Originally published by The Financial Times, 04 July 2010

By Kathrin Hille in Kuybagh

Every day on her way to school, Amargul walks past a large sign. It says: “Chinese is our national language. Learning Chinese is necessary to make the nation strong and the people rich.”

And learn Chinese she does. Late last year, the primary school where the 12-year-old Uighur girl had been educated in her native tongue, a Turkic language, was closed down, and she was moved to an integrated Chinese primary school. The change here in Kuybagh, an oasis town in the poorest corner of Xinjiang, is part of a government offensive to get to the roots of the simmering conflict in the restive region in China’s far west – through education. According to official figures, almost 200 people, most of them Han Chinese, were killed a year ago on Monday in riots in Urumqi, the regional capital, that amounted to the worst ethnic violence in the history of the People’s Republic of China.

Most of those arrested afterwards were Uighur migrants from southern Xinjiang, a region where the indigenous ethnic group still accounts for more than 90 per cent of the population and which has missed out on Xinjiang’s oil and gas-driven double-digit growth. The local economy relies on agriculture, and jobs are hard to come by. Those who leave for the cities lose out in the race for jobs to better-qualified rivals from elsewhere.

Critics have long complained that the region’s education system puts Uighurs at a disadvantage. “Chinese high schools are run for just a few thousand Han Chinese, whereas districts with hundreds of thousands of Uighurs have only one high school,” says Ilham Tohti, an economist at Minzu University in Beijing, and one of the most outspoken advocates of Uighur rights.

But as Xinjiang’s government bureaucracy as well as its official economy are run completely in Chinese, the authorities have concluded that Uighur youngsters must learn Mandarin rather than get more and better education in their mother tongue.

Xinjiang switched to Chinese as the priority teaching language as early as 2001 but implementation had been poor, especially in the south.

After last year’s riots, the assimilation policy has been stepped up. In September 2009, all middle schools in townships and villages were closed and merged into larger ones at the county level, teachers and education officials in southern Xinjiang told the Financial Times. The new system aims to expose students to Mandarin at a much earlier age and give the school more influence compared with their families.

“Pupils whose homes are too far away now all stay at school,” said Yan Yongzhen, headmistress of the Kuybagh Han primary school. “This is to change their habits.”

Poskam, the county Kuybagh belongs to, has one Chinese and one Uighur high school.

The Chinese schools here were set up decades ago to cater to the offspring of employees at one of Xinjiang’s oldest oil refineries. Kuybagh Han primary school was founded for the same purpose.

Now as reserves at the Poskam oilfield are running out, the Han population in the area has been dwindling and Uighur children are being channelled into the Mandarin classes instead.

The transition is not easy. Teachers are not trained to deal with bilingual classes. Many are university students, as primary schools in rural areas are the last place qualified Chinese graduates want to go.

Ms Yan also complains of a language barrier herself. A native of Chongqing in central China, she cannot speak Uighur in spite of having lived in Xinjiang for 13 years. “I tried a bit but it’s too difficult,” she says with an embarrassed laugh.

Uighur teachers are highly motivated to come home to work but they face a different problem.

At the teachers’ college in Hotan, a city at the southern rim of the Taklamakan desert, most students come from Hotan or counties nearby. They did not start learning Mandarin until the last year of high school.

College lessons and textbooks are all in Mandarin but students preparing for their end-of-term exams are visibly struggling. “We have to make a big effort,” says Buzainap, a 21-year-old student, showing her history textbook which has its margins scribbled full of Uighur translations of the Chinese text. Thus, experts say it might take many years to reconfigure the school system to Mandarin. “The kindergarten kids are doing best,” says Ms Yan. “For the other mixed classes, which language is spoken depends on what the teacher can do and what works best.”

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f5952bba-8785-11df-9f37-00144feabdc0.html