I mean I know western media outlets never tried to hide their bias, but this is like bingo night. Let’s see how many hits we get:
Use of the word sweeping:
“China has approved a sweeping new law which claims to help promote “ethnic unity” - but critics say it will further erode the rights of minority groups.”
Use of the word rubber-stamp:
“The law was approved on Thursday as the annual rubber-stamp parliamentary session drew to an end.”
So-called expert using emotionally charged language:
“The law is consistent with a dramatic recent policy shift, to suppress the ethnic diversity formally recognised since 1949,” Magnus Fiskesjö, an associate professor of anthropology at Cornell University said in a university report.
“The children of the next generation are now isolated and brutally forced to forget their own language and culture.”
Again use of absolute language:
“The law was voted and passed on Thursday at the National People’s Congress in Beijing, which has never rejected an item on its agenda.”
Suspicious anonymous monk quotes:
When the BBC visited a monastery that had been at heart of Tibetan resistance in July last year, monks spoke of living under fear and intimidation.
“We Tibetans are denied basic human rights. The Chinese government continues to oppress and persecute us. It is not a government that serves the people,” one of them told us.
Again some no-name “professor of government”, lmao i mean truly bottom of the barrel:
"The Communist Party says it embraces different ethnicities. The country’s constitution states that “each ethnicity has the right to use and develop their own language” and “have the right to self-rule”.
But critics believe this new law will cement Xi’s push toward assimilation.
“The law makes it clearer than ever that in Xi Jinping’s PRC non-Han peoples must do more to integrate themselves with the Han majority, and above all else be loyal to Beijing,” Allen Carlson, an associate professor of government at Cornell University said, referencing China by the initials of its official name.
Americans cannot imagine anything worse than being forced to learn a second language
the National People’s Congress in Beijing, which has never rejected an item on its agenda
As well as being misleading (the NPC can change proposed laws to an unlimited degree as suits them, sometimes over the course of years, so why would you not eventually pass it). This line has been repeated at every media outlet. And 20 seconds of reading Wikipedia shows it’s just… objectively false.
in 2015, the NPC refused to pass a package of bills proposed by the State Council, insisting that each bill require a separate vote and revision process
The time for legislation can be as short as six months, or as long as 15 years for controversial legislation such as the Anti-Monopoly Law.
Weird how this democratically elected “rubber stamp” parliamentary body are constantly changing and rejecting laws as suits them under Xi’s DICTATORSHIP. It’s almost like China is actually just a parliamentary democracy with more sensible structures and incentives.
I’m also not sure how I feel about the languages thing. I can see the reasoning to do it, but I can also understand the fear of losing local languages (and the consequent value lost). BBC has zero right to talk about it though - the UK government ALSO requires that English be taught in all schools, and more prominent on all signs before Cornish, Welsh, Scottish or Irish Gaellic, etc, so labelling it as SCARY CHINA EVIL attitude is quite amazing hypocrisy.
Remember that France stops every attempt to non-French languages teachable in state schools. So Breton cannot be taught to kids in Brittany unless it is a private school, when an attempt was made to work with Breton language schools the constitutional council said it violated the constitution. They do have bilingual state schools, but that is not teaching the language as far as I can tell.
A plan to integrate Diwan (and its immersion style) into the public school system was signed in May 2001 by the Minister of Education, Jack Lang, and several agreements were worked out with the French Education system during the spring and summer of 2001 concerning the nuts and bolts of putting all this into place.
Just as things were starting to jell for the budgeting of teachers and facilities to be fully in place for the opening of the Fall 2002 school year, the French government (Conseil d’Etat) suspended this agreement for public integration of Diwan. This was in part due to pressure from a federation of public school teacher and parent organizations who feel that the immersion system of Diwan “attacks the principle of equality and unity of the [French] Republic.”
