Author: Claire Ellison
December 5, 2024
This is the second installment of a multi-part series on the intersection of language rights and human rights. Read the first article here.
Introduction
The People’s Republic of China formally recognizes the existence of 55 minority nationalities in addition to the Han Chinese majority. This number is a gross conflation of many other minorities who were denied recognition by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This practice of exclusion is referred to as a “paper genocide” as these identities cease to exist in the eyes of the state. Minorities who were previously recognized and had some collective power are now under attack, with privileges such as extra points on college entrance exams or exceptions to family planning laws being rolled back. Perhaps the most culturally destructive change is the attack on minority languages.
Minority-language education for ethnic groups in China, a vestige of the Soviet model of ethnic autonomy, is being replaced by so-called “bilingual education”, favoring Mandarin Chinese as the language of instruction and the relegation of minority languages to select subjects, if any. Ethnic diversity, previously tolerated by authorities, now carries the threat of nationalist movements with the potential to endanger geopolitical interests. Standardization of language has become synonymous with centralization of power. This article provides a snapshot of the status of three languages in China: Uyghur, Mongolian, and Cantonese.
UYGHUR
Background
The Uyghur ethnic minority is primarily located in the western region of Xinjiang. Xinjiang’s stability is crucial to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, an ambitious development project strengthening infrastructure connecting Asia with Europe. China’s largest coal and natural gas reserves are also located in this region. Everything that makes Uyghurs Uyghurs, like their culture, language, and religion, also distinguish them from the Han Chinese majority. Expressions of Uyghur identity over the years have increasingly been perceived as a separatist threat to national unity. The Uyghur language in particular has been labeled as backward and unpatriotic by state officials. The language’s Turkic roots and Arabic-based script are a permanent anchor to Central Asia and Islam, both of which are decidedly not Han Chinese.
After 9/11, authorities justified their suspicion of Islam, particularly among Uyghurs, as part of the Global War on Terrorism. This worsened in the 2009 Ürümqi riots, after discontent triggered by state-backed Han Chinese migration and ensuing economic and cultural discrimination came to a violent boiling point in the capital of Xinjiang. By 2014, a full-fledged campaign called “Strike Hard Against Violent Terrorism” targeting Uyghurs was underway. Since then, Uyghurs have faced a range of repression including arbitrary detentions and torture, forced labor, organ harvesting, sterilizations, forced marriages, religious persecution, and destruction of cultural heritage.
Education and “Re-Education”
In August 2013, linguist Abduweli Ayup was arrested, incarcerated for over a year, and tortured after founding a school which taught Uyghur, Mandarin, and English. Minority language instruction in Xinjiang attracted Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Mongol ethnic groups in the community, and the school’s success was quickly labeled as a threat to national unity. While Ayup managed to flee to Turkey as a refugee before finally settling in France, Uyghurs in Xinjiang today remain firmly under the thumb of Chinese linguistic imperialism. Bilingual language education policy is a key component of forced assimilation of Uyghurs. “Bilingual” is a misnomer, as the aim of Mandarin language assimilation is to eliminate the Uyghur language, rather than a benign addition of Mandarin language skills. Han Chinese in ethnic minority regions are also not required to know local languages.
Uyghurs are surveilled through a homestay program in which civil servants live in the home of a Xinjiang resident, sometimes even sleeping in their beds. Their Mandarin language skill level and frequency of usage is observed and factors into the looming threat of “re-education.” The United Nations (UN) estimates indicate over a million people have been held in internment camps purported to help “trainees” learn Mandarin, receive a patriotic education, and thus battle the “three evils” of separatism, terrorism and extremism. To achieve this, official government ordinances aim to “break lineage, break roots, break connections, and break origins.” According to former Xinjiang Communist Party Secretary, Wang Lequan, “the languages of the minority nationalities have very small capacities and do not contain many of the expressions in modern science and technology, which makes education in these concepts impossible. This is out of step with the 21st century.” Accordingly, inmates are required to learn over 1,000 Chinese characters and barred from using other languages, including the Muslim greeting “As-salaam alaikum.” Some of these requirements prove virtually impossible for illiterate, elderly, or visually impaired prisoners.
