Chinese ethnic cleansing in inner Mongolia
Editor’s note: this analysis was originally published by the Japan Institute for National Fundamentals and is reposted here with its permission.
China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region aka Southern Mongolia has been greatly shaken. Local Mongols including children from elementary school up to high school students, their parents, reporters, university teachers and public servants have raised opposition to Beijing’s cultural genocide policy. The Chinese government is plotting to eliminate Mongolian ethnic history and culture.
This protest was in response to a new policy unveiled in late June that said starting this fall, the language used in classes in Mongolian ethnic schools would change from Mongolian to Mandarin. Classes for teaching the Mongolian language would be retained, but all other classes would be taught in Chinese, a language that is foreign to ethnic Mongols. The policy would ban Mongols from calling Mandarin “kitad kele” (Han Chinese language) and force them to call it the “native language.” This means Mongols will be forced to lie that their mother tongue is not Mongolian but Mandarin.
I detected Beijing’s plot in an early stage and launched campaigns for collecting signatures of opponents to the policy. Many Mongols initially made light of the plot in the absence of any official document. When hundreds of thousands of new textbooks reached them later, however, they found that Lesson one of the Mongolian language text book printed the words “We are Chinese” in Mandarin. Not only Mongolian folk tales and folk songs, but also the word “Mongolia” disappeared. School children and their parents and all other Mongolians are angry that Mongolian history and culture has been eliminated from school textbooks. In response, campaigns to boycott school classes and to collect signatures of opponents to Beijing’s policy spread rapidly throughout Mongolian communities in the autonomous region.
Support from Mongolia
A website I opened from July 28 to August 10 attracted 3,641 supporters. Half the supporters were from the country of Mongolia (aka Northern Mongolia), indicating that Mongols in both Mongolia and China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region commonly recognize themselves as descendants of Chinggis Khaan and share the sentiment and history even after the Mongolian region was divided into two parts in 1945 under the secret Yalta agreement between the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union. Mongols in Mongolia have been aware that their siblings in the south have been suppressed by Beijing but remained patient along with their siblings. Northerners have now concluded that they cannot tolerate the suppression anymore and launched their proactive support for their compatriots in “Southern Mongolia.”
Two-thirds of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region had been put under Japan’s influence before World War II. Young Mongols yearn for Japan. I would like Japan to engage with young Mongols’ deadly struggle and support Mongols. Its engagement with the international community would lead to Japan’s constitutional amendments.
Yang Haiying, also known as Akira Ohno, is a professor at Shizuoka University. He is from Southern Mongolia and naturalized in Japan.
