China detains 23 in crackdown on Inner Mongolia protests
In this image made from video taken in August 2020, parents confront authorities outside a school in Tongliao in Northwestern China's Inner Mongolia region. Ethnic Mongolians, including students and parents, in China’s Inner Mongolia region, are demonstrating their anger in rare public protests against a new bilingual education policy that they say is endangering the Mongolian language. (AP Photo) Police in China’s Inner Mongolia region has detained at least 23 people following protests last week against a new policy that replaces Mongolian-language textbooks with Chinese ones in classrooms. The push to use the new textbooks, which started in other ethnic minority regions such as Xinjiang and Tibet in 2017, has prompted demonstrations and school boycotts by ethnic Mongolians in at least five cities and counties in Inner Mongolia. The 23 detentions were across eight banners, the regional word for counties, according to an Associated Press tally of nine local police reports over the past several days. The reasons range from “organizing and collecting signatures for a petition” to “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble.” Others were for “flagrantly insulting a deceased former leader of the country” and “sharing videos in a WeChat group to obstruct the implementation of the national textbooks policy.” WeChat is a popular messaging app in China. The local government is also exerting pressure in other ways. Read the full article