A sticking point for those who seem to confuse uniformity with unity of the French state is the French Constitution which states in Article 2 that “French is the language of the Republic.” Diwan’s immersion system of teaching through the Breton language appears to be against the French Constitution. This constitutional argument also blocks France’s adoption of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. This Charter was signed by France in May 1999 but is yet to be ratified so that the meager protections it affords to languages like Breton can be put into place.
In a December 27, 2002, decision on this matter, the Constitutional Council clearly stated that the immersion style of teaching Breton is contrary to the Article 2 of the French Constitution. Here’s how the Council states things: “The usage of a language other than French cannot be imposed on students in establishments of public education in the operation [life] of the establishment or in teaching subjects other than the language in question.” This not only eliminates the use of Breton as the language for playground or cafeteria communication, but also as a language used to teach math, science or history-a restriction which could also impact regular public school bilingual programs where such subjects are taught through the medium of Breton.
It is the immersion system of using Breton as the medium for all activity at a school that is troublesome. Yet, it is this use of Breton for the life of the school that so effectively allows the youngest children (preschool and primary school) who do not come from Breton-speaking families to master the language and use it naturally. The whole point of enrolling one’s child in a Diwan school is to get such immersion (which is chosen and not “imposed”). Thus any proposal for public school integration that compromises this is not acceptable to Diwan.
Diwan has proven that its pedagogical system is a success. The challenge for continued growth is financial. Many teacher’s salaries are covered in a “contract” with the French State which puts Diwan in a “private school” category despite the fact that it charges no tuition and operates as a public institution open to anyone who wants to enroll. Whenever a new school is opened (and Diwan continues to grow each year) it must wait for five years before it can come under the “contract.” Thus, there are currently over a dozen teachers whose salaries must be raised by fundraising. Because of its “private school” status, there have also been limits placed on the contribution of building space and public monies to support Diwan schools - no matter how willing and able a particular town and population may be to support a Diwan school. Thus, the financial challenges remain very high for Diwan to open new schools to meet the demand of parents and students.
Comrades, if you ever think you hate the French too much or even adequately, you don’t. You can and should always hate them more. It is a cultural or at least linguistic genocide, and now that I think about it, probably these laws are the same basis that France uses to discriminate against “separatist” ideologies IE “Islamo-Communism” or whatever Macron called it.
It’s “Islamogauchisme” (“Islamo-leftism”), right?
BBC has zero right to talk about it though
Furthermore the BBC itself was used as a tool to teach the Queens English to places where there weren’t enough fluent speakers. They strictly enforce not just language but very specific accents.
It makes sense that Chinese ethnic minorities should have a proficiency in Putonghua since that is a necessary skill for living in China, but it is an extra step to say that Chinese characters must be displayed more prominently when displayed in public. That is assimilationist and will likely promote ethnic disunity rather than unity.
Also the law explicitly states that “preserving minority languages” means digitizing and recording them so they are not lost to posterity. It explicitly states that maintaining them as living languages is not a goal. I think this is poor policy as well.
It explicitly states that maintaining them as living languages is not a goal.
Oh, that’s very sad.
Out of interest I read the rest of the draft but it’s not that interesting. It repeats itself a lot by having multiple articles roughly say the same thing but for different facets of government (perhaps that’s why it feels “sweeping” to Westerners). There’s stuff about economic development, interethnic exchange and persecuting acts that threaten national unity.
Article 29 talks about people learning eachothers’ culture and language and promoting that in cultural institutions, which was nice. Article 55 talks about creating “model areas” of interethnic unity; Article 56 stipulates a “National Unity and Progress Publicity Week” in September. Notably there are no changes to the governance of autonomous regions.
It reads more like a policy guideline or to-do list than a law that itself changes how the government functions.
This would be like freaking out that the US has ESL classes for immigrants.
It’s possible that the law has something bad, but they don’t explain this being anything more than mandating everyone be taught Mandarin, which is a good policy to have because as many people as possible in a country should have at least one language in common.
It mandates that all children should be taught Mandarin before kindergarten and up until the end of high school.
