34 China The EconomistJanuary 30th 2021
S
ometimes easyvictories are the most revealing. Lots of govern-
ments are capable of ruthlessness in the face of terrorism or real
threats to national security. When a regime uses its full strength to
impose its will on a group offering no resistance, however, that is a
clarifying moment. Just such an unequal contest is now unfolding
in the forested hills of the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefec-
ture, near the Chinese border with North Korea.
Yanbian is home to fewer than a million members of an official-
ly recognised Korean ethnic minority, most of them descended
from migrants who fled wars and famines on the Korean peninsula
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Chinese scholars study the
region as a model of co-existence with the country’s Han majority.
Education is part of that story. Ethnic Korean schools in Yanbian
have offered bilingual education for more than 60 years. Until re-
cently, classes in maths, science and foreign languages were of-
fered in Mandarin, while Korean was used to teach hard-to-grasp
concepts in subjects like history, politics and other social sciences.
Traditionally, the urge to learn is strong in Korean culture. “Par-
ents would sell cattle for their children to go to school,” says one
academic. In this century Yanbian pioneered trilingual education,
passing local education laws in 2004 that gave precedence to Kore-
an but placed new weight on teaching students a third language
(sometimes Japanese, but mostly English). In a globalised age, par-
ents understand that languages are about more than tradition:
they are a bridge to other cultures, says the academic. Multilingual
Yanbian graduates are sought after by employers in southern
boomtowns such as Shenzhen and Guangzhou.
Yanbian’s ethnic Korean schools were for a long time sheltered
from a campaign to promote Mandarin over minority languages,
which was rolled out a decade ago in such restive spots as Xinjiang
and Tibet and has since spread nationwide. Last November a lead-
ing member of the National People’s Congress (npc) called Manda-
rin-promotion a crucial policy for “managing ethnic affairs, en-
hancing national unity and safeguarding national security”.
Now Yanbian finds its education laws under direct assault. On
January 20th a powerful body, the Legislative Affairs Commission
of the npcStanding Committee, announced that education laws in
two unnamed places violate an article of China’s constitution thatsays the state promotes the nationwide use of Mandarin. As first
reported by npcObserver, an invaluable blog run by Changhao Wei
of Yale University Law School, the only education laws that match
the announcement are in Inner Mongolia and Yanbian.
The ruling is shocking in several ways. For one thing, it is the
bluntest of legal instruments to declare a law unconstitutional.
For another, the npcruling made no mention of another article in
the constitution that offers protection for ethnic-minority lan-
guages. In reality, those protections are a relic of policies that date
back to the founding of Communist China in 1949. Today, the polit-
ical tide is with prominent scholars and officials who call for “sec-
ond-generation ethnic policies”, built around assimilating minor-
ities into a single, Chinese civilisation. Such nationalists justify
their centralising zeal with claims that China risks ethnic unrest
and a Soviet-style break-up if minority privileges are not ended.
In Xinjiang education policies are bound up with a larger wave
of repression, imposed in the name of counter-terrorism and
fighting Islamic extremism. Most foreign attention has been paid
to Xinjiang’s political re-education camps, through which perhaps
a million Muslims from the Uyghur minority have passed, after
being flagged as potential extremists for such acts as praying too
often or telephoning relatives overseas. But in Xinjiang’s ethnic-
minority schools, life has also been transformed. Formerly, many
subjects were taught in the Uyghur and Kazakh languages. Now
those tongues have been downgraded from mediums of instruc-
tion to mere subjects, offered for a few hours each week. In Tibet
and in Tibetan areas of Qinghai, a neighbouring province, similar
changes to education policies prompted street protests in 2010. In
the late summer of 2020, thousands of parents in Inner Mongolia
boycotted schools after it was announced that such sensitive sub-
jects as literature, politics and history must be taught in Mandarin
by 2022. Across Inner Mongolia riot police broke up protests, and
parents were ordered to send children to school or else be declared
ineligible for government subsidies or bank loans.
No riots greeted a similar change to language rules in Yanbian,
unveiled as the school year began last September. Today the aca-
demic urges patience, encouraging families to wait to see how the
government balances the need to strengthen general-purpose
education with the task of preserving ethnic languages.Bad Korea move
Locals encountered in Yanji, the regional capital, on a recent week-
day, including parents who had brought children to skate or sled
on the frozen Buerhatong river, offered mixed opinions of the
change. A Korean-Chinese man with a son at kindergarten sup-
ports the greater use of Mandarin in schools. He struggled at uni-
versity and had to study Chinese in his spare time. He accuses
some groups, such as Tibetans, of separatist ambitions. “We Kore-
ans don’t feel like that, we’re more supportive of the government.”
Others are torn. A mother of two toddlers worries that Korean
culture may be weakened by the new rules. But there must be a log-
ic to the state’s actions, she adds, as locals glide past on chairs fit-
ted with ice-skates, pushing themselves along with spike-tipped
poles. The government sees a bigger picture than mere citizens
can, suggests the mother, loyally. Such deference to authority is
not rewarded with much trust. Plain-clothes police followed Cha-
guan around Yanji and tried to eavesdrop on interviews.
The fate of Yanbian—a region that finds itself accused of un-
constitutional acts—points to a bleak reality for ethnic minorities.
Loyalty is not enough. Their duty is to become more Chinese. 7Chaguan Becoming more Chinese
Assimilation of minorities is not just for Uyghurs and Tibetans