On August 26, 2020, Chinese authorities announced that Mongolian language used in national language textbooks for the first grade of elementary schools in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China will be replaced for the standard Mandarin (hereinafter referred to as “Putonghua”). The Mongolian people expressed strong protest against the announcement. Late in August, Mongolian patriarchs and students held “non-compliance demonstration” in cities such as Tongliao, Ordos and Hohhot, as well as students boycotted classes and participated in a demonstration. Protesters sang Mongolian songs confidently, alleging that “our language is Mongolian and our eternal home is Mongol. Our mother tongue is also Mongolian and we never change it for our mothers till we die,” while Chinese police and public security officers detained participants strictly.
Like in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, in fact, the Chinese government has in this autumn imposed compulsory Putonghua education in elementary and middle schools of three northeastern provinces of Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang.
Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) adopted the language education policy to shift Tibetan language to Putonghua in schools of the Tibet Autonomous Region where the March 2008 Tibetan unrest erupted. In October, 2010, thousands of Tibetan junior and high school students showed objections against the policy in response to a report of language programs limited to Putonghua alone in the western province of Qinghai. After that, the Chinese authorities prohibited Tibetan language in schools of the region, ordering to learn Putonghua.
The New York Times Chinese reported the state of Tibet region as below on an article “Tibetans Fight to Salvage Fading Culture in China” dated November, 30 in 2015 . There is no school or facility for instructions of Tibetan language in the plateau. The Chinese authorities, in addition to temples and private schools in the region, ordered to stop teaching the local language to laypeople. Bilingual education of Putonghua and Tibetan language has already been given up in the public schools. Therefore, their own language is just one of foreign languages even if classes could be offered there.
In 2002, the CCP banned Xinjiang University at Urumchi city in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region from delivering lectures in Uyghur language. From around September, 2017, it also totally prohibited the use of Uyghur language in schools of Xinjiang's Hotan Prefecture. For example, a five-point directive in regard to language education in Hotan, which outlawing the use of Uyghur language for training Putonghua teachers, orders to develop Putonghua classes in elementary schools. In addition, the authorities have instructed people to refrain from using Uyghur language in slogan or pictures alone and participating in collective and public activities.
On the other hand, an eight-discipline to teachers of kindergartens in Hotan forbids religious education and interacting in kindergartens in addition to ordering teachers to use Putonghua and banning them to wear a hijab, a veil worn by Muslim women, and to grow a beard. The rule was legislated in Hotan Prefecture and expanded over the region.
Furthermore, in October of the same year, a notice from the local education bureau in Yining county in Xinjiang's Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture required to stop the use of all materials in Uyghur and Kazakh languages and ordered the sealing of them. Also, the notice required, due to uncompleted translation, ceasing the use of textbooks written in the languages of the ethnic minorities, subjects of which are ethic and rule of law, and history. Since then, the policy has been applied to the entire region.
From September 25 to 26 in 2020, the central symposium on work related to Xinjiang was held to discuss policies on governing the region. President Xi Jinping underlined the correctness of policies there and ordered to tighten assimilation on Uyghur. We can identify it as “Han Chauvinism.”
Incidentally, Assimilation policy on ethnic minorities by Xi's regime not only targets the Mongolian, Korean, Tibetan and Uyghur people.
The Hong Kong national security law, on July 1 in 2020, was enacted, thus the regime is being transformed from “one country, two systems” to “one country, one system,” applying the assimilation policy to a former colony of the United Kingdom. “Modernized” Hong Kong people are orthodox Han people, not the ethnic minority in China. But, the Xi administration has suppressed Hong Kong people, who express protest against the governments of Beijing and Hong Kong, as brutally as other minority people.
After all, it is not too much to say that the Chinese government is conducting not “the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” but “the ‘Small' Proletarian Cultural Revolution (or the second Cultural Revolution).” What's more, Xi is trying to impose the pre-modern “Chinese Values” on not only peripheral countries but also the world through his Cultural Revolution.
