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Inner Mongolia Protests (2011, 2020)

In May 2011, the killing of Mongol herder Mergen by a coal truck sparked the largest ethnic Mongol protests in Inner Mongolia in two decades; in August 2020, a policy curtailing Mongolian-language instruction triggered school boycotts by hundreds of thousands of students, with some 10,000 arrested. Both were flashpoints of the CCP's "second-generation ethnic policy" toward Mongols.

Time

May 10–June 2011; August 31–September 2020

Place

Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region: Xilin Gol League (West Ujimqin Banner, Xilinhot), Hohhot and others; in 2020 across all Mongolian-language schools regionwide

Decision-makers

2011: Hu Chunhua, then Party chief of Inner Mongolia, led the stability-maintenance response; 2020: under Xi Jinping's "second-generation ethnic policy," the Inner Mongolia Department of Education imposed the "bilingual education" reform, with central-government directives to universalize the national common language in education

Background

The Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region spans 1.18 million square km with about 24 million residents, 79.5% Han Chinese and some 4.2 million ethnic Mongols (17.1%). Mongols are China's sixth-largest minority; nearly 70% of China's roughly 6 million Mongols live in Inner Mongolia. In 1947 the region became an autonomous region under CCP leadership — two years before the PRC itself — the Party's first ethnic autonomous area. Mongols were among the first minorities to declare support for the CCP, and in exchange received nominal cultural autonomy: Mongolian-language education was officially offered in six provinces and regions for seven decades.

That "autonomy" was hollow from the start. During the 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution, Inner Mongolia suffered the "digging and purging" (挖肃) campaign: Mongols were accused of plotting to unite with the Mongolian People's Republic (then a Soviet satellite) and were brutally purged. Researchers estimate tens of thousands — perhaps more — Mongol cadres and civilians were killed or maimed, the darkest page in the region's history and an unhealed trauma in Mongol collective memory.

After reform and opening, Inner Mongolia became China's largest coal producer. Frenzied open-pit mining devoured the steppe: official figures show 90% of China's 400 million hectares of grassland now degraded to some degree. Authorities blamed "overgrazing" by herders, imposing grazing bans and forced settlement, while handing vast grasslands to coal mines, rare-earth mines and Han migrant farms. Herders lost pastures, livestock and the nomadic life; Han migrants flooded in under the "Develop the West" campaign. Mongols became a cultural minority in their own homeland — by 2017 only about 30% of Mongol students received any Mongolian-language education, down from roughly 60% in 1990.

In April 2011 a State Council meeting called for "more forceful policy measures" to develop pastoral areas and "ensure ecological security, ethnic unity and border stability" — in practice endorsing a new round of grassland controls. Against this backdrop, Mergen's death lit the fuse.

Who decided

2011:

• Hu Chunhua (Inner Mongolia party chief, November 2009–November 2012). His government took a "take-no-chances" approach, sending police and paramilitary to seal off central Hohhot.
• On May 24 the Xilingol authorities announced the driver's arrest and promised swift handling — local crisis management.

2020:

• The bilingual-education policy: in 2020 Inner Mongolia's education department rolled out unified textbooks — Chinese language, politics and history switched to Mandarin-medium, effectively ending Mongolian-medium teaching. The decision flowed from the central "national common language" drive; Xi Jinping repeatedly stressed "forging a strong sense of the Chinese national community."
• Implementation: the regional party committee and education department; schools ordered to comply from September 1.
• The central decision process was never disclosed (unverified).

2011: Mergen's death and the herder protests

May 10, 2011: In West Ujimqin Banner, Xilin Gol League, Mongol herder Mergen (Mongols often use a single name) joined some 20 other herders trying to block coal trucks of the Liaoning Chencheng Industry and Trade Group from crossing his pasture. The convoys had long ravaged the steppe: May is lambing season and the trucks' thunder causes ewes to miscarry; dust pollutes pastures; livestock are run over or stolen year after year. Driver Li Lindong (Han Chinese) ran Mergen down and dragged him to death — reports cite 30, 145 or 150 meters; the exact figure is unverified, though the dragging itself is undisputed.

May 15: A second herdsman was killed in a clash with mining personnel, according to overseas Mongol organizations. The two deaths compounded years of accumulated rage.

May 23: The first street demonstrations erupted in Xilinhot, then spread: on May 25 some 2,000 secondary-school students and herdsmen rallied at the League government buildings in Xilinhot, with protests also in East Ujimqin Banner; on May 26 they reached the Bordered Yellow Banner. Demands quickly grew from "justice for Mergen" to protecting the steppe ecology, respecting herders' rights, and halting mining's destruction of grasslands.

May 30: Despite declared martial law and deployments of riot police and paramilitary forces, hundreds of Mongols took to the streets of Hohhot, rallying before the government building. The overseas Chinese outlet Duowei News quoted a Hohhot official saying "fewer than 10 protesters were killed" as crowds were dispersed — unverified by independent sources. Authorities locked down secondary schools and universities with large Mongol enrollments.

Hu Chunhua, then Party chief of Inner Mongolia (later Politburo member and Vice Premier), led the stability response: heavy suppression paired with swift "surgical" concessions. On June 8, the Xilin Gol Intermediate People's Court, after a six-hour trial, sentenced driver Li Lindong to death for murder, passenger Lu Xiangdong to life imprisonment, and two others to three years each for obstructing justice. On August 25, Li Lindong was executed. The government also compensated Mergen's family, promised tougher environmental enforcement, and sacked the West Ujimqin Banner Party chief.

