China’s push to create a single national identity

livemint.com:

THE STREET signs in Inner Mongolia, a region in northern China, are written in two languages. There are the blocky characters of Mandarin, the mother tongue of most Chinese. Then there is the vertically-written script of Mongolian, which is spoken by many people in the region.

The language is not just seen on signs; it is heard in cafés and used in classrooms (such as the one pictured). More Mongols live in Inner Mongolia than in Mongolia, the country next door. But the Mongolian language is dying in China, say activists, and not of natural causes.

Three years ago the central government told schools in Inner Mongolia to replace the language with Mandarin when teaching some subjects. That sparked protests, but a year later China’s legislature went further, annulling regulations that allowed autonomous regions to teach in minority languages. Today, kindergartens in Inner Mongolia are taught entirely in Mandarin and, according to locals, an increasing number of other classes are, too.

The decline of Mongolian is part of a years-long push by the central government to assimilate ethnic minorities across China. Officially, such groups are meant to have equal standing with the Han, the ethnic group that makes up over 90% of the mainland’s population. In practice, the Han (who often speak Mandarin) dominate and other groups are marginalised.

“They don’t want minorities to be too distinctive," says a 25-year-old Mongol in the Inner Mongolian city of Tongliao. “To be blunt, they want to turn us into Han." When the Communist Party took power in 1949, it inherited an unwieldy, multi-ethnic state with far-flung borders drawn during the Qing dynasty (1644-1912). To manage their vast new country, Communist officials copied the Soviet