As-expressed, this is a good policy, but then the next sentence (of the two-sentence paragraph) says:
Previously students could study most of the curriculum in their native language such as Tibetan, Uyghur or Mongolian.
Which does not contradict the previous claim? Being taught a language is not the same as the rest of your schooling being taught in that or another language, unless they are complaining that classes teaching Mandarin will not exclusively be taught in e.g. the Uyghur language because it will need to use Mandarin in order to teach it, which is a bizarre and worthless complaint.
Also, even then they say “most of the curriculum,” which should logically still be true unless “most” meant “a slim majority” and this is pushing it over, something they never explain, let alone substantiate.
“The children of the next generation are now isolated and brutally forced to forget their own language and culture.”
This is never substantiated.
Beijing has long been accused of restricting the rights of minority ethnic groups in regions like Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia.
Accused by who? This is a great example of the passive voice actually being used for propagandistic purposes.
Aside from the UN in the Xinjiang case, the article just goes on to cite other reporting by the BBC, so I guess they mean “Beijing has long been accused by us”
Also OP, you left out another classic buzzword:
Authorities moved quickly to crackdown on what it saw as dissent.
Being taught a language is not the same as the rest of your schooling being taught in that or another language
Alaskaball linked to the actual draft, which explicitly states that all schools should use Mandarin as the default language for teaching.
The thing is that this isn’t new, a few years back the BBC liked to report on this exact thing causing protests in Tibet and Inner Mongolia. So either these were regional policies being enshrined in national law or they’re only now actually finalising the switch.
Alaskaball linked to the actual draft, which explicitly states that all schools should use Mandarin as the default language for teaching.
Okay, that does suck. Obviously not on par with active repression but I do think people should be able to have their, and their kids’, education in their own language. Obviously including mandarin in the curriculum is also extremely good but my understanding is that, previously, eg a Uyghur could attend a Uyghur language school so long as mandarin is on the curriculum, and I think that’s a better state of affairs.
The on and off suppression of minority languages in the USSR is one of the saddest black marks against it, and it sucks to see China seem to fall into those pitfalls. Hell you go back to the early 2000s late 2010s and even lib outlets are writing semi-positively about China’s encouragement of minority languages.
Also this linguist wrote a paper that I now really want to read but cannot actually find but the abstract is
Although Mao Zedong (1893-1976), the long-time leader of the Communist Party of China (CPC), was the main creator of Mao Zedong Thought, he was not the only one, so references to Mao Zedong Thought may involve works other than those written by Mao. One of the many significant issues in Mao Zedong Thought is minzu, usually rendered into English as “nationality” or “nation.” The term has two different meanings. One is the collectivity of ethnic groups that make up a nation-state, specifically China. The other is the individual ethnic groups, or “minority nationalities” (shaoshu minzu) within the larger nation-state. This paper will analyse how these meanings interrelate and the complexities of how the concept of “nation” operates within the Chinese state in the context of Mao Zedong Thought. The Chinese state recognizes fifty-five minority nationalities or ethnic minorities, with the process of identification being all but complete by the time Mao Zedong died in 1976. Mao Zedong was sympathetic to the notion of ethnic self-determination and respect for the cultures and languages of ethnic minorities, but only with the proviso that it did not lead to ethnic separatism. There has been a revival of ethnic identity in China since the reform period began in 1978, which accords generally with concepts found in Mao Zedong Thought. The great majority of members of ethnic minorities are happy to belong to the Chinese nation-state. There are potential and in a few cases actual contradictions between the notion of a multinational unitary nation-state and ethnically driven identities. Nevertheless, the paper’s central argument is that these contradictions are not now, and need not become, so acute as to threaten the survival of a united China. Mao Zedong Thought has mostly been entirely consistent with harmonious ethnic integration.
Colin Mackerras who’s work seems to be very pro-China from a glance.
