Rectifying Names, Erasing Mongols: The Unmaking of Mongolian Education in China

On a clear October morning in 2025, two massive cranes rolled up to a middle school in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Workers prised off the large Chinese and Mongolian signs running along the roofline of the main teaching building and replaced them with a new sign that erased the Mongolian name from the facade: Tongliyuu Mongol Ündüsütennie Dumdad Surguul (ᠲᠦᠩᠯᠢᠶᠤᠤ ᠬᠤᠳᠠ ᠵᠢᠨ ᠮᠤᠩᠭᠤᠯ ᠦᠨᠳᠦᠰᠦᠲᠡᠨ ᠪ ᠳᠤᠮᠳᠠᠳᠤ ᠰᠤᠷᠭᠠᠭᠤᠯᠢ, Tongliao Mongolian Middle School) was now the No.6 Middle School of Tongliao City (通辽市第六中学) (TCEB 2025).

This was not an isolated incident. Since 2021, we have recorded the renaming of nearly 100 Mongolian-language schools across the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR) (for the list, see Borjgin n.d.). Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials insist this is mere bureaucratic rationalisation aimed at ensuring that educational resources match the needs of students and the nation. Yet, for Mongolian students, teachers and parents, it looks like something else entirely: cultural erasure, subtly chronicled—and protested—on social media, as a basic search for ‘ethnic Mongolian schools’ (蒙古族学校) on Chinese-language social media apps such as Weixin, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu clearly shows.

Renaming is politics by other means. It is a modern version of what Confucius called the ‘rectification of names’ (正名): making words conform to the world the CCP seeks to create (Sorace 2017: 13–17), an ideological reflex baked into Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era (see, for instance, China Media Project’s dictionary of party-speak).

The constitutional guarantee of mother-tongue education for China’s minority nationalities was once a lived reality for Mongols. It was formerly possible to pursue studies from kindergarten through to university entirely in Mongolian—an academic pathway traversed by this essay’s second author. That era is over. Since 2020, IMAR officials have gradually (yet methodically) replaced Mongolian as the medium of instruction with what they call the ‘national common language’ (普通话 Putonghua), triggering mass protests and a subsequent crackdown (Atwood 2020; Sorace 2020; Leibold 2021).

And once Mongolian ceased to be the medium of instruction, party officials saw no further need for Mongolian schools. Removing ‘Mongolian nationality’ (ᠮᠤᠩᠭᠤᠯ ᠦᠨᠳᠦᠰᠦᠲᠡᠨ Mongol ündüsüten) from school names and suppressing Mongolian as a language of instruction—while retaining a token ‘bilingual’ label—prefigure and naturalise a future in which Mongolian is no longer worth studying or even speaking.

In Xi Jinping’s ‘new era’ of Chinese colonialism, ‘Mongolian’ (ᠮᠣᠩᠭᠣᠯ Mongol)—as a language, identity, and nation—is slowly and silently disappearing from public life. This is part of a larger de-Mongolisation campaign in the IMAR: the Inner Mongolian homeland is reframed as ‘a place collectively owned by the people of all [Chinese] ethnic groups nationwide’ (Xinhua News Agency 2021); Mongolian culture is folded into a vaguely defined ‘northern frontier culture’ (Allen et al. 2024; T.S. 2024); and the Mongolian mother tongue is recast as a mere ‘heritage language’ (Grey 2025; Zuo and Wang 2025).

In this essay, we expose the systematic dismantling of Mongolian-medium schooling and argue that the rectification of school names is one of the final acts of cancelling once-promised autonomy and sovereignty. Along the way, we visit two renamed schools and reflect on the weighty significance of these small acts of erasure.

Speaking Mongolian in Southern Mongolia

Settlement on the grasslands south of the Gobi Desert has always come with a politics of naming. ‘Inner Mongolia’ (内蒙古 Nei Menggu) reads like neutral geography, but it encodes an imperial hierarchy, an inner/outer ordering inherited from the Qing Empire’s frontier administration and later normalised through Chinese administrative practice (Bulag 2004).

