A Los Angeles Times journalist was detained and then expelled from Inner Mongolia while covering protests that have erupted in the region over a controversial education policy.

Alice Su, the newspaper’s Beijing bureau chief, was in Hohhot covering protests against the use of Mandarin Chinese instead of Mongolian as the language of instruction in ethnic minority schools. She was visiting a school when she was surrounded by plainclothes men who put her into a police car, according to the LA Times.

Despite identifying herself as an accredited journalist, she was taken to the back building of a police station and was interrogated while her belongings were taken away, the LA Times reported.

Su was not allowed to call the American Embassy. During the interrogation, an officer grabbed her throat with both hands and pushed her into a cell.

She was forced to leave Inner Mongolia after being detained for more than four hours. Three government officials and a policeman accompanied her to a Beijing-bound train and stood by the window until the train departed.

The Hohhot city propaganda department did not respond to enquiries regarding the incident.

Beijing had feared that Inner Mongolia would attract international attention following the likes of Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong, and had thus been making efforts to block foreign media from covering the protests, an unnamed source told Apple Daily.

Protests in the autonomous region were sparked by a new policy from the Chinese government requiring schools to switch from Mongolian to Mandarin as the language of instruction, starting from the new academic year. More than 100 parents, teachers and activists have been arrested or being put under house arrest for objecting to this policy.

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