Ethnic Mongolians push back against threat to cultural identity
Protesters in Inner Mongolia who rallied against a decision to replace their native Mongolian language with Mandarin Chinese in school subjects worry that their cultural identity will become increasingly under threat, said an ethnic Mongolian scholar.
Thousands of students took to the streets in multiple cities and towns in the autonomous region earlier this week to protest a new language policy that would see Chinese replace Mongolian as a language of instruction in the region’s ethnic minority schools from Sept. 1.
The new policy is the latest in the Chinese Communist Party’s ongoing attempts to assimilate ethnic minority groups into the culture of the Han majority and is part of President Xi Jinping’s ambitious empire-building strategy, said humanities professor Yang Haiying, a China-born ethnic Mongolian who teaches at Japan’s Shizuoka University.
The radical move rekindled strong sentiments among ethnic Mongolians about their identity as descendents of Genghis Khan, Yang added.
An online petition against the policy change has so far garnered 3,700 signatures and has been sent to the Chinese Ministry of Education.
“People in many places have put up resistance. Ethnic Mongolians in China and overseas all worry that [Inner Mongolian] will become a second Hong Kong,” he said, referring to the yearlong political unrest that has engulfed the semi-autonomous metropolis.
“Some people have been arrested … But I think today’s young people are unlike our generation. The younger they are, the stronger their sense of resistance,” Ohno Akira said of the protesters in Inner Mongolia.
The latest developments in Inner Mongolia bear similarities to the persecution that minorities in the region faced over allegations of secession during the Cultural Revolution, said Akira, whose family members were victims of the political purge. “At the time, the CCP proposed that ethnic Mongolians should speak Chinese, not the Mongolian language,” he said.
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