Against that framing, Mongolian nationalists promoted an alternative territorial language. When the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region was established under Ulanhu in 1947, the Mongolian name shifted from Dotood Mongol (ᠳᠤᠲᠤᠭᠠᠳᠤ ᠮᠤᠩᠭᠤᠯ ‘Inner Mongolia’) to Öbör Mongol (ᠦᠪᠤᠷ ᠮᠤᠩᠭᠤᠯ, literally the ‘sunny/front/southern side’), a semantic reorientation that no longer implies ‘inside China’ in the same way, even as the Chinese name (内蒙古) remained unchanged (Borjigin 2004). In more recent usage, Mongolian activists have pushed the English rendering further, translating Öbör as ‘Southern Mongolia’ (and pairing it with ‘South Mongolia’, 南蒙古 in Chinese). The contest over what to call the region is not semantic nit-picking; it is a struggle over which historical claim becomes the default and whose map becomes common sense.

The Chinese settler-colonial project in Inner Mongolia has a longer historical trajectory than that in Tibet and Xinjiang. The Qing initially sought to protect the grasslands, but the region’s proximity to the Han sedentary heartland—and fluid transitional zone between farming and herding—saw millions of Chinese colonists cross the Great Wall in search of ‘virgin land’ (Cheng et al. 2023; Lattimore 1962). They brought not only hoes, but also their language, culture, and administrative structures. By the time the empire collapsed in 1912, Han settlers outnumbered Mongols by almost two to one (IHLR 2018). Small wonder, then, that figures such as Ulanhu—born Yun Ze (云泽) into a heavily Sinicised Tümed milieu—spoke Mongolian poorly, yet retained a strong sense of Mongol identity; demographic transformation did not erase identity so much as force it to reorganise around politics, memory, and naming.

To win the support of Ulanhu and other Inner Mongolian nationalists, Mao Zedong (1935) promised them the right to manage their own affairs and use their own language and script. After the CCP’s victory and the establishment of the IMAR, Ulanhu and his education minister Khafengga built a vast system of Mongolian-language education. Guided by the PRC’s first Nationalities Education Conference in 1951, officials established schools in which Mongolian was the medium of instruction and textbooks used the Mongolian script, with Chinese introduced only as a single subject from year 3 (Tsung 2014; Ha and Koyanagi 2007).

They insisted that Han officials working in IMAR learn Mongolian and help preserve the traditional vertical Mongolian script (ᠪᠢᠴᠢᠭ Bichig) while resisting the Cyrillic alphabet adopted by the Mongolian People’s Republic (Wang 2021; Billé 2010). Official regulations insisted that Mongolian was the lingua franca of the autonomous region, even though most inhabitants spoke Putonghua in daily life (Shagaa 2015).

Thanks to a dedicated funding stream, the number of Mongolian schools increased rapidly during the 1950s and early 1960s. These schools were part of a distinct ‘nationalities education’ (民族教育) system, overseen by the IMAR Government and the State Nationalities Affairs Commission (Leibold and Chen 2014). Okamoto (1999) reports that, by 1964, some 77 per cent of primary, 74 per cent of junior middle, and 67 per cent of senior middle school students in the IMAR were being taught in Mongolian.

In response to the collective resentment and lingering guilt provoked by the Cultural Revolution’s brutal repression—and by continued Chinese in-migration, which reduced Mongols to less than 13 per cent of the region’s population by 1982—the party rebuilt Mongolian-language schooling in the 1980s and 1990s (Tsung 2014; China Education Online 2010). Ulanhu and his son Buhe, then IMAR chairman, championed the 1984 Law on Regional Ethnic Autonomy, which still provides a clear legal basis for Mongolian-medium education. Article 37 states that schools in ethnic autonomous areas should, ‘whenever possible’, use textbooks in their own languages and use those languages as the medium of instruction (NPC 2024).

Yet, in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse and repeated cycles of violence in the PRC’s borderlands, scholars and officials began questioning the wisdom of autonomy and preferential policies for minorities such as the Mongols (Leibold 2013; Elliott 2015). Separate schools and languages, they argued, not only hindered national unity and economic development; they also encouraged backwardness, parochialism, and even separatism. When Xi Jinping took the top party post in 2012, he signalled support for those advocating a ‘second-generation of ethnic policies’ (Roche and Leibold 2020) and schooling soon became a prime arena for his new-era project of ‘forging the collective consciousness of the Chinese nation-race’ (铸牢中华民族共同体意识) (Pan 2025).

