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UHRP releases report on bilingual education in East Turkestan—Uyghur Voices on Education
New report highlights assimilative language policy through firsthand accounts
The Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) announces the publication of Uyghur Voices on Education: China’s Assimilative ‘Bilingual Education’ Policy in East Turkestan. Since UHRP’s first report on bilingual education in 2007, the Chinese government has accelerated and expanded an education policy that has effectively marginalized the Uyghur language from the education system in East Turkestan.
The ‘bilingual education’ policy is designed to transition Uyghur students at all levels from education in their mother tongue to education in Chinese resulting in the removal of Uyghur in the classroom and presenting a fundamental challenge to a distinct Uyghur identity.
Since the 2014 Work Forum, Chinese officials have placed ‘bilingual education’ at the center of its efforts to achieve “ethnic mingling,” an initiative that aims to blur the cultural distinctiveness of the Uyghur people and assimilate Uyghurs into the Chinese nation dominated by the Han culture.
“China's bilingual education policy as implemented in East Turkestan is not bilingual at all. In practice, it is a monolingual Mandarin education. Its intent is to annihilate the living Uyghur language and eventually assimilate the Uyghur people into the Chinese culture, thereby eliminating the status of the Uyghur people as the original, indigenous and dominant people in East Turkestan,” said UHRP director, Alim Seytoff in a statement from Washington, DC.
Uyghur Voices on Education: China’s Assimilative ‘Bilingual Education’ Policy in East Turkestan offers four accounts by Uyghurs reflecting on their experiences in the Chinese education system. Each account presents a different aspect to the ‘bilingual education’ policy including: loss of cultural identity, lack of employment opportunities, ethnic discrimination faced by Uyghur students and teachers and the effect of mergers between Han and Uyghur schools. UHRP is extremely grateful to the Uyghurs who shared their accounts forUyghur Voices on Education, as the descriptions present a stark contrast to Chinese government rhetoric.
Chinese officials have portrayed the Uyghur language as incompatible with modernity. Following a pattern of broader development policy that has promoted the adoption of Han civilization as central to modernization, China has moved to diminish the status of the Uyghur language in society. The Chinese government has stated that by 2020 almost the entire non-Han Chinese student population will be educated in ‘bilingual education’ schools. In a further comparison with broader development policy, Uyghur participation in devising ‘bilingual education’ was absent.
As the report describes, despite strong Mandarin skills, Uyghurs are much more likely to struggle in finding employment compared to their Han counterparts due to endemic discrimination in the hiring process. Furthermore, conditions in Uyghur schools fall far behind Han schools with noticeable differences in funding and class size. UHRP researchers also describe how Uyghur teachers have lost their jobs as the government aggressively pursues ‘bilingual education.’ The shortage of teachers in East Turkestan often means unqualified Han instructors are hired to fill the gap. The implementation of the mainland class program, in which Uyghur students are educated outside of East Turkestan, aims to assimilate Uyghurs and promote the value of ethnic unity amongst the participants. However, as Uyghur Voices on Education relates, the program has limited success in promoting unity. Students often encounter racism in the program, and upon graduation, have difficulty finding work and obtaining permits to remain in interior China.
Uyghur Voices on Education recommends the Chinese government respect domestic laws on the language rights of ethnic minorities, as well as meet international obligations on linguistic rights. In particular:
Article 37 of the Regional Ethnic Autonomy Law:
Schools (classes) and other educational organizations recruiting mostly ethnic minority students should, whenever possible, use textbooks in their own languages and use these languages as the media of instruction.
Article 4 of the Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities:
States should, where appropriate, take measures in the field of education, in order to encourage knowledge of the history, traditions, language and culture of the minorities existing within their territory.
China’s Crackdown on Minorities: Tibetans, Uyghurs Denied Passports
Breitbart
by Frances Martel
14 Jul 2015
Human Rights Watch has released a report alleging that China has developed a two-tiered passport system designed to prevent the nation’s Tibetans and ethnic Uyghur population from leaving the country. Both groups, internationally known for their resistance to the central government in Beijing, suffer up to five-year delays in passport processing without explanation.
“If you are a religious minority who lives in a part of the country where most people are minorities, it’s virtually impossible to get a passport,”
says Human Rights Watch’s China director, Sophie Richardson. While members of China’s majority Han ethnicity can efficiently acquire passports, leading to 100 million trips outside of mainland China in the past year, Uyghurs and Tibetans are forced to fill out extensive paperwork and show numerous documents not required for Han Chinese nationals. The processes in Tibet and western Xinjiang, where most Uyghurs live, also requires “political vetting”–assurance that the person requesting the passport has not been involved in activities against the Chinese communist government. These individuals are often
delayed or denied passports with no explanation.
Human Rights Watch concludes an ethnic and political basis for the two-tiered system, as only one of China’s prefectures using the more extensive application process is populated with mostly Han Chinese. Fewer than ten percent of prefectures use the system, and with the one exception, all are in Tibet or Xinjiang.
In Tibet’s Changdu prefecture, two passports were issued in the entirety of 2012.
The study arrives at a time in which Uyghur migration, in particular, has become a point of international contention. Uyghurs have been attempting to flee China in droves as Beijing continues to crackdown on Islam in Xinjiang, going as far as to force shops in the state to
sell alcohol and cigarettes, both banned by Islamic teaching. The Chinese government has established deals with countries like Thailand and Indonesia that repatriate Uyghurs who illegally migrate to those countries, seeking to live in nations more open to the practice of Islam.
The Chinese government alleges that many Uyghurs have ties to radical Islamist terrorists. Most recently, Chinese police killed three Uyghur men for being “
terrorism suspects,” allegedly wielding knives. Sixteen others were reportedly arrested, with state media posting photos of the raid on Chinese social media network
Sina Weibo. The incident, occurring in the city of Shenyang, is one of the few in which Uyghur suspects have been subdued outside of Xinjiang. Also this week, three Uyghurs arrested for falsifying passports to reach Indonesia have been sentenced to six years in prison for “
conspiring with Indonesian terrorists.”
In Thailand, hundreds of Uyghurs fleeing China have been arrested and repatriated to China, triggering protests in Turkey, where the Turkic Uyghur people are considered brethren. Thailand
sent 170 of those arrested to Turkey–those who could prove they were Turkish nationals; those who could not prove they had ties to Turkey were returned to China, where the Chinese government claims many Uyghurs were not on their way to Turkey, but
to Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State terrorist group.
Throughout its ordeal with the Uyghur population, China has attempted to appear open-minded towards Islam generally. While the crackdowns continued on Uyghur separatist groups in 2014, China announced that it would
pay for 14,000 Chinese nationals to travel to Mecca and complete the
hajj, a requirement of the religion. The trips, however, would fly out of Ningxia, not anywhere near the Uyghur heartland. Most of its beneficiaries would be from China’s largest Muslim ethnic group,
the Hui, who, unlike Uyghurs, are physically indistinguishable from Han Chinese, live spread out throughout China, and have not threatened Beijing politically.
Human Rights Watch has released a report alleging that China has developed a two-tiered passport system designed to prevent the nation’s Tibetans and ethnic Uyghur population from leaving the country
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