How bad could it get? America’s ugly election

Testy times

N A N J I N G

Schools are trying to make pupils’ lives easier. Some parents object

China

47 Language in Inner Mongolia

48 Chaguan: Buying social order

Also in this section

---

The Economist

September 5th 2020 

China

47

2

dia theories circulated that officials who

advocated a less demanding curriculum

really just wanted to make it harder for stu-

dents from humbler families to get ahead.

The tussle highlighted a bitter divide

over how to educate China’s teenagers,

whose summer holidays ended this week.

In Nanjing many locals sympathise with

the protesters. Xu Wuqing, waiting for his

granddaughter outside the school gates

with homemade pigeon soup, said that

“less pressure” on students was “simply

not okay”. In a complaint last year to Nan-

jing’s education bureau, which was widely

shared online, a mother griped that the

city’s children were being turned into

“slackers”, too weak to cope with exams.

Many in China once supported what

schools such as Nanjing Number One are

trying to do. In the early 2000s a bestseller

about raising a child in the West, “Educa-

tion for Quality in America”, popularised

the idea of 

suzhi jiaoyu

. The term refers to a

well-rounded education that attaches im-

portance to building character as much as

knowledge. It guides most of Nanjing’s

more liberal teaching. The author, Huang

Quanyu, became a household name among

the middle class, writes Teresa Kuan, an

American academic, in “Love’s Uncertain-

ty: The Politics and Ethics of Child Rearing

in Contemporary China”. In 2010 China

published a ten-year plan on education

which admitted that the country’s teaching

was “relatively outdated” and that people

had “strong yearnings” for 

suzhi jiaoyu

.

Some reforms have seemed fanciful. In

2018 the central government called for “30

burden reductions”, including a limit of 90

minutes of homework a day and an end to

the parental habit of comparing their off-

spring to others. This year, to prevent cram

schools from racing too far ahead with the

syllabus, it published lists of subjects suit-

able for certain age groups. For example,

under-nines are not to study how to add

and subtract with numbers comprising

four or more digits.

From next year a tweaked 

gaokao

will

give students leeway to pick and choose

some subjects, beyond the compulsory

ones. But China is reluctant to overhaul a

test that remains remarkably meritocratic.

“By sticking with the exam, we waste stu-

dents with other talents. By moving too far

away from it, we disadvantage poor kids,”

says Wang Tao of East China Normal Uni-

versity. It is not that loving parents do not

want their children to have fun. Rather, as

one mother in Nanjing puts it, relaxed

classrooms are “just no use” if they do not

get a pupil into a good university. 

So quasi-military cram schools—“

gao-

kao

factories”, as they are known—still

thrive. One such is Hengshui Secondary

School in the northern province of Hebei. It

has 18 branches across China, some of

which reward students who get into top

universities with tens of thousands of dol-

lars. In 2018 one of them bought two de-

commissioned army tanks to flank its en-

trance, apparently to instil a sense of

toughness among its students.

Mr Wang says he is glad to see “so much

negotiation” under way, with educators

pushing forward and policymakers follow-

ing cautiously, even if parents are still re-

sisting. Observant children at the museum

in Nanjing will find, in addition to statues

of prominent men who aced the

keju

, a

bronze one of a person who failed it repeat-

edly: Wu Cheng’en, who was educated in

Nanjing in the 16th century. Wu went on to

write “Journey to the West”, one of China’s

most celebrated novels.

7

O

n the first

day of the school year in

Inner Mongolia, a northern province of

China, some teachers in schools using the

Mongolian language found their class-

rooms empty. To show their anger at an of-

ficial order that Mandarin be used to teach

history, politics and literature, parents had

kept their children at home. In recent years

the government has stepped up repression

in parts of China with large ethnic-minor-

ity populations, making widespread prot-

ests all but impossible. In Inner Mongolia

ethnic tensions have seldom reached lev-

els seen in Tibet or Xinjiang, so the school

boycott is especially remarkable. 

The Communist Party has never been as

fearful of unrest among Inner Mongolia’s

ethnic Mongols as it is of protests by ethnic

Tibetans, or Uighurs in Xinjiang. One rea-

son is that a massive influx of ethnic-Han

Chinese over the past few decades has re-

duced ethnic Mongols to less than a fifth of

the province’s population of nearly 25m

people. Their separate identity has long

since been eroded. Most (unlike some Ti-

betans and Uighurs) are bilingual. But eth-

nic Mongols often still cherish their tradi-

tional culture and language. By requiring

more use of Mandarin in schools, the party

risks fuelling dissent.

The boycott has affected many schools

across Inner Mongolia. Protesters have

submitted thousands of petitions to the

government, some using a traditional

Mongolian format that involves signato-

ries putting their names in a circle to avoid

any one of them being perceived as a ring-

leader. Videos circulated online show par-

ents singing Mongolian songs outside

schools. In one clip, high-school students

shout, “Mongolian is our mother tongue!

We are Mongolian until death!”

Fearful of police reprisals, protesters

have posted messages online warning

against the use of violence, and even

against any action on the streets. “We’ve all

agreed to stay united by keeping our chil-

dren at home,” says a herder from Xilingol

League, a prefecture in Inner Mongolia.

“But we know that if we take to the streets

in protest, we will be thrown into jail.” 

The changes under way in Inner Mon-

golia’s schools were rolled out in Xinjiang

in 2017 and in Tibet the following year.

They will eventually affect students in In-

ner Mongolia throughout their nine years

of compulsory education. This academic

year they apply only to those in the first

year of secondary school and first year of

primary. Parents worry that their children

will lose fluency in Mongolian and grow up

unable to use the classical Mongolian

script. They take particular pride in this

form of writing. Mongolia, an independent

country to the north, more commonly uses

the Cyrillic script—a hangover from its

days as a satellite of the Soviet Union.

The authorities are already cracking

down. The herder says two of her relatives

who had spoken out against the new lan-

guage policy disappeared on August 31st.

Users of Inner Mongolia’s only Mongolian-

language social-media platform, Bainu,

have found that access to their feeds has

been blocked. Censors have erased posts

about the protests from other social media.

Local officials have ordered teachers to

press parents to send their children to

school. Ethnic-Mongol party members,

civil servants and teachers have been told

that if they join the boycott they may lose

their jobs and party membership. Tibetans

and Uighurs have long been familiar with

such bullying. Ethnic Mongols will have to

get more used to it. 

7