[lg policy] China intensifies its official push to eliminate the Uyghur language from instruction

[Harold Schiffman]

China intensifies its official push to eliminate the Uyghur language
from instruction

Washington, UAA, 15.11.2010 –

As Chinese officials in East Turkestan intensify a campaign to rid the
region’s schools of Uyghur language instruction under the rubric of a
“bilingual education” (Chinese: 双语教育) policy, Uyghur students, parents
and teachers have expressed anger over the implementation of the
policy. A move by educational officials in Toksun County, located in
Turpan Prefecture near the city of Turpan in the eastern part of the
region, is emblematic of the policy’s effects on Uyghur teachers
subject to layoffs after years of teaching. The firing of Uyghur
teachers has highlighted grievances among the Uyghur population with
respect to “bilingual education”, which many feel constitutes an
attack on Uyghurs’ core identity, and is also tied to concerns that a
recent push for development in the region will primarily benefit
ethnic Han Chinese and not Uyghurs and other Turkic “minority” groups.

Employing the term “bilingual” education, the Chinese government is,
in reality, implementing a monolingual Chinese language education
system that undermines the linguistic basis of Uyghur culture. The use
of the term “bilingual” presents a façade of cultural diversity to the
international community and obscures a campaign to eliminate Uyghurs’
cultural distinctiveness. While the term “bilingual” is used, Chinese
officials are aggressively promoting only the use of Chinese in
education and other spheres, in the absence of any official programs
to promote and protect the Uyghur language.

Radio Free Asia (RFA) recently interviewed Uyghur teachers in Toksun
County who will be affected by local officials’ plans, announced on
October 24, 2010, to fire 518 out of nearly 2,000 teachers in the
county. According to RFA, a day before the announcement, Sharapet
Tursun, chief of Toksun County’s educational bureau, told principals
of local Uyghur schools at a meeting that the 518 layoffs were
required in order to abide by the spirit of a red-letter document[1]
on bilingual education issued in October by the Xinjiang Uyghur
Autonomous Region government. Tursun requested that each school
conduct Chinese language proficiency exams prior to November 8 in
order to determine which 518 teachers to lay off, and to showcase the
legitimacy of the directives outlined in the official document.

Local Uyghur teachers told RFA of their extreme dissatisfaction and
opposition to the layoffs. They said they wanted to protest because of
their disagreement over the firings, but they were afraid of the
consequences. RFA contacted Toksun County’s education bureau to
confirm the news of the upcoming layoffs, but local education
officials refused to comment.

Tibetan language protests

During peaceful protests in October in Tibetan areas over plans to
replace Tibetan with Mandarin Chinese as the language of instruction
in the classroom, Uyghur students and teachers expressed support for
the thousands of Tibetan protestors, but said they had been told by
school authorities not to join Tibetans as they demonstrated for
language rights.

Professor and economist Ilham Tohti, who cautioned Uyghur students in
Beijing not to join in the Tibetan protests for fear of running into
trouble with the authorities, has been visited by security personnel,
who have warned him to keep silent on the issue of “bilingual
education” for Uyghurs. A November 8 report from “Uyghur Online”
states that, when invited to “have tea” with security personnel
recently, they interrogated him over his support for Tibetan students
and his interviews with foreign media. They indicated that they would
visit Tohti again, and stressed that his problems would “become
bigger” if he did not stop talking about language rights.

As Tibetan blogger Woeser points out, Chinese officials have decided
that even the Chinese dialect Cantonese is too distinct from what they
view as “Han culture” to be allowed to flourish. She wrote about
protests that broke out in Guangzhou, the provincial capital of
Guangdong Province, in July 2010, following moves by local political
advisory officials to ensure that Mandarin is used on Guangzhou
television shows, as part of a “vital national policy”. Woeser notes
that Cantonese protestors are allowed to demonstrate openly on behalf
of their language rights, unlike Tibetans and Uyghurs. While Tibetans
demonstrated en masse over language rights in October, there are
reports that 20 demonstrators have now been arrested, and all students
in the area of the initial protest have been ordered to attend daily
political re-education classes. No such reports emerged regarding
comparable consequences for Cantonese protestors.

Woeser cites a Beijing cadre’s comment in 2002 that “those minorities
that do have a written language should just let it die out, our entire
system uses one unified language, which is Mandarin, the Han
language.”

One Uyghur netizen’s comment, adds Woeser, reads: “in China, when
Uyghur people from Xinjiang support their language or when Tibetans
support their language, their actions are most likely to be labeled as
“splittist activities.””