Rectifying Names in Bayisingtu

A common consciousness, Xi Jinping believes, requires a common language (MOE 2021a). Party officials began speaking about the urgent need to ‘promote and popularise the national common language and script’ while also adopting ‘unified textbooks’, especially in the contested borderlands where non-Han languages were still spoken. Xinjiang adopted new textbooks and Putonghua instruction in 2017, and Tibet, the following year. Yet, Mongolian officials resisted similar changes, as they had done in the past (Tumnwoljee 2020).

At the start of Xi’s new era, there were still 485 Mongolian schools and 282 Mongolian preschools in the IMAR, with more than 250,000 students learning either entirely in Mongolian or taking the language as a core part of the curriculum (Jia and Wang 2015). More than 100 of these schools were in Bayisingtu (Tongliao), where the Mongols make up almost 50 per cent of the population. Take, for example, the Tongliao Mongolian School, which offered nine years of compulsory education entirely in Mongolian to nearly 3,000 students (TCMS 2021).

Its principal Ms Gowaa oversaw a fivefold increase in student numbers during the early 2000s and helped grow the school into the region’s largest and most lauded Mongolian school, earning herself a state award as a hero of national unity in 2007 (QERB 2009). Today she is in detention. After the 2020 protest movement against mandated Putonghua-medium instruction, she was accused of corruption and purged (Hohhot Bar 2021), and many of the school’s students, teachers, and parents were also punished for resisting (Leibold 2021). That year marked the beginning of the end for Mongolian education in the region.

The then IMAR party secretary Shi Taifeng berated Mongolian officials, claiming they had strayed from the CCP’s ethnic work and failed to forge a collective consciousness (AsiaNews 2020). He made a ‘special visit’ to the Tongliao Mongol Middle School, where he scolded teachers and administrators for their ‘deviations in ideological understanding’ and called for ‘resolute and effective rectification’ (Liu, X. 2020).

Across Tongliao and elsewhere in the IMAR, Mongols were subjected to re-education classes in their work units (IMDE 2021). The second author endured a month of re-education, including weekly sessions in which participants were encouraged to confess to ‘divisive’ acts such as speaking Mongolian and wearing Mongolian clothing, followed by a final exam (Borjgin 2025). Officials at all levels in Tongliao were required to sign ‘military-style pledges’ to advance Putonghua, with a ‘dedicated and capable’ cadre assigned to monitor progress (Guo 2025). Local regulations were rewritten to uphold the ‘dominant position’ of Putonghua and its central role in forging Xi Jinping’s collective consciousness (BEB 2021).

By the start of the 2024 school year, authorities declared that Tongliao’s 106 schools—serving nearly 50,000 students previously taught in ethnic languages, including the soon-to-be-renamed No.6 Middle School—had fully transitioned to Putonghua instruction using nationally unified textbooks (Guo 2025).

Fastening Life’s First Button in Hohhot

With a nationwide push to expand early childhood education, Inner Mongolia’s kindergarten sector has grown rapidly over the past two decades. This includes kindergartens for minority children: their number rose from 18 in 1979 to 427 in 2015, with nearly 50,000 children receiving instruction in Mongolian (Zhu 2018). As enrolment in Putonghua-medium primary and secondary schools rose and Mongolian proficiency declined, Mongol educators came to see these kindergartens as critical to sustaining basic Mongolian literacy and cultural knowledge.

Take, for example, the Huhhotin Mongol Undestenie Heuhedin Checherlig (ᠬᠦᠬᠡᠬᠤᠳᠠ ᠵᠢᠨ ᠮᠤᠩᠭᠤᠯ ᠦᠨᠳᠦᠰᠦᠲᠡᠨ ᠪ ᠬᠡᠦᠬᠡᠳ ᠎ᠦᠨ ᠴᠡᠴᠡᠷᠯᠢᠭ; Hohhot City Mongolian Kindergarten 呼和浩特市蒙古族幼儿园), a three-year boarding school in the Saihan District of the regional capital. Founded in 1982, the school expanded rapidly—at one point operating three campuses and enrolling nearly 2,000 students aged three to six—as city officials invested millions of yuan in its growth (Liu, S. 2020). The Hohhot Education Bureau established a special nationalities education fund to support the ‘priority development’ of Mongolian-medium education across the city (Hohhot News 2015).