Name Changes
Human Rights Watch research analyzing the names of villages in Xinjiang from 2009 to 2023 show that 630 villages were changed in accordance with the CCP’s sinicization policy. Names referring to Uyghur religion, culture, and history were replaced with names like “Happiness”, “Unity”, and “Harmony”. Among the names deemed offensive were religious terms specific to Islam and Shamanism as well as any references to Uyghur historical figures and kingdoms preceding 1949, the year that the People’s Republic of China was founded. Even names related to Uyghur culture, like the musical instrument known as a dutar, were removed. One inhabitant described her confusion upon release from a re-education camp. When she tried to get a bus ticket back home, she couldn’t find one that stopped at her village, unaware that the old name had been discarded in her absence in favor of a more ideologically appropriate one.
The suppression of the Uyghur language is not only evident in the place names of Xinjiang but in people’s names as well. Many common Uyghur names are banned outright. Linguistic discrimination is taken a step farther, however, when registering a child’s name. A very common structure for western names consists of a birth name (or first name) followed by a family name (or last name). Uyghur names follow this order and typically use the father’s birth name as the family name of his children. However, the Chinese naming practice places the family name first, followed by the birth name. When a Uyghur child’s name is registered, Chinese government authorities intentionally follow the Chinese naming order, disregarding the family’s intentions. This puts female children in the embarrassing position of having a legal birth name that is male. It also means siblings legally have the same birth name but different family names. Additionally, since Chinese citizens are required to have names written in Chinese characters, foreign names are written by choosing characters that sound similar. Any given syllable could be potentially matched to a range of different Chinese characters with pronunciations that come close to the original. However, no standardized transliteration from Uyghur to Chinese has been established. Multiple people with the same name in Uyghur could have names that are spelled using completely different and arbitrarily assigned Chinese characters; making it much more confusing to navigate bureaucratic matters and manage documentation. Some Uyghurs even report officials choosing Chinese characters with negative or offensive connotations to represent Uyghur names in an effort to humiliate them. Dispossessing people of their true names is yet another way to attack the identities of ethnic minorities. It is also a violation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states that a child “shall have the right from birth to a name”.
Boarding Schools
North Americans may recall that boarding schools were used as a violent assimilation tactic on indigenous people in Canada and the United States starting in the 19th century. This boarding school model is meant to subjugate a people in the long-term by erasing its identity from the newest generation. It physically separates children from their parents while creating a cultural and linguistic divide, potentially in the matter of a few pivotal developmental years.
Lutfullah Kucar and Aysu Kucar were 4 and 6 years old when they were forced to leave their parents and go to a Chinese boarding school. If they spoke in Uyghur, they endured physical punishments. When they were released 19 months later, they were malnourished and unable to speak their native languages, Uyghur and Turkish. Even living with their father in Turkey, they sang propaganda songs in Chinese about grandfather Xi Jinping and father Wang Junzheng, the Chinese President and security chief for Xinjiang, respectively. Their father, Abdullatif Kucar, had left religious repression in 1980s Xinjiang for Turkey, where he became a citizen. He later returned to China and started a family but found himself deported back to Turkey in 2017 during the CCP’s campaign against terrorism. Because his children had Turkish citizenship through him, Kucar began petitioning the Turkish government for help. Shockingly, the kids were successfully released in 2019, but their mother Meryem faced a 20 year sentence for separatism with no way of contacting them. Children with “doubly detained” parents are especially vulnerable to being sent to boarding schools, even if other family members want to take them in.
Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights poses: “In those States in which ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities exist, persons belonging to such minorities shall not be denied the right, in community with the other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, or to use their own language.” China has signed this but not ratified it, implying an intention to follow it, but they are not legally bound to.
MONGOLIAN
History
The Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region was created in 1947 under the Republic of China. Its leaders backed Mao Zedong’s Communist Party when the People’s Republic of China was formed two years later with the understanding that their autonomy was guaranteed. This was short-lived, as a couple years later, ethnic Mongolians were strategically outnumbered by Han Chinese settlers. The Cultural Revolution also saw 20,000 Mongolians killed under fraudulent accusations of membership to a secret party. Despite the region’s history, protests among Mongolians are rare, and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region is peaceful and stable in contrast to Xinjiang and Tibet. This is due in part to a stronger integration with the Han Chinese majority after years of Han migration and intermarriage. In fact, ethnic Mongolians now make up about one-sixth of the minority population of Inner Mongolia. An increase in coal mining, driven by the Han population, has also made the traditional herding lifestyle emblematic of Mongolian culture increasingly difficult.
