Chaguan
Local languages are being phased out
S
OMETIMES EASY victories are the most revealing. Lots of governments are capable of ruthlessness in the face of terrorism or real threats to national security. When a regime uses its full strength to impose its will on a group offering no resistance, however, that is a clarifying moment. Just such an unequal contest is now unfolding in the forested hills of the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, near the Chinese border with North Korea.
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Yanbian is home to fewer than a million members of an officially recognised Korean ethnic minority, most of them descended from migrants who fled wars and famines on the Korean peninsula in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Chinese scholars study the region as a model of co-existence with the country’s Han majority. Education is part of that story. Ethnic Korean schools in Yanbian have offered bilingual education for more than 60 years. Until recently, classes in maths, science and foreign languages were offered in Mandarin, while Korean was used to teach hard-to-grasp concepts in subjects like history, politics and other social sciences.