- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
China has approved a sweeping new law which claims to help promote “ethnic unity” - but critics say it will further erode the rights of minority groups.
On paper, it aims to promote integration among the 56 officially recognised ethnic groups, dominated by the Han Chinese, through education and housing. But critics say it cuts people off from their language and culture.
It mandates that all children should be taught Mandarin before kindergarten and up until the end of high school. Previously students could study most of the curriculum in their native language such as Tibetan, Uyghur or Mongolian.
Don’t the US, Canada, and Australia have similar laws? Kinda crazy China took so long to stoop to our level
And you don’t think China is a colonial empire that expanded its borders in the exact same way the US or Russia did? Just how exactly do you think China ended up being a majority Han nation ruling over a bunch of ethnic minorities? Skin color or ethnicity is not a prerequisite for imperialism.
What do you even do think Han is? lol To think that this law is a tool of Han supremacy is to ignore that it doesn’t actually encompass the idea of ethnicity as it exists in the West. Most people that would be identified as Han do not share an identical culture or even language. What this law talks about ie “the common language” is a construct created by many people who spoke other Chinese languages first. It’s wild how ready you are to speak with such authority about a country you seemingly know next to nothing about.
You’re putting words in my mouth.
I keep mentioning, over and over, Polynesians, Inuit, Aboriginals AND Tibetans AND Uyghur as examples of native populations forced to learn the tongue of their colonizer. I keep mentioning, over and over, how the situation of colonization in the US, Canada, and Australia is SIMILAR to the one in China. It’s deeply frustrating how much I have to re-explain here. Am I that bad at writing?
Don’t apologise too soon, it’s the basis for their lingual homogeneity, and is a common theme since its inception. For example:
https://daily.jstor.org/when-american-schools-banned-german-classes/
https://hawaiianflair.com/blogs/news/the-history-of-hawaiian-language-suppression-and-revival
And check the history section of the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_Languages_Act
Yes, but all these countries have politicians who say they feel bad about it
Genuine question : why do requiring a earnest effort to learn the language of the country a bad thing?
There is a shit ton of bad things about our immigration laws, but forcing immigrants to learn the local language isn’t one of them.
Language barriers isolate people and learning the local language helps reduce the isolation, benefiting everyone.
Learning a language in itself is not a bad thing, as long as you have a lot of support and mix with the locals, but mixing it with integration politics, the R word will start to rear its head: by endlessly raising the bar to a fantasy “native” level of the target local language in business hiring, that a coded word meaning they don’t want expats. While the government is simultaneously pulling public funding away from language schools. Oh no, you will never be one of them. Realistically, you will also need some years to be at a native level; the pressure is real.
I actually don’t think having a main language in a country and offering education in that language is a bad thing per se.
But I don’t like hypocrisy, and if someone’s upset at the Chinese for teaching in Mandarin I need them to be just as upset at Australia, Canada and the US for doing the exact same thing.
What hypocrisy?
The discussion conflates a lots of things. So to be clear :
We are talking about someone moving to a new country, not a country invading another country and forcing them to learn the new language to assimilate them.
We can be mad at China for annexing Tibet for example, forcing them to learn mandarin and forbidding them to talk to their native language.
But if I decide to go live in China, then it is not far fetched to expect me to learn mandarin, regardless of its history. It is two different things.
Context matters.
I live in Canada. Should we make real efforts to restitute Natives? Absolutely. Does that mean that we can’t expect new immigrants to learn the current local language because of our past?
We can’t change the past, but we can make better in the future and integrating new arrivants is necessary and beneficial for everyone.
Why can’t I move to China and assimilate into the Uighur or Tibetan population, if that’s something I really want to do? Why does only the dominant imperialist ethnicity get to expect immigrants to learn the language? Maybe it should be the opposite. Maybe every Han person who moves to Western China should have to learn Uighur or Tibetan. After all, they’re immigrants.
You’re so ridiculously ignorant. Both Tibet and Xinjiang have been multiethnic for so long that trying to determine who was “first” is just stupid. If you wanted to play that game then you would have to admit that Han people existed in Xinjiang prior to the Uyghur ethnic group. Now it would be ridiculous to claim that Han people have a special right to Xinjiang and Uyghur people. What you seem to be advocating for is literally ethnonationalism which is China’s laws including the one we’re discussing explicitly reject.
I’m not talking about people moving to a new country at all. Polynesians didn’t move to the US, the US invaded their land and forced them to learn a new language. And so on and so forth for the other settler colonies. I am not talking about immigration at all. There’s a reason why I talk about the US, Canada, and Australia, and not for example Italy. They are settler colonies. They moved somewhere and then forced the locals to learn their language.
So folks getting upset about the Chinese teaching Uyghurs and Tibetans in Mandarin in schools should be just as upset at the Americans, Canadians, and Australians for teaching Polynesians, Inuit, and Aboriginals in English in their schools. I hope it’s a bit clearer now, I’m not a great communicator, and I really cannot make the hypocrisy more obvious than this.
Other examples: Norwegians teaching Sami in Norwegian, the Portuguese teaching the locals in Brazil in Portuguese, the Spanish teaching the locals in Chile in Spanish, the English teaching the Maori in New Zealand in English, et cetera.
Nonexamples: the Dutch teaching Turkish immigrants in Dutch, the Germans teaching Moroccan immigrants in German, Italy teaching Slovenian immigrants in Italian, the US teaching Mexican immigrants in English, China teaching Indonesian immigrants in Mandarin. – I am fine with all of these, full stop.