The EconomistSeptember 5th 2020 China 352 dia theories circulated that officials who
advocated a less demanding curriculum
really just wanted to make it harder for stu-
dents from humbler families to get ahead.
The tussle highlighted a bitter divide
over how to educate China’s teenagers,
whose summer holidays ended this week.
In Nanjing many locals sympathise with
the protesters. Xu Wuqing, waiting for his
granddaughter outside the school gates
with homemade pigeon soup, said that
“less pressure” on students was “simply
not okay”. In a complaint last year to Nan-
jing’s education bureau, which was widely
shared online, a mother griped that the
city’s children were being turned into
“slackers”, too weak to cope with exams.
Many in China once supported what
schools such as Nanjing Number One are
trying to do. In the early 2000s a bestseller
about raising a child in the West, “Educa-
tion for Quality in America”, popularised
the idea of suzhi jiaoyu. The term refers to a
well-rounded education that attaches im-
portance to building character as much as
knowledge. It guides most of Nanjing’s
more liberal teaching. The author, Huang
Quanyu, became a household name among
the middle class, writes Teresa Kuan, an
American academic, in “Love’s Uncertain-
ty: The Politics and Ethics of Child Rearing
in Contemporary China”. In 2010 China
published a ten-year plan on education
which admitted that the country’s teaching
was “relatively outdated” and that people
had “strong yearnings” for suzhi jiaoyu.
Some reforms have seemed fanciful. In
2018 the central government called for “30
burden reductions”, including a limit of 90
minutes of homework a day and an end to
the parental habit of comparing their off-
spring to others. This year, to prevent cram
schools from racing too far ahead with the
syllabus, it published lists of subjects suit-
able for certain age groups. For example,
under-nines are not to study how to add
and subtract with numbers comprising
four or more digits.
From next year a tweaked gaokaowill
give students leeway to pick and choose
some subjects, beyond the compulsory
ones. But China is reluctant to overhaul a
test that remains remarkably meritocratic.
“By sticking with the exam, we waste stu-
dents with other talents. By moving too far
away from it, we disadvantage poor kids,”
says Wang Tao of East China Normal Uni-
versity. It is not that loving parents do not
want their children to have fun. Rather, as
one mother in Nanjing puts it, relaxed
classrooms are “just no use” if they do not
get a pupil into a good university.
So quasi-military cram schools—“gao-
kao factories”, as they are known—still
thrive. One such is Hengshui Secondary
School in the northern province of Hebei. It
has 18 branches across China, some of
which reward students who get into top
universitieswithtensofthousandsofdol-
lars.In 2018 oneofthemboughttwode-
commissionedarmytankstoflankitsen-
trance, apparently to instil a sense of
toughnessamongitsstudents.
MrWangsaysheisgladtosee“somuch
negotiation” under way, with educators
pushingforwardandpolicymakersfollow-
ingcautiously,evenifparentsarestillre-
sisting.Observantchildrenatthemuseum
inNanjingwillfind,inadditiontostatues
ofprominentmen whoaced thekeju, a
bronzeoneofa personwhofailedit repeat-
edly:WuCheng’en,whowaseducatedin
Nanjinginthe16thcentury.Wuwentonto
write“JourneytotheWest”,oneofChina’s
mostcelebratednovels. 7O
n the firstday of the school year in
Inner Mongolia, a northern province of
China, some teachers in schools using the
Mongolian language found their class-
rooms empty. To show their anger at an of-
ficial order that Mandarin be used to teach
history, politics and literature, parents had
kept their children at home. In recent years
the government has stepped up repression
in parts of China with large ethnic-minor-
ity populations, making widespread prot-
ests all but impossible. In Inner Mongolia
ethnic tensions have seldom reached lev-
els seen in Tibet or Xinjiang, so the school
boycott is especially remarkable.
The Communist Party has never been as
fearful of unrest among Inner Mongolia’sethnic Mongols as it is of protests by ethnic
Tibetans, or Uighurs in Xinjiang. One rea-
son is that a massive influx of ethnic-Han
Chinese over the past few decades has re-
duced ethnic Mongols to less than a fifth of
the province’s population of nearly 25m
people. Their separate identity has long
since been eroded. Most (unlike some Ti-
betans and Uighurs) are bilingual. But eth-
nic Mongols often still cherish their tradi-
tional culture and language. By requiring
more use of Mandarin in schools, the party
risks fuelling dissent.
The boycott has affected many schools
across Inner Mongolia. Protesters have
submitted thousands of petitions to the
government, some using a traditional
Mongolian format that involves signato-
ries putting their names in a circle to avoid
any one of them being perceived as a ring-
leader. Videos circulated online show par-
ents singing Mongolian songs outside
schools. In one clip, high-school students
shout, “Mongolian is our mother tongue!
We are Mongolian until death!”
Fearful of police reprisals, protesters
have posted messages online warning
against the use of violence, and even
against any action on the streets. “We’ve all
agreed to stay united by keeping our chil-
dren at home,” says a herder from Xilingol
League, a prefecture in Inner Mongolia.
“But we know that if we take to the streets
in protest, we will be thrown into jail.”
The changes under way in Inner Mon-
golia’s schools were rolled out in Xinjiang
in 2017 and in Tibet the following year.
They will eventually affect students in In-
ner Mongolia throughout their nine years
of compulsory education. This academic
year they apply only to those in the first
year of secondary school and first year of
primary. Parents worry that their children
will lose fluency in Mongolian and grow up
unable to use the classical Mongolian
script. They take particular pride in this
form of writing. Mongolia, an independent
country to the north, more commonly uses
the Cyrillic script—a hangover from its
days as a satellite of the Soviet Union.
The authorities are already cracking
down. The herder says two of her relatives
who had spoken out against the new lan-
guage policy disappeared on August 31st.
Users of Inner Mongolia’s only Mongolian-
language social-media platform, Bainu,
have found that access to their feeds has
been blocked. Censors have erased posts
about the protests from other social media.
Local officials have ordered teachers to
press parents to send their children to
school. Ethnic-Mongol party members,
civil servants and teachers have been told
that if they join the boycott they may lose
their jobs and party membership. Tibetans
and Uighurs have long been familiar with
such bullying. Ethnic Mongols will have to
get more used to it. 7Efforts to boost the use of Mandarin in
schools angers ethnic MongolsInner MongoliaMongolingualism
Towards a less Mongolian future