tibet. In both cases, the parallels to the current gradual policy removing Mongolian language courses are uncanny.

Language has been a front of special attention in the de facto war against a distinct ethnic identity. In the quest to promote assimilation, languages such as Uyghur, Tibetan, and Mongolian are irritants that must be done away with. That battle is still ongoing; on September 11, amid the protests in Inner Mongolia, the CCP’s United Front Work Department issued an edict stressing that “spreading and universalizing the national language and script is an important mission of ethnic work in the New Era.”

The Social Fallout

This background explains why China’s government rolled out the new policy (although not the odd timing – during a pandemic that has caused global economic catastrophe, and with Beijing facing serious foreign policy pushback from India, the United States, Australia, and increasingly Europe). The context also explains the intense reaction from ethnic Mongolians, who saw in the updated teaching guidelines an existential threat to their language and culture.

Verifiable information on protests in China is hard to come by; Radio Free Asia put the number of Mongolian protesters in the “tens of thousands,” citing estimates that up to 80 percent of students in some regions were taking part in class boycotts. The Associated Press also described protests and student boycotts, although it did not venture a figure.

The resulting crackdown has been similarly murky. Arrests have undoubtedly been made, but how many depends on who you ask. There are also reports of beatings by police and less official detentions, including house arrests. Meanwhile, China has ramped up its censorship in the region, shutting down Mongolian social media apps. The Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center claimed that “the Chinese authorities mobilized a vast army of police, SWAT teams, plainclothes officials, and interim social workers to terrorize the entire Mongolian populace.” The region “is turned into a police state now,” an unnamed source told the group.

While the details may be sparse (and unverifiable), it would be a shock if Xi’s China didn’t crack down – hard – on protesters, particularly those asserting a unique ethnic identity. But it’s worth remembering that the authorities are responding to an entirely manufactured crisis. The whole episode could have been easily averted had the government not pushed forward with its controversial new education policy. If the goal is “social stability,” it seems to have backfired by causing more unrest than had previously existed.

And the problems could well be longer-lasting than a few weeks of protest. As Baioud noted in her overview, there could be potentially serious long-term social consequences. If the goal is to gradually weed out Mongolian language instruction, according to the Xinjiang and Tibet precedents, it will inevitably have a trickle-down effect on job opportunities for Mongolian speakers – the one area where ethnic Mongolians have an obvious advantage over their Han counterparts. That, in turn, “will certainly further marginalize and systemically exclude young Mongols from higher education and the job market,” Baioud argued.

As Beijing expands its ethnic minority policy to include other groups, the government risks creating new problems outside of traditionally restive areas like Tibet and Xinjiang – and much closer to the developed, wealthy areas of the country. China’s new hardline policies have “sent shock waves through the ‘less-famous’ ethnic minorities such as the Mongols, Koreans,” and others, according to Baioud. “What are the consequences of bringing such tribulations onto the very groups that China has held up as ‘model minorities’, including the Mongols?”

It’s worth pondering if Beijing has asked itself that same question.