Uyghur language being destroyed in China's colonial education

Recently, the "Open Questions" section of the South China Morning Post published an interview with Barry Sautman, an expert on ethnic minorities in China. In response to a reporter's question, Barry Sautman said that while the Uyghur language is disappearing in schools in East Turkistan, the Tibetan language is still being taught in schools in Tibet.
Barry Sautman, an American expert, visiting professor at Tsinghua University, is an expert on Uyghur and Tibetan affairs. His main research interests are minority rights, cultural protection, and changes in China's political environment.
He visited East Turkistan three or four times in the late 1990s and early 2000s. After the protests in Tibet in 2008 and the massacre in Urumqi in 2009, and China's "regional national autonomy system" and minority policies, he saw that a wave of change in the policy of granting privileges to minorities was prevailing. He conducted research on this.
He pointed out that in the past ten years, the role of national cadres and leaders in minority areas has been underestimated, as well as the importance of minority education. According to him, since 2000, some subjects related to minority language and literature have been removed from schools in East Turkistan and Tibet, but the situation between East Turkistan and Tibet on this issue has been different. In the early 2000s, parents in East Turkistan expressed that they did not believe in the future of Uyghur language education. “A primary school in Kashgar told us that since last year they have not given special Uyghur language lessons to students. Because the parents strongly objected to it. They hoped that their children would not waste time learning Uyghur and would focus on biology, mathematics, and Chinese. Of course, most of these children are Uyghurs, and 84 percent of the population of the city where they live is Uyghur. So they do not forget Uyghur, because they speak it every day at home and at school. But now there is no one to teach them how to read and write Uyghur. “Parents no longer care about it, most of them are from urban areas, and they want their children to pass exams with distinction, so that they can go to a good high school and then to college,” said Dr. Henryk Szajewski, a researcher at the Uyghur Human Rights Foundation. Barry Sautman’s years of research in China, however, attributing the elimination of Uyghur language classes to Uyghur parents is one-sided and even wrong. However, the Chinese government has gradually removed the Uyghur language from the education system, and schools have done the same. The government does not do this just because parents say so. The Chinese government has imposed it on Uyghurs without any consultation. In fact, many Uyghurs have demanded that Uyghur be taught in schools. A foreign activist was imprisoned and tortured when he tried to set up a mother tongue school in Kashgar. Uyghur parents want their children to be fluent in Chinese is certainly true. But don’t they want their children to know Uyghur? I wonder why Professor Sautman believes this nonsense. Moreover, he himself has had great difficulty communicating with others due to the strict censorship and investigation in East Turkistan, so how did he know what people were thinking? ".
Ms. Gulnar, who used to teach at a school in East Turkistan and is now a Uyghur language teacher at Harvard University, disagreed with Barry Sautman's statement. She said that since the 2000s, the Chinese government has made many policy changes to ban the Uyghur language in primary and secondary schools, which has little to do with parents' opinions.
Barry Sautman expressed that Uyghur intellectuals were very concerned about this situation and said: "Minority intellectuals are concerned that Uyghur children should not only learn to speak Uyghur, but also learn to read and write." So that they can be familiar with the literary works of their nation.
In his response to the reporter, Barry Sautman said that the situation in Tibet is different from East Turkistan, and that many Tibetans consider themselves to belong to Tibet and China, and that there is no hatred for China, and that they belong to the same system linguistically. Therefore, the Chinese government is not concerned. On them, because many Tibetans are bilingual, and their children are bilingual. He said that schools teach reading and writing in Tibetan for about five hours a week, which is different from primary schools in Kashgar. He also said that even if there is no "Xinjiang problem" at present, the Tibetan problem will gradually disappear, and after the death of the Dalai Lama, the problem will disappear completely. The situation of the Mongols in Inner Mongolia is similar to that of the Tibetans. In the following years, protests against China's policy of excluding Mongolian from education in Inner Mongolia were quickly suppressed, and the Mongolian language is still being abolished. In other words, in the past ten years, the Chinese government's policy of removing non-Chinese languages ​​from education has been implemented under strict pressure. Since September 2016, the teaching of the Uyghur language has been banned in all schools in East Turkistan. Ms. Gulnar stressed that China's policy of banning the Uyghur language began with the so-called "bilingual education" and ended with the "ban on the Uyghur language in all schools" in 2017, which is cultural genocide in itself. Dr. Henryk Szajewski said that China's policy of eliminating the Uyghur language has become the most important part of the genocide and cultural genocide of the Uyghur people in recent times: "The Chinese government has never cared about the value of the Uyghur language.
In this interview, Barry Sautman claimed that “extremism” exists in East Turkistan, and that re-education centers have already been set up to eradicate extremism and train technical personnel. He also recently spoke to the Chinese press. He said that “the accusations and comments about Xinjiang are part of the US political strategy and propaganda against China.” We tried to reach him, but he did not respond to our messages.
source:
https://www.rfa.org/uyghur/xewerler/xitay-mustemlike-uyghur-tili-09272024155845.html

368 people read this News!
04/10/2024
COMMENTS
Leave a comment
There are 0 comment.