A Change in Curriculum
In June 2020, a new curriculum was announced across Inner Mongolia requiring three subjects in elementary and middle schools to be taught in Mandarin Chinese instead of Mongolian. At around 3:00 AM on August 31st, 2020 in an eastern part of Inner Mongolia called Ogniuud Banner, hundreds of high school students locked into their school dormitories made a dramatic escape in protest. After breaking into their lockers to recover confiscated phones, the students contacted family members and left the school in a matter of hours. The protests and boycotts which broke out from late August to mid-September in Inner Mongolia were swiftly retaliated against by authorities. One parent explained, “If you don’t send the kids [to school], they take away your jobs. You can’t get subsidies or loans from the banks. They put you on a blacklist. They are arresting the people who signed petitions. They have all kinds of methods.” By December 2020, at least eight Mongolians had killed themselves in protest, including a government official, school principal, teachers, parents, and a student.
Though the policy is framed by the government as a way to improve access to higher education and employment, the Mongolian education level is very high, and graduates already successfully apply their bilingual skills at elite universities. Their commitment to secular education is part of what makes them a more “palatable” and acceptable minority than the Uyghurs and Tibetans, whose religion-inflected cultural identity is viewed as primitive superstition. Rather than resisting Mandarin Chinese, Mongolians have asked that elementary school children have the right to be taught Mongolian first, but even this relatively modest request from the “model minority nationality” was denied.
Mass recruitments for Mandarin teachers quickly followed the announcement. Crucial to the policy of assimilation, candidates were asked to relocate to rural areas where traditional herding practices are still followed by Mongolians. Yang Haiying, a Mongolian-born professor based in Japan, explains, “They are recruiting from the rest of China, not Inner Mongolia, which means they are basically looking for Han Chinese.” The subtext is clear: expect a larger inward migration to follow, a strategy used repeatedly throughout Chinese history, including during the Cultural Revolution when farmers from other regions were sent to the borders of Inner Mongolia. Three years later, fears were proven correct: what started as a change from Mongolian to Mandarin as the language of instruction for three subjects led to a more drastic movement towards erasure. As of September 2023, schools are mandated to use Mandarin as the sole language of instruction. Mongolian continues to be taught, but with greatly reduced hours and only as a subject. It’s also been entirely banned from kindergarten, crucially cutting off new generations from their culture in their first year of schooling.
There is speculation that this shift is a response to a linguistic transition being undertaken by the region’s northern neighbor: the Republic of Mongolia. Their government plans to transition from the Cyrillic alphabet back to the Mongolian script, in an effort to distance themselves from Soviet occupation pre-1990. This could encourage more engagement with independent Mongolian content from ethnic Mongolians in China, strengthening cultural exchange and influence with a technically foreign nation. Too much foreign influence would be antithetical to one of the bilingual education campaign’s slogans: “Learn Chinese and become a civilized person.”
CANTONESE
Background
Unlike the examples explored above, Cantonese is part of the Chinese language family, along with Shanghainese and Hokkien, despite being mutually unintelligible. While Mandarin hegemony affects these groups of speakers as well, they belong to the Han Chinese ethnicity and are historically more prosperous than minorities like Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Mongolians. Any prejudice against non-Mandarin Chinese languages does not have the strongly racialized tone wielded against the ethnic minorities examined above. Though spoken Mandarin and Cantonese are mutually unintelligible, they use the same script. After the CCP came into power in 1949, a reform to the writing system was initiated to simplify Chinese characters. Cantonese speakers in mainland China use these simplified characters, while the original traditional characters are still in usage in Hong Kong and Taiwan, which were not under Communist control at that time. Conservative estimates place the number of Cantonese speakers at over 85.5 million. The Cantonese language originated in the southern Chinese region of Guangdong and is the lingua franca of Hong Kong and a key part of the identity of Hongkongers. It is vibrantly represented in the arts through Hong Kong’s film industry and Cantopop.
