Erasing Identity: China’s Education Reforms Attempt to Silence Mongolian Culture
This is an interview from September 14, 2024, conducted in Chifeng City, Inner Mongolia.
Interviewee: ᠤᠶᠠᠬᠠᠨ, Wuyahan (Pinyin), Host of Mongolian Radio in Inner Mongolia
Introduction:
ᠤᠶᠠᠬᠠᠨ is a Mongolian radio presenter who currently lives in Chifeng city. She grew up in a pastoral area in the outer regions of Inner Mongolia and came to Chifeng City for college. She occasionally works part-time as a Mongolian teacher, but most of the time she works in the radio company. Her husband is a civil servant, working in the government. Both her and her husband are ethnic Mongolians. They have a child who is in middle school right now, studying in one of Chifeng’s Mongolian Middle Schools (in Chifeng, schools are divided into Han and Mongolian schools).
This is ᠤᠶᠠᠬᠠᠨ’s work setting, in the background the radio station is playing a Mongolian song.
Interview Transcript
Q: Is Mongolian tested on the middle school, high school, and college entrance examination now?
A: Yes, Mongolian language is tested. If you study in a Mongolian middle school (where all students are ethnically Mongolian), you must take the Mongolian test. If you study in No. 4 Middle School and No. 5 Middle School (names of Han middle schools), you don’t need to take the test. If you go to a Mongolian middle school, you have to learn Mongolian, and you have to take it in the middle school entrance examination, but not in the college entrance examination.
Q: Do schools like No. 4 Middle School and No. 5 Middle School teach Mongolian now?
A: No. They don’t teach it. They are ordinary high schools. Even in our Mongolian middle school, some of the children we know don’t learn Mongolian. But for us, we insist that our child learns it until the third grade of junior high school, and study it for the high school entrance examination, so that they won’t forget it.
Q: Why do you think it is important to learn Mongolian?
A: Because it’s your own language. If you go to other provinces or other places, upon knowing that you are Mongolian, people will ask you if you can speak Mongolian. If you can’t speak it, people will think you are strange. Besides, for me, I work in this industry (referring to the radio industry), and it’s not good for my children to not speak Mongolian. I read the news in Mongolian every day. But, if my children can’t speak Mongolian, that’s not good. Well, my children are good at Chinese, but not Mongolian.
Q: Why is it so?
A: I don’t know. As long as he opens his mouth, he speaks in Chinese. They are very good at Chinese, the children. My son complains every day that my mandarin is in the wrong tone. He eavesdropped on our Mongolian class the other day, and then after class he said, "You are out of tune and people can't understand you at all." He said, "Mom, you are out of tune."
Q: Do children now speak more Chinese?
A: Yes, all of them speak more Chinese.
Q: Wasn't it like this before?
A: Children in the city were like this too, in the past. But in our time, children in the pastoral areas spoke more Mongolian. I only learned Chinese after I went to college.
Q: When did they start speaking more Chinese?
A: Five or six years ago. Children in the pastoral areas now also speak pure Chinese.
Q: Why are schools in pastoral areas like this too? Is it because of the nine-year compulsory education?
A: Because the textbooks are now in Chinese. If the textbooks are in Chinese, Chinese is the only language you’ll learn well. Mongolian is of secondary importance. Our textbooks were in Mongolian. For example, geography and chemistry. We learned everything in Mongolian. The teachers also taught in Mongolian. Now, even the Mongolian textbooks are all in Chinese, and the teachers teach in Chinese. Chinese, Mongolian, and English, the languages are all messed up now. The children don’t even do their Mongolian homework, so how can they learn Mongolian? They do the homework from other subjects, just not the Mongolian homework. I guess they just don’t know how to learn it. They probably didn’t learn it well in elementary school so they don’t have a good foundation.
We chatted for a while and talked about the Mongolian people broadcasting live on the grassland.
A: We also like to watch it. Because we used to live that kind of life. The food they cook and the environment they live in are all the original ones, the ones we lived in. Our previous generation lived and inherited this way of living. There are very few people that live like that now. Most people are running to the city and don’t want to go back. In fact, if you go back, there are many chores to do. For us, we also won’t want to go back even if you ask us to.
