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AFP
Protesters gathered to show their support in neighboring Mongolia
Ethnic Mongols in northern China have held rare demonstrations against measures to reduce teaching in the Mongolian language in favor of Chinese.
When schools began a new term on Tuesday, some parents held the children in protest at the policy.
According to the rules, three core subjects in Inner Mongolia will be gradually taught in Mandarin, the official language of China.
Many ethnic Mongols see the move as a threat to their cultural identity.
Large crowds of students and parents were seen protesting the change in demonstrations that broke out over the weekend in various cities.
“Our language is Mongolian and our homeland is Mongolia forever! Our mother tongue is Mongolian, and we will die for our mother tongue!” students yelled at a recent protest, reported Radio Free Asia, a station funded by the US government.
Images of women applying their fingerprints or adding their signatures to petitions against the measure also circulated widely on social media.
‘Suppress the Mongolian language’
Starting this month, according to the new policy, schools would gradually change the language of instruction in three subjects (politics, history, and language and literature) from Mongolian to Mandarin in China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, home to a Mongolian ethnic minority.
The Southern Mongolia Human Rights Information Center, a New York-based activist group, described angry scenes in the region, as many parents only learned of the change in policy when schools were ready to reopen.
He said there was a tense confrontation at a boarding school when hundreds of parents demanded the release of their children, who had returned early.
“Hundreds of riot police came to the scene, preventing parents from accessing the school dormitories. After hours of fighting, the parents finally broke through the police barricade and proceeded to pick up their children,” the group said in a statement.
Authorities have warned people in Inner Mongolia not to speak out on social media. Posts on the subject on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, have been removed.
But concerns about the directive remain high, and some parents keep students at home.
On Tuesday, staff at a school in Naiman County told the BBC that only about 40 students had signed up for the semester instead of the usual 1,000. Later, some changed their minds and only about 10 remained.
They said teachers had been sent on family visits to convince parents to send their children back to school. But parents were concerned that the language change would damage the future of their own language.
It has been an unusual display of widespread dissent in the remote grassland region bordering Mongolia and Russia.
A 32-year-old pastor from the Xilingol League told AFP that he was concerned that the children would lose fluency in their mother tongue.
“Almost all Mongols in Inner Mongolia oppose the revised curriculum,” said the man, who gave his last name as Hu.
Critics say the Chinese government has been accelerating its push to assimilate minorities despite coming under widespread international criticism for its treatment of minority groups, including the mostly Muslim Uighurs, in western Xinjiang.
In a statement released on Friday, in an apparent response to growing discontent over the policy, the regional authority in Inner Mongolia referred to the importance of “strengthening national language education in ethnic areas.”
The new leadership has also seen some people protest in the capital of neighboring Mongolia, while others expressed fear for the region from exile.
Speaking to the BBC from Germany, Temtsiltu Shobtsood, chairman of the Inner Mongolia People’s Party, a group of exiles, accused China of “trying to suppress” the Mongolian language.
“The whole world is talking about human rights, but we are not visible enough,” he said, adding that the imposition of Mandarin and majority Han Chinese culture on minorities in Inner Mongolia was a form of “cultural genocide.”
