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BEIJING: Tens of thousands of people in an ethnic Mongol region of northern China have joined rare protests and school boycotts against a new curriculum that they fear will erase their minority culture, residents said on Tuesday (September 1).
The policy change in Inner Mongolia means that all ethnic minority schools in the remote region will now be required to teach core subjects in Mandarin instead of Mongolian, echoing similar movements in Tibet and Xinjiang to assimilate local minorities. in the dominant Han Chinese population.
“Almost all Mongols in Inner Mongolia are opposed to the revised curriculum,” a 32-year-old pastor from the Xilingol League, who used the last name Hu, told AFP, warning that Mongolian children were losing fluency in their language. maternal.
“In a few decades, a minority language will be on the brink of extinction.”
Tensions flared in the vast grassland region bordering Mongolia and Russia after the Inner Mongolia Education Office announced the policy last Wednesday.
Mass demonstrations, with hundreds of parents and students clashing with the police, have broken out across the region, according to videos provided by residents to AFP, while thousands of students have boycotted classes.
“There are at least tens of thousands of people protesting in Inner Mongolia,” Baatar, a 27-year-old pastor from the Hinggan League, told AFP who declined to give his real name for security reasons.
“Many parents are protesting outside the schools, some with a few thousand parents outside, as well as ordinary people protesting on the street.”
Mongols are protesting at the Foreign Ministry in Ulaanbaatar, the Mongolian capital, against China’s plan to introduce Mandarin-only classes in schools in China’s neighboring Inner Mongolia region. (Photo: AFP / Byambasuren BYAMBA-OCHIR)
Enghebatu Togochog, director of the New York-based non-governmental organization Southern Mongolian Human Rights Organization, called the protests a “resistance movement to civil disobedience” that has spread throughout Inner Mongolia, home to more than 4 million people. Ethnic Mongols making up 16 percent. percent of the region’s population.
“Parents refuse to send their children to schools that use Chinese as the only language of instruction,” he said.
WeChat messages and photos of anti-politics petitions written in the traditional Mongolian vertical script have been massively censored by authorities in recent days, he added.
The Inner Mongolia Education Bureau did not respond to faxed requests for comment. It stated in a post on Monday that the number of hours of Mongolian language instruction was unchanged.
It is the only remaining region 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 wide range of subjects taught in Mongolian, in addition to Mandarin, English and Korean.
Herder Hu said that he and many other Mongols had become fluent in Mandarin while retaining their native language through this system.
Mongols held a protest in the Mongolian capital on Monday against the switch to Mandarin lessons in neighboring China.
