Thank you very much for the kind introduction! Colonial boarding school system started in Southern Mongolia since the day one of the colonial regime that was established in 1949. 

As Chinese policies of “ecological migration” and “urbanization” intensified in Southern Mongolia starting early 2000, thousands of rural Mongolian schools were either eliminated or combined with Chinese schools in urban areas where Chinese are predominantly majority. Mongolian children of school age were forced to leave their communities to go to boarding schools in towns and cities. 

According to Chinese official statistics, in 2021, there were 2,087 boarding schools including elementary and middle schools across Southern Mongolia’s 76 banners and counties. The total number of  residential students in these boarding schools is 1.07 million. The proportion of residential school students in Mongolian concentrated areas is higher than that in Chinese concentrated areas. Some areas such as Shiliingol League and Hingaan Leagues, the proportion of residential students as high as 70-80%. 

Boarding school system in Southern Mongolia is an integral part of China’s overall colonial policy of wiping out the language, culture and identity of the entire Southern Mongolian population as a whole. Chinese occupation of Southern Mongolia is a typical settler colonialism which inherently is genocidal in nature. As early as the 1950s, the Chinese Government kicked off a political witch-hunt against the Southern Mongolians in the name of “Anti-National Rightist Movement” to purge the Mongolian elites. Tens of thousands of Mongolians were persecuted; In the 1960s through 1970s, the Chinese committed their first massive formal genocide in Southern Mongolia. Entire Southern Mongolian population was targeted by this genocide campaign that was carried out in the name of “Purging the Members of Separatist Organization Inner Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party”. 

The Mongolians were indiscriminately arrested, imprisoned and tortured to confess that they were members of the national separatist group Inner Mongolian People’s Party, and forced to provide the names of all of their family members, relatives and acquaintances as the members of the alleged separatist group. In many cases, under unbearable tortures, those who exhaustively provided the names of the alleged members of the separatist group even confessed that their pets, livestock and household utensils were members of the Inner Mongolian People’s Party. Estimated 100,000 Mongolians were tortured to death, and a half million imprisoned, tortured and permanently maimed. At that time, the total Mongolian population in Southern Mongolia was about 1.5 million. This means one out of three Mongolians was persecuted in this genocide campaign. 

A recently published book entitled “A Chinese Rebel Beyond the Great Wall --- The Cultural Revolution and Ethnic Pogrom in Inner Mongolia” by Professor TJ Cheng, Uradyn E Bulag and Mark Selden says, I quote, “the death rates, based on published records, ranged from 14 to 17 per thousand… these were the localities where the intensity of the violence would have ranked high among the most notorious cases in recent world history.”

Once the Mongolian population is crippled, reduced in number, the Chinese authorities kicked off a new campaign: the erasure of the Mongolian traditional nomadic way of life. Two major policies were implemented for this effort by the Chinese Government. They are “Ecological Migration” and “Ban Over Livestock Grazing”. With these policies, the Chinese Government forcibly displaced the entire Mongolian herders from their ancestral land to predominantly Chinese populated urban and agricultural areas. Nomadic way of life was accused of being “backward” way of life and blamed for the environmental degradation that in fact was caused by the Chinese intensive farming and mining practice. According to the Chinese State Council, China launched a massive resettlement project to resettle the remaining 1.2 million monads by end of 2015. That means the nomadic civilization that the Mongolians and other peoples maintained for thousands of year was officially wiped out within its borders of the People’s Republic of China by the end of 2015. This alone amounts to a form of genocide, permanently and intentionally depriving a people and population of their means of production and livelihood that are essential to their survival. 

After taking away political rights and traditional way of life, now the Chinese government is targeting the Southern Mongolians’ last defense of national identity that is the language. Starting last September 2020, the Chinese Government came up with a new policy called the “Second Generation Bilingual Education” whose goal is to completely wipe out Mongolian language, culture and identify from Southern Mongolia. 

This sweeping campaign did not stop at the removal of Mongolian language. It is going further to erase the Mongolian culture and identity altogether as part of the “Firm Inculcation of the Chinese Nationality Common Identity” campaign. A region-wide mass training program has been launched immediately after the brutal crackdown of the Mongolian protest in 2020. From kindergartners to college students, from teachers to professors, from ordinary herders to party members, the entire Mongolian population is subjected to this massive training program. During the training, Mongolians are condemned for expressing their national feeling, condemned for singing Mongolian songs, wearing Mongolian clothes; Mongolians are condemned for not having enough number of Chinese friends, not being affectionate enough to the Chinese; not only Mongolian students and teachers are banned from communicating in Mongolian among themselves, but also the rural Mongolian herders are forced to speak in Chinese at home; Mongolians are forced to condemn their supposed “narrow nationalism” and embrace the “superior Chinese culture, Chinese language and Chinese tradition” This is what is happening in Southern Mongolia.

Thank you!