Why China's Ethnic Minorities Speak Mandarin

Recently I heard a claim that surprised me: Xinjiang once ran one of the best bilingual education systems in the world. Most people are aware of the controversial policies of recent years promoting Mandarin as the common language in ethnic minority regions. I then decided to find out what actually happened.I traced the claim to a study on Yi-language (彝族, another major minority in southwest China) bilingual education. In this 2019 Springer monograph on minority schooling, Lubei Zhang and Linda Tsung wrote that China “should be regarded as a world leader” in developing bilingual education for minorities, naming the Uyghurs and Kazakhs of Xinjiang, the Mongols, the Tibetans, and the Koreans of Yanbian as groups that built mother-tongue school and examination systems.As to the authors, Zhang is at Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu; Tsung is at the University of Sydney. Tsung’s PhD, “Minorities in China: Language policy and education,” dates to 1999 at Sydney. She is a three-decade…