Hong Kong
Hong Kong has a unique history that sets it apart from mainland China. In 1842, after the First Opium War, the Qing Dynasty ceded Hong Kong to the British. Starting in 1898, Hong Kong was leased to the British for 99 years. While Hong Kong was not fully a democracy during this time, Hongkongers still held greater freedoms than mainlanders. The end of British rule in 1997 gave way to the “one country, two systems” model which allowed Hongkongers to theoretically retain certain rights like the freedom of speech and assembly and a multi-party system. Since then, Hongkongers have pushed back against CCP political interference, including protests like the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement of 2014. More famously, up to 2 million people protested in 2019 against a bill proposing the extradition of cases to mainland China, putting pro-democracy activists in greater danger.
The National Security Law, introduced in 2020 in response to the 2019 protests, radically changed Hong Kong. Anything deemed to be acts of secession from China, subversion of the authority of the central government, terrorism, and collusion with external forces is illegal. Other sections detail the possibility of extradition, private trials, the precedence of Beijing law over Hong Kong law, the surveillance of persons of interest, and the application of the law to non-permanent residents of Hong Kong.
During the 2019 protests, slogans deftly used Cantonese slang and homonyms to create puns and pointed satire. Support of the Cantonese language has also been politicized, as evidenced by the shutting down of Cantonese language advocacy group Societas Linguistica Hongkongensis in 2023. Founder Andrew Chan says national security police searched his family’s home without a warrant while he was away, prompting him to dissolve the organization out of fear for his family’s safety. Officers attributed the search to a short story entry to the group’s Cantonese-language essay competition, claiming it violated the National Security Law. The story, set in a dystopian 2050, describes a Hong Kong subjugated by the CCP and suffering from a sort of mass amnesia of its own history. The protagonist, raised in the UK by parents who emigrated in 2020, is one of few who know about Hong Kong’s pre-authoritarian past. The story features a Milan Kundera quote: “The struggle between man and totalitarianism is the struggle between memory and forgetting.”
The advocacy group, which for ten years aimed to “safeguard the linguistic rights of Hong Kong people,” experienced harassment which predates both this short story and the National Security Law. After speaking out against a compulsory Mandarin-language exam at a university, Chan received death threats and was forced to leave his job, and the group was reported to the authorities as being radical and anti-China. A CCP-backed newspaper alleged that the group's cooperation with opposition organizations and objection to patriotic education in schools proved it promoted independence disguised as support of Cantonese. In another case, the public expression of anxiety around the future of the Cantonese language, represented in the 2016 Hong Kong film “Ten Years,” in which Cantonese is banned and replaced by Mandarin, was similarly suppressed when authorities banned public screenings. It should be noted that, unlike other languages in China, Cantonese is nowhere close to being endangered. However, the rise in usage of Mandarin reflects the mounting CCP presence in Hong Kong.
The percentage of Hongkongers who can speak Mandarin has grown from 25% in 1996 to 54.2% in 2021. Even two years prior to the massive protests of 2019, 70% of elementary schools in Hong Kong taught primarily in Mandarin, with 25% of secondary schools doing the same. The reality of an ever-closer proximity with the mainland means that strong Mandarin skills are prioritized over Cantonese by parents focused on preparing their children for the future. Another point of consideration is the over 144,000 Hong Kongers who have left under the British National Overseas scheme; a special visa launched in 2020 in response to the National Security Law. It’s fair to say that at least some of the Hongkongers disturbed by the future of Hong Kong and the possible erosion of its unique identity have made the choice to pick up and leave.
Guangdong
In 2010, thousands of people participated in a pro-Cantonese language protest in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong, after a government proposal was made to decrease Cantonese-language broadcasting before the Asian Games, a major multi-sport event. Typically, television stations in China must be in Mandarin, but Guangzhou was initially granted an exception in the 1980s, with the hope that its broadcast would garner attention from other Cantonese speakers in European-controlled neighboring regions, such as Hong Kong, under British rule at the time, and Macau, under Portuguese rule. Today, Cantonese-language television is alive and well. However, on Chinese social media platform Douyin, multiple Cantonese-language livestreamers complained that their videos were taken down or accounts were banned for using “unrecognizable language.” Ironically, the automatically generated subtitles that Douyin provides were accurately displayed on these videos. These incidents appear to be linked to the aftermath of the 2019 protests in Hong Kong.
