Bilingual education in China’s unruly far western region of Xinjiang will help to preserve stability and to develop the area, a senior Communist Party official said on Wednesday, stressing the importance of a controversial policy.<\/p>\n
Dec 10, 2014<\/p>\n
BEIJING (Reuters) – Bilingual education in China’s unruly far western region of Xinjiang will help to preserve stability and to develop the area, a senior Communist Party official said on Wednesday, stressing the importance of a controversial policy.<\/p>\n
Xinjiang, home to the Muslim Uighur people, has been beset by violence for years, blamed by the government on Islamists who want a separate state, though rights groups say Beijing’s harsh controls on Uighur culture are more to blame for the unrest.<\/p>\n
Bilingual education has been promoted in recent years to help give ethnic minorities, especially in sensitive places like Xinjiang, better job opportunities, with a lack of fluency in China’s official tongue of Mandarin seen holding back development.<\/p>\n
But it has been opposed by many Uighurs, who worry that their own Turkic language, which is written in an Arabic-based script, is being marginalized. In some Tibetan parts of China the issue has lead to riots.<\/p>\n
Yu Zhengsheng, the party’s number four ranked leader, told a group of young Uighurs visiting Beijing that speaking both languages was of vital importance.<\/p>\n
“If we are to maintain Xinjiang’s social stability and ethnic unity we must put education and employment work in an even more prominent position and further raise the quality of bilingual education,” state television cited Yu as saying.<\/p>\n
This will ensure that students in Xinjiang get an education that is as good as that which children in the rest of the country get, added Yu, who heads a largely ceremonial advisory body to parliament.<\/p>\n
In recognition of the economic roots of some of the violence in Xinjiang, where better paying jobs often go to Mandarin-speaking migrants from other parts of China, the government has poured money in, notably in the heavily Uighur southern part of Xinjiang.<\/p>\n
Yu said more efforts would be put on job creation and technical training for minority people.<\/p>\n
Xinjiang, resource-rich and strategically located on the borders of central Asia, is crucial to China’s growing energy needs. Analysts say most of the proceeds from sales of its resources have gone to majority Han Chinese, stoking resentment among Uighurs.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Robert Birsel)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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