As the number of Tibetan self-immolations continue to escalate in China, the public and rights advocates are calling attention to the cause of Tibetan grievances. One of the main grievances is what Tibetans have called the forced learning of Mandarin Chinese in their schools.
In 2010, the New York Times reported on a large protest of thousands of Tibetans in China’s western province Qinghai, where Chinese authorities were attempting to institute a change in the primary language of instruction to Mandarin Chinese. Photographs and videos from 2010 were widely circulated on the Internet, showing thousands of Tibetan students protesting in Qinghai, and later in Beijing, over the new policy.
The escalation of self-immolations in recent months also mark the increased anger of Tibetans to the 2012 policy in Rebkong, or Tongren county, also located in the Qinghai province, to replace textbooks written in Tibetan with Chinese-language textbooks. International scholars have also addressed the spreading crisis by writing a petition to China’s Vice President Xi Jinping to protect the Tibetan language and culture. In the petition, 91 scholars point to the deep unease over the marginalization and devaluation of Tibetan language and culture as a result of Beijing’s new policies.
A recent report from Chinanews.com found that four out of ten languages native to minorities in China are threatened with extinction. According to the report, only seven non-Han languages are expected to survive: Mongolian, Tibetan, Uighur, Kazakh, Korean, Zhuang, and Yi. The reporter attributes this to written script as one of the main reasons for those languages withstanding extinction.
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