In the eyes of Chinese officials, the Uyghur and Tibetan languages
constitute a greater threat to Han society than Cantonese. They
believe Uyghur separatism will remain as long as Uyghurs are allowed
to retain a separate Uyghur identity, culture and language. If
Uyghurs’ language and religious beliefs are allowed to thrive, Chinese
officials fear that Uyghur nationalism and “splittism” will threaten
Chinese rule in East Turkestan and the “unity of the motherland”.

An intensification of “bilingual education” in East Turkestan

On November 12, official media announced that the Chinese education
ministry had set up a special group to promote education in East
Turkestan, focusing on bilingual education, secondary vocational
education and higher education. At a “Xinjiang Work Forum” that took
place in May 2010 aimed at planning massive development projects
region-wide, government cadres pledged to ensure that all students in
the region would be able to speak Mandarin by the year 2020. In
October, the regional government published a document outlining a
ten-year plan toward reaching this goal. According to the South China
Morning Post, the regional government will hold a conference this
month on “bilingual education”.

The government mandate to remove the Uyghur language at all levels of
instruction in East Turkestan’s schools, which was carried out and
intensified under the leadership of former Xinjiang Party Secretary
Wang Lequan, is extremely unpopular among the Uyghur population.
Regional officials, including XUAR chairman Nur Bekri, have tied the
policy to political stability, and have gone so far as to state that
Uyghurs who do not speak Chinese are vulnerable to terrorists. While
the Chinese government asserts that “bilingual education” will provide
ethnic Uyghurs with the Mandarin language skills necessary to succeed
in China’s competitive job market, many Uyghur graduates who are
fluent in Mandarin Chinese report facing employment challenges due to
rampant ethnic discrimination among employers.

In 1997, “Xinjiang classes” were established, in which Uyghur and
other “ethnic minority” students are sent to high schools in large
cities in eastern China, where they receive Chinese-language
instruction as well as immersion in Chinese culture. In 2005, Wang
Lequan described the program in terms of its political importance,
stating that “political thought training”, and not academic
preparation, was its chief goal. According to official media reports,
22,000 students were reportedly enrolled in Chinese-language high
schools in eastern China in fall 2010, marking an increase of 2,000
over the previous year.

Background – “Bilingual education” in Toksun County

According to 2000 statistics, there were 50 Uyghur schools in Toksun
County, including elementary, middle/high schools and vocational
schools. However, due to the implementation of the “bilingual
education” policy and the forcible merging of Uyghur schools with
Chinese schools in recent years, the number of Uyghur schools has been
reduced to just 24. The school mergers had already resulted in a high
number of Uyghur teachers being laid off, but the planned layoff of
518 Uyghur teachers will mark the biggest layoff of Uyghur teachers
thus far.

In line with school districts throughout East Turkestan, Turpan
Prefecture[2] officials announced in June that 42 “bilingual
education” preschools would be constructed in the prefecture by the
end of 2010, and that the central government would invest more than 52
million yuan (approx. US$7.5 million) to construct a total of 58
preschools by the year 2012, as part of the national plan to invest in
East Turkstan’s development.

Uyghurs left out of development benefits

The firing of Uyghur teachers, and their replacement with ethnic
Chinese teachers, throughout East Turkestan is likely to feed
resentment among the Uyghur population as the benefits of large-scale
development plans drafted at May’s Xinjiang Work Forum manifest
themselves unequally among Uyghurs and Han Chinese. Employment rates
are skewed heavily in favor of Han Chinese, and Chinese domination of
the regional commercial and government sectors, coupled with
institutionalized discrimination, are likely to prevent much of the
profits from official development from trickling down to the Uyghur
population.

Many Uyghurs feel that the eradication of the Uyghur language in the
educational sphere constitutes an attempt to assimilate them into
Chinese society, amid fears that a distinct Uyghur identity will lead
to separatism. The intensification of the “bilingual education” policy
has coincided with official efforts to weed out “terrorism, separatism
and extremism” and official proclamations regarding “splittism” and
the need to maintain territorial integrity.

Other policies have also raised fears of cultural annihilation among
the Uyghur people. In early 2009, officials began the demolition of
traditional Uyghur buildings in the Old City of Kashgar, an initiative
that has already eradicated much of an ancient, irreplaceable center
of Uyghur culture and religion. Many Uyghurs consider protection of
Kashgar Old City as vital to maintaining a separate Uyghur identity.
Chinese government authorities have stated that the demolition was
initiated by the need to protect Old City residents from homes prone
to earthquake damage and poor drainage. However, the demolition is
consistent with ongoing official moves to restrict and manage Uyghur
cultural traditions.

http://www.cascfen.net/?p=1104

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