This paper goes into more depth though is broader in focus.
https://sophia.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/2015079/files/200000015345_000011000_1.pdf
Edit ok this guy is so based, when Xi visited Australia for the first time he specifically thanked him
On Monday 17 November 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping gave an address to the Australian Parliament as a major part of his visit to Australia. Towards the beginning of his address, President Xi thanked Colin for his friendship and dedication, drawing applause from those present. This was a very proud moment in Colin’s career.
Maybe email Colin and ask him about it? My understanding is that academics usually love to send copies of their work. I’ve never contacted anyone about a paper, specifically, but every time I have reached out to someone about their research they have been downright giddy:)
Thanks for pointing this out. The BBC can’t even articulate their grievances very well, I guess.
I don’t understand why China would do this when it also has made an effort at supporting the preservation and promotion of Tibetan.
This reminds me of that all-timer rage bait where that anarchist tweeted “We must remember that literacy is not an unalloyed good.”
I think about it like once a week. What a banger.
I always remember that one anti-communist on twitter saying that his grandpa was able to live a life free of communist propaganda because he was illiterate
One major point, the article frames this as being used to suppress “non-han” ethnicities. In fact, the biggest loss of linguistic diversity going on is with han Chinese losing dialects of yue, wu, etc.
The article is scant on what the actual changes the law will bring is. My preference for every country is that elementary school should be taught in the students home language, where possible, and middle to high should be a world language like Chinese, Arabic, English, Spanish, etc.
The article never makes a concrete claim except that there is a mandate for Mandarin to be taught starting from Kindergarten (not that schooling is in Mandarin, but that the language itself is taught). They never make any specific claim about the language of any other subject (or schooling in general) being changed.
Don’t let libs forget the complacency of the BBC in the Palestinian genocide. Smash it again and again, that they’re echoing Zionist media that engages in genocide denial.
Good thing the west never forces people to learn languages or selects a single language for their state and stamps out minority dialects. Definitely not something the UK, France, etc have any experience with and certainly something Americans are blameless on. They’re all so egalitarian about people speaking other languages and not full of people who immediately fly into a frothing rage at the suggestion some child within their borders may not speak their national language.
I’ve seen the French, British, Americans, Germans, all basically say of the migrants that they have to learn and speak their language to stay.
Icelandic people are still taught danish in schools lmao. The danish colonized white people, yet noone writes about our rubber stamp parliament
I’ve seen the French, British, Americans, Germans, all basically say of the migrants
Let alone Occitan, Breton or fucking Irish. It’s unhinged that people take any criticism coming from western countries seeing what they’re actively doing to their own fucking people
“Hey Lemmy.World, how’s it going?”
https://lemmy.world/post/44186892
I don’t go over there, like ever. Randomly checked today and saw they had the same thread we’re talking about now. Just non-stop thought-terminating clichés. And they’re not Stormfront, so these libs are just posting fed talking points out of pure love for the game. Anyone suggesting students can’t even graduate high school in the US unless they have English credits are all down voted.
And they’re not Stormfront
It’s really hard to parse through the article wether this is actually a rare China L or just typical bad reporting
What’s an L about this? Everyone should be taught the dominant language of the nation they live in. Frankly everyone wants to learn the language because life without it is objectively more limited and difficult, so this won’t even really change much.
Frankly everyone wants to learn the language
This is absolutely untrue. Plenty of people, especially in colonized nations, do not, in fact, want to learn the dominant language of the nation-state they live in. Especially when there is a history of violent repression of indigenous languages. Linguistic hegemony is an integral facet of socio-cultural hegemony.
Enforcing dominant language education is most often a way to supplant the socio-cultural makeup of indigenous groups. This was a key policy in residential schools on Turtle Island, for instance.
Providing minority language education is crucial for safeguarding indigenous linguistic cultures. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t also offer national language education, but to demand it at the expense of minority language education is a form of indigenous cultural erosion.
“Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam.”
godisdog seemed to be clearly speaking about what the article says, which only specifically cites there being mandatory Mandarin classes rather than all classes being taught in Mandarin (which unfortunately appears to be the actual content of the law). Of course both we and many national minorities (etc.) object to the latter.
