Talking Turkey

Bilingual education spreads Chinese to ethnic minorities
03/29/2006
Kazuto Tsukamoto, The Asahi Shinbun

BAXKERAM KANT, China—At an elementary school on the outskirts of an oasis town along the Silk Road, Chinese authorities are carrying out a unique cultural experiment. In one of the classrooms of this white, one-story school house, 47 students in the fourth grade are reading their “national language” textbook in a loud voice. The language is Chinese. However, all of the children are members of the Uyghur ethnic minority. At home, they speak the Uyghur language. Located in the town of Baxkeram Kant in the western part of the Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region, the school is attracting notice as a pioneering bilingual school, in which children of a minority people learn subjects not in their own language but in Chinese.

The last thing anyone in Xin’jiang needs is a “cultural experiment” courtesy of the Chinese authorities. And while the leftist Asahi tries to bill this as progressive “bilingual education,” many would call it nothing short of cultural imperialism or Hanification. But that’s not the main point of this post.

All of the 532 students are Uyghur, an Islamic people whose ancestors are said to have come from Turkey.

Not quite. Yes, Uyghurs are Turkic. But the Turkic peoples came from Central Asia, probably near the Altaic Moutains stretching between eastern Kazakhstan and Mongolia. What we now call Turkey is geographicalyl referred to as Anatolia or Asia Minor and was once the sparring grounds between Greeks and Persians. Turks have been in Turkey barely a millenia, and the Turks in western China have been there markably longer than the Turks in Anatolia.

SIDENOTE: A friend notes that if the Uyghurs, who’ve been in western China for at least 2,000 years, really did come from Turkey, they would be Greek.