Cantonese speakers in Guangdong and Hong Kong are culturally linked but use the language differently. While many in Guangdong identify both Mandarin and Cantonese as their mother tongues, Hongkongers are more likely to say just Cantonese was their mother tongue, in part due to British influence. Under the British colonial government, other minority Chinese languages were banned in Hong Kong schools. By the 1970s, the colonial administration found that encouraging Cantonese prevented Hongkongers from identifying too much with mainland China. Thus, Cantonese had less competition with Mandarin. A 2021 census found that 88.2% of Hong Kong residents used Cantonese as their main language, while 2.3% used Mandarin, and 4.3% used English. People in Guangdong indicate they speak Mandarin more in professional contexts and Cantonese with family, while Hongkongers prefer Cantonese and English over Mandarin in professional contexts and Cantonese with family.
Some animosity against Mandarin speakers has been reported in Hong Kong, particularly during the 2019 protests and during the COVID-19 pandemic, when some restaurants refused service to certain patrons. Though concerned Cantonese speakers may say “Guangzhou today, Hong Kong tomorrow” in reference to a possible eclipsing of Cantonese with Mandarin, this appears to be an exaggeration, at least for now. In both Guangdong and Hong Kong, the economic motivations for Mandarin fluency, as well as higher internal migration from other regions, promotes its usage among the population and make a government mandated imposition of it unnecessary. This, in some ways, protects the Cantonese language from linguistic crackdowns experienced in other regions.
CONCLUSION
In a political climate where support of a language, an expression of identity itself, can be painted as separatism by the ruling party, entire cultures risk being corroded in service of an artificially universal idea of what it means to be Chinese. Whether linguistic repression takes the form of top-down language policy or more insidious demographic changes brought about through state-backed migration, its results are destructive, and the plight of a region like Xinjiang could very well become the framework for others. In 2021, the CCP marked its 100 year-anniversary. If current policies under Xi Jinping continue, the next 100 could greatly impoverish the rich linguistic diversity of a nation of over 1.4 billion people.
Glossary
Antithetical: exactly the opposite of someone or something
Centralization of power: to centralize power in a country, state, or organization means to create a system in which one central group of people gives instructions to regional groups.
Chinese Communist Party (CCP): the sole political party of China since 1949. Communism refers to a political and economic doctrine that aims to create a classless society in which the public owns the means of production and property.
Conflation: the merging of two or more sets of information, texts, ideas, etc. into one
Cultural Revolution: upheaval launched by CCP chairman Mao Zedong from 1966 to 1976 with the purpose of renewing the spirit of the 1912 Chinese revolution which overthrew the Qing dynasty
Extremism: the support of radical ideas or actions, particularly in politics or religion
Global War on Terrorism: American-led global counterterrorism campaign set in motion after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001
Han Chinese: the largest ethnic group in China which outnumbers minority nationalities in every province or autonomous region except Tibet and Xinjiang
Lingua franca: a language that is adopted as a common language between speakers whose native languages are different
Linguistic imperialism: the practice of imposing a dominant language on other languages and communities which can lead to marginalization of local languages.
Misnomer: a wrong or inaccurate use of a name or term
“One country, two systems” model: concept developed in the 1980s during negotiations between China and the United Kingdom in which there would be only one China, but that Hong Kong could keep its own economic, administrative, and governmental system.
Ratify: to approve a treaty, contract, or agreement, making it officially valid
Relegation: the act of putting someone or something into a lower or less important rank or position
Religious repression: the suppression of religious activity or belief through harassment, prevention of religious services, destruction of places of worship and religious texts, or forced conversion
Separatism: the belief held by people of a particular race, religion, or other group that they should be independent and have their own government or in some way live apart from other people
Sinicization: process or policy in which neighboring countries or minority ethnic groups within China are assimilated into the Chinese identity, particularly through language, societal norms, and culture
Totalitarianism: a political system in which those in power have complete control and do not allow people freedom to oppose them
Transliteration: the process of converting written text from one script or alphabet to another while preserving the original word's pronunciation
Umbrella Movement: a series of protests against proposed electoral reforms in Hong Kong from September to December 2014, named after the protestors’ use of umbrellas against police pepper spray and tear gas
Vestige: a trace of something that is disappearing or no longer exists