This is absolutely untrue.
I’m being China-specific. All the Tibetans and Uyghurs and other Chinese minority people I’ve known learn Chinese because it gives them opportunities that they otherwise would not have. Don’t know about other countries so I won’t comment.
The difference being teaching a national language and all teaching being in the national language are not the same. The latter destroys languages.
Everyone should be taught the dominant language of the nation they live in
This is not a China-specific comment, which makes the following sentence seem more broad as well. But, frankly, it is also incorrect even in a China-specific context. Firstly, because this is a law that mandates national-language education, and secondly, because you cannot possibly speak on behalf of every minority language speaker in China. there is nothing frank about that claim, just a claim to encompass entire populations based on the people you personally have met.
It would be just as wrong for me to claim that no minority language speakers want to learn Chinese because I have met Hakka Chinese who are bitter about needing to learn Mandarin.
As far as giving them opportunities: sure, this is true. But it could be just as possible a solution to expand minority-language opportunities as it is to legislate away minority-language education. It’s a narrow-minded solution to a large problem that is easily brushed aside as a minority concern.
Just because your indigenous group’s region is encompassed into a larger governing body does not mean you should need to learn another language. Why shouldn’t the people governing you presume to learn your language if communicating with you is so important? If they are representing your group at a national level, if they lay claim to your ancestral territory, why aren’t they able to take an effort to ensuring that your integration into a wider society doesn’t come at the cost of your cultural identity?
This effort is what leads to reciprocal language exchange–and ultimately, inspires people to learn the dominant language out of choice, rather than coercion.
Between this thread and the immigration one we can see that the colonial mindset is alive and well in the minds of many users.
Yeah, it seems dumb having part of your population unable to communicate with another part of the population. Having a common language does not delete minority languages (although some measures to protect those minority langs, like making mandatory for any public servant to be able to communicate in them when working in their respective regions, should be put in place).
Edit: I skimmed the translation someone posted and I’m less favorable to this. Making education use the dominant language will erase the minority ones. Daily life should be in the minority language, and both should be taught in school.
From what I’ve read so far, it falls in the category of “at its absolute worst, it will be the same as policies in almost every other large, diverse country.”
A lot also seems to come down to the implementation. Consider two policies:
- Mandarin-only education, and not only are there no educational resources for teaching local languages, but children are punished in school if they speak their native tongue.
- A long-term push towards teaching in Mandarin, but it’s only ramped up to the extent schools can also teach local language classes, and kids are encouraged to retain fluency in their native tongue.
You could write the same BBC article about both policies.
Controversial take: literacy good, language skills also good
Literacy is genocide, culture mixing is communism.
So the countries public school curriculum is going to be in a single language? Like pretty much every single western nation?
It’s not like their banning minority languages alltogether from the curriculum, like Ukraine did with Russian
The funny thing is English classes are mandatory in China (and in most countries) as well. The US is pretty exceptional in being so slack about language education.
“China
mandatessponsors Mandarin as a second language education for all its citizens.”https://hexbear.net/comment/6997708
任何组学校及其他教育机构以国家通用语言文字为基本的教育教学用语用字。
Auto-translated: “All organizations, schools, and other educational institutions shall use the national common language and script as the basic language and script for education and teaching.” In contrast to the current situation where minority schools often teach in the minority language.
So disappointing, tbh. It’s a massive step backwards. I hope they at least keep teaching people their languages, even if it’s not the general language of instruction.
They will indeed still teach their native touch as a dedicated subject
A few years back the BBC liked to report on this exact thing causing protests in Tibet and Inner Mongolia, then it only pertained to high schools iirc. So either these were regional policies that are now being enshrined in national law or back then it was just an announcement and they’re only now actually switching.
Bit disappointing but I don’t know the precise circumstances. Critical support as always to the CPC:)
Since Hexbear consists mostly of Leninists I’m sure we’ll all be a bit critical of China for reneging typical Leninist policy on the national question (equal language rights) :^)
