Beijing’s ban on Mongolian lessons ‘cultural genocide’

China is facing protests in Mongolia after it was accused of attempting ‘cultural genocide’ by ordering schools to teach in Mandarin.

The new policy requires Mandarin to be taught in Inner Mongolia from the first year of primary school. Picture: Mark Henley

China is facing growing protests in its Mongolian region after it was accused of attempting “cultural genocide” by ordering schools to dump the native language and teach in Mandarin.

Videos have surfaced of demonstrations in Inner Mongolia involving hundreds of people, including children, with protesters shouting in their own language: “Our mother tongue is Mongolian. Until death, we are Mongolian.”

Hundreds of teachers in the cities of Tongliao and Ulaanhad are said to have been called into “urgent, secret meetings” to take orders from Beijing to switch curriculums to Mandarin under a “bilingual education program”.

According to the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Centre, a New York-based group, the policy requires Mandarin to be taught from the first year of primary school and to replace Mongolian for politics and history. Other subjects will be converted later, it says. Until now, students took lessons in their native language, then studied Mandarin from the age of eight.

The centre said that a civil disobedience movement was growing in the region, where most of China’s six million ethnic Mongols live, adding: “People from all walks of life … are standing up in an unprecedented level of solidarity and co-ordination against the new policy, which many see as a new round of ‘cultural genocide’.”

The Times