Q: Does the school teach Mongolian history now?
A: Mongolian history, what should I say? A lot of things happened here. The history books are about Mongolian, that is, the Mongolian history section has been scraped off.
Q: What happened?
A: It was five years ago, the year before the epidemic. We had a big fight about that policy. Our children were not allowed to learn Mongolian, because of the bilingual policy. You can learn it if you want, but Mongolian became an extracurricular class, and there are only three classes a week.
Q: Did Mongolians fight against this policy?
A: Yes, we fought. My child was in first grade at that time, and he was learning Mongolian. Our previous policy was to only start learning Chinese in the third grade. From the first to the second grade, students all learned Mongolian. Suddenly, a few years ago, the policy changed and became you were not allowed to learn Mongolian. All Mongolian students in Inner Mongolia refused to go to class on September 1st. All Mongolian students did not go. This is a fact that only the Mongolians know. Only the Mongolians know, but people in other schools did not know. Then the Education Bureau started to find you, starting with the working people. They told workers that if they did not send your children to school, they would lose their jobs. There was nothing we could do, so we sent them one after another to school in the following week. Many Mongolian teachers killed themselves, some jumped off buildings. The Mongolian principal was also swapped for a Han replacement. Many Mongolians were very angry and they tried to gain independence.
From living in the pastoral regions to living in the city of Chifeng, from speaking only Mongolian to speaking Chinese. ᠤᠶᠠᠬᠠᠨ (Wuyahan) witnessed the gradual decline and extinction of her native culture and mother tongue. The Mongolian language has, in the minds of the new generation of native people, already been abandoned. ᠤᠶᠠᠬᠠᠨ’s life has changed dramatically since the education reforms of 2020. Some of her friends were arrested for protesting, some teachers she knew committed suicide by jumping off school buildings, and some of her former classmates she never saw again. When we were talking about the Mongolian Tiktok blogger, ᠤᠶᠠᠬᠠᠨ expressed how rare it was for someone to inherit the Mongolian heritage. Maybe it was because she felt the difficulty of passing on culture and language, that she liked the blogger so much. She watched his live broadcast like she was watching someone live her earlier life. Her hometown, Keshiketeng, is still inhabited by elders in her family and she is welcome to return home. But when we talk about someone’s home, a home should be a place that delivers messages of love and gives people a sense of belonging. When the Mongolian language gradually became an unpopular choice among the Mongolian people and even her child lost interest in Mongolian, mocking her Mandarin, I think it would be difficult for her to feel that sense of belonging at home.
Later, when we talked about her hometown, she told me that her hometown was in Keshiketeng Banner. There are more Mongolians there, and they were more determined when they opposed the policy changes. Living in the city and living the Han way of life, she told me how Mongolians in Keshiketeng deemed her as not Mongolian due to her integration into Han society. These changes have probably affected her self-determination and identification. The complex and intertwining relationship between the Han and Mongolian ethnicities makes it hard for her to find belonging in either of the identities. These changes that have happened in Inner Mongolia, all the chaos and reform, have changed the Mongolian people’s attitude towards life in cities. To keep their jobs and maintain a living, they were forced to forfeit the right to their native language, and years after this incident that had plagued the entire Mongolian population in China, the Han population had barely any knowledge of what had happened to them. Living in the same country, same city, perhaps even in the same neighbourhood, the atrocities Mongolian people have experienced have been kept in the dark away from their Han counterparts. To embrace otherness and understand diversity has always been a challenging task, yet the obscurity of information in the country is only making the task more impossible. With no context, ethnic minorities resentful towards the government are regarded as traitors by the Han population, as the majority of Chinese people embrace and support the government’s actions without second guesses.
By subtly changing the big picture, and addressing broad issues like education and the environment, the people in power have managed to obliterate and reshape minorities’ identity and tradition. The reason why the sense of belonging found in ethnic identity has faded away is that people think it would be better if this sense of belonging were to be subdued by a sense of belonging delivered by nationalism. Minority life has always been tumultuous. The big picture is constantly changing, and many people may be bound by society all their lives, unaware of the systemic oppression exerted upon them, helpless in the face of structural oppression.