Under the leadership of its principal Wu Haitang, the school was recognised as an ‘autonomous-region-level model kindergarten’ and celebrated for helping ‘Mongolian children master their own ethnic language and life habits’ (OEB 2018). It hosted repeated visits by party leaders, including Bu Xiaolin, Ulanhu’s granddaughter, who chaired the IMAR before being pressured to resign in the wake of the 2020 protest movement (Wenming Inner Mongolia 2019).

In the past, the kindergarten adopted a purely Mongolian instructional model, described as operating ‘without Chinese-language classes’ (Hohhot Xinhua 2016). Teachers and parent volunteers worked to foreground Mongolian history, culture, and etiquette through weekly cultural immersion sessions. For Children’s Day in 2016, for instance, the school organised a traditional Naadam Festival, with children dancing and wrestling in traditional Mongolian dress (HMK 2016). In a People’s Daily Video (2018) Mongolian-language feature, one parent said she chose the school so her child could be educated in Mongolian, learn to love the mother tongue from an early age, and understand its importance. ‘We want them to grow up Mongolian,’ she said.

This desire to preserve Mongolian identity was sharply curtailed in 2021, when the Ministry of Education ordered rural and minority kindergartens to adopt Putonghua as the medium of instruction, in line with Xi Jinping’s directives on ‘fastening life’s first button’ and beginning patriotic education ‘from infancy’ (MOE 2021b; RFA 2021).

That year, the atmosphere at Hohhot City Mongolian Kindergarten shifted noticeably. After a flag-raising ceremony attended by party officials, students were led through ‘red’ cultural activities meant to instil ‘the revolutionary spirit of one’s forebears—their arduous struggle, fearlessness in the face of hardship, and selfless bravery’ (SYK 2021). Leaving little to chance, officials were dispatched to assess how well Mongolian teachers in the city’s former Mongolian-language kindergartens were implementing the new Chinese-only mandate (Yin 2021).

By the start of the 2023 school year, regional officials claimed Putonghua had achieved full coverage across the IMAR school system, including early childhood care and education (Liu 2023; CNA 2023). When Principal Wu ‘retired’ and the kindergarten was reorganised, its Mongolian name quietly disappeared. As puzzled parents noted on social media (Momo 2023), the newly renamed Yinhe South Street Kindergarten (银河南街幼儿园) now teaches in Putonghua and accepts Han students.

Rectifying Names, Unmaking a People

Since 2020, CCP authorities have sought to remake education in Inner Mongolia. Their aim is a cradle-to-university pipeline of ‘soul-casting’ (铸魂) (Leibold 2025; CIMU 2023), by which Putonghua, Han norms, and patriotic discipline become ‘a code of conduct and a daily habit’ (IMPC 2024). The ambition is not merely curricular; it is totalising.

Putonghua is now demanded not only in classroom instruction and assessment, but also across all the paperwork of schooling: teaching plans, blackboard notes, PowerPoint presentations, supervision records, and administrative reporting. Campuses have been ‘sanitised’ of linguistic ‘problems’ and saturated with Putonghua signage, party slogans, and revolutionary displays (CIMU 2021). This is rectification in the party-state’s contemporary key: an effort to make language conform, so that thought and conduct follow.

Yet, the most consequential rectification is also the simplest: removing ‘Mongolian’ from a school’s name and from a child’s day. When ‘Mongolian nationality’ vanishes from plaques and is replaced with generic, numbered titles, the public identity of a school—and of the region—changes with it. Names are not decorative. They are official claims about who belongs, what a place is for, and which futures are imaginable. In Inner Mongolia today, rectification no longer tries to align words with reality; it tries to remake reality by stripping Mongolian of public legibility and cancelling a once-promised autonomy now rendered paper thin.

What is unfolding here is ‘slow violence’—a cumulative harm that rarely looks like violence in the moment because it is dispersed across policy memos, classroom routines, and the banal theatre of signage. As Gerald Roche (2019) argues, this kind of ‘structural violence’ makes the intergenerational transmission of a minority language increasingly impractical and unrewarding in the PRC, pushing Mongol families to absorb the loss quietly—until the cultural injury is baked in and the wound becomes hard to name.

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