Inner Mongolia bans Mongolian language teaching, mass protests, CCP police's violent suppression

Reporter : Zhong Gusheng / Editor : Ming Xuan / Publisher : NTDTV

Ref : https://www.ntdtv.com/gb/2020/08/31/a102930714.html 

Translation, editing : Gan Yung Chyan, KUCINTA SETIA

Image : Inner Mongolian pupil holding a slogan "Foreign language is a tool, mother tongue is the soul" protested the Chinese Communist Party's plan to replace Mongolian with Chinese. (Photo of Southern Mongolia Human Rights Information Center)

Following Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong, the CCP has launched a campaign to exterminate local culture in Inner Mongolia and has begun to promote the prohibition of Mongolian language teaching and Mongolian books. This move triggered large-scale and fierce protests among the Mongolian people. The authorities have arrested at least hundreds of people. Under high pressure, a middle school student died in protest by jumping off the building.

According to Free Asia, the CCP’s plan to replace Mongolian language teaching with Chinese in Inner Mongolia schools in September triggered a large-scale civil disobedience protest movement. Some artists, singers, scholars and even some officials from the government and the Education Bureau also joined it. Parents and teachers of students everywhere also boycotted. Many schools were on strike. Parents took their children home and the classrooms were empty.

Tens of thousands of students and parents in Tongliao, Ordos, Hohhot and other places in Inner Mongolia launched strikes and protest rallies. The protesters sang Mongolian songs and chanted slogans outside the Mongolian school.

At the gate of a school, many male and female students in school uniforms shouted in Mongolian, "Our language is Mongolian, and our permanent homeland is Mongolia! Our mother tongue is Mongolian, and we will die for our mother tongue!"

Tuya, a parent of a student from the Xilin Gol League, revealed that 80% of Mongolians in Inner Mongolia have participated in boycotting Chinese teaching and preventing students from going to school. Some parents who went to work were threatened by the authorities to participate in the protest to "lose their jobs."

In some places, the police forcibly restricted students who had already started school to schools, and prevented their parents from taking them home. As a result, the students and their parents had confrontations and conflicts with the police. Some school parents and students broke through the police blockade and escaped from the school.

The authorities also violently suppressed the protesters. Hundreds of protesters have been arrested or placed under house arrest.

In the evening of Sunday (30 August), the students of Shebotu Mongolian Middle School in Horqin Zuoyihou Banner, Tongliao City were forcibly confined to the school. Their parents asked to pick up the students and were suppressed by the armed police. A student learned that his mother was beaten by the armed police outside the school and jumped off the fourth floor to protest. Unfortunately, he died. The student's mother has been taken away.

Xi Haiming, chairman of the Inner Mongolian People’s Party in exile in Germany, revealed that the local police or special police have begun to force teachers to lead the way and forcibly arrest students in herdsmen’s homes. It is said that once the student return rate reaches 40%, the government will begin to enforce the new language teaching plan.

Xi Haiming said that language is the most natural right of a nation. The Chinese use this method to accelerate the overall control of the Mongolian people, and they will not hesitate to push the children to the opposite side, which has mobilized the entire Inner Mongolian people to resist. This is tantamount to giving the Mongolians an enlightenment of national self-identity and national consciousness. The Mongolians are forced to resist by the whole people, and even "national independence" may become an important topic for their rethinking.

Mongolian commentators believe that after the CCP has suppressed the Uyghur and Tibetan people, and then stepped up its comprehensive "assimilation" of the Mongolians, it is tantamount to launching a new round of "ethnic cultural extermination."

On 26 August 2020, the Inner Mongolia Department of Education issued the “Implementation Plan for the Use of Nationally Compiled Chinese Textbooks in the First Grade of Primary School and the First Grade of Junior High Schools in Ethnic Language Teaching in the Region”, stipulating that from the beginning of this autumn, subjects taught in Inner Mongolia’s ethnic languages ​​must be taught in the first grade of primary school. The grade begins to use the nationwide Chinese teaching materials. In the next two years, the politics and history classes in the first grade of elementary school will be gradually started, and the courses will also be taught in Chinese.

The Human Rights Information Center of Southern Mongolia (the Chinese Communist Party's official name is Inner Mongolia), headquartered in New York, the United States, stated that the Chinese authorities used Chinese to replace Mongolian language teaching in all schools in Southern Mongolia under the name of "the second type of bilingual education." The CCP used to implement "Class One Bilingual Teaching" in Inner Mongolia, learning Chinese from the third grade of elementary school, and teachers can also use Mongolian to explain Chinese.

In addition to compulsory Chinese teaching, governments across Inner Mongolia conducted a large-scale inventory of Mongolian books on Sunday, and all Mongolian books must be removed from the shelves. In Zarut Banner, the police have started to confiscate all books and stationery in Mongolian at the stationery store.