But the mining project that sparked the protests kept operating, and grassland controls did not loosen. The New York Times noted that compared with the hard crackdowns in Xinjiang (2009) and Tibet (2008), the authorities' "acknowledgment of anger" was more conciliatory — a tactical difference only: troop deployments and "acknowledgment" ran in parallel, both aimed at preventing ethnic unrest from spreading.

2020: curtailing Mongolian instruction and the school boycotts

Around August 26, 2020, the Inner Mongolia Department of Education notified ethnic-language schools (Mongolian-medium schools) that from September 1, three subjects would switch to Chinese-medium instruction with nationally unified textbooks: Language and Literature (Chinese) from grade 1, Morality and Rule of Law from grade 1, and History from grade 7. This was the local rollout of the national unified-textbook reform pushed across China since autumn 2017.

Officials called it "bilingual education" affecting only three subjects. Mongol parents and teachers saw through it immediately: language, politics and history are precisely the three most ideologically loaded subjects. The US-based Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center (SMHRIC) broke the story on August 20, and outrage spread fast.

On August 31, protests erupted across Mongol communities. Parents kept children home; on September 1, the semester's first day, many Mongolian schools stood empty. Students took to the streets; Mongolian TV anchors and language advocates posted solidarity videos. A leaked 52-minute parent-teacher meeting recording later revealed the principal of Hohhot's No. 30 Middle School announcing that "under central-government directives, all Mongolian schools regionwide will use the national common language as the medium of instruction starting September 1," with his own school starting May 1 — and that Mongolian entrance exams would be set exclusively in Chinese from 2025 (high school) and 2028 (college).

The scale was unprecedented: SMHRIC reported over 300,000 Mongol students in the streets, with millions of parents and teachers joining the boycott. In a move never before seen in China, all 300 Mongol employees of Inner Mongolia TV and Radio signed a joint letter threatening mass resignation if parents (many of them station employees) were punished for the boycott.

The crackdown machine moved at full speed: mass detentions in early September; the Mongolian-language social platform Bainu shut down; a credentialed Los Angeles Times reporter in Hohhot was surrounded by plainclothes men, interrogated at a police station for over four hours, then expelled from the region. Amnesty International issued an Urgent Action (UA 140/20) on September 21 for detained peaceful protesters.

Most symbolic was the political framing: during the 2020 National People's Congress, People's Daily declared local legislation on minority-language education "unconstitutional" — effectively voiding the legal basis of seventy years of Mongolian education. On January 9, 2021, the regional education department banned all extracurricular Mongolian teaching. SMHRIC director Enghebatu Togochog testified before the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China in 2022 that 8,000–10,000 Southern Mongolians had been arrested, detained, jailed or house-arrested after the 2020 protests (a single-source figure, not independently verified).

Observers read the reform as textbook Xi Jinping "second-generation ethnic policy" — the melting-pot formula for the "ultimate solution" to ethnic questions through comprehensive assimilation in language, education and intermarriage. Tibetan and Uyghur mother-tongue education had already been compressed the same way; Inner Mongolia was the last. As University of Pennsylvania Mongolian-studies professor Christopher Atwood put it, Mongols had been Beijing's "assimilation success story" — high intermarriage, fluent Mandarin: "There was a kind of peace that had prevailed for 25 years. It just seems very odd that the government would create conditions that would arouse dissent."

Who executed

2011 enforcement:

• Police and paramilitary: central Hohhot sealed off; mass police deployment in Xilingol, Tongliao and elsewhere.
• The coal-truck driver who killed herder Mergen was arrested (announced May 24).
• Information blockade: protest news strictly censored.

2020 enforcement:

• Schools forced to comply: the September 1 switch to Mandarin-medium for three subjects; non-compliant teachers suspended, parents summoned.
• Crushing the boycott: Mongol students and parents boycotted classes; police detained organizers.
• Online censorship: protest videos and posts swiftly deleted.

Scale & Methodology

Who opposed

2011:

• Mergen: a Xilingol herder, dragged and crushed to death by a coal truck on May 10, 2011 while defending his pasture. His death ignited the protests.
• The herders' protests: thousands of Mongol herders took to the streets — demanding grassland protection, punishment of the killer, respect for Mongol rights. Inner Mongolia's largest protests since the 1980s.
• Exiled Mongols: solidarity abroad; foreign media coverage.

2020:

• The school boycott: from late August 2020, Mongol students across Inner Mongolia boycotted classes against the end of Mongolian-medium teaching; parents petitioned.
• Teachers' resistance: some Mongol teachers refused Mandarin-medium instruction and were suspended.
• Overseas solidarity: protests by Mongols in Mongolia, Europe and America; wide international coverage.
• Outcome: the protests were crushed and the policy went ahead — but the 2020 boycott was among the largest collective ethnic-minority actions in recent China.

Supplementary record: the founding of the autonomous region, the "digging and purging" catastrophe, and the 1981 student movement

1947: the first ethnic autonomous government. On April 23, 1947, a people's congress of Inner Mongolia convened at Wangye Temple (today's Ulaan Hot); on May 1 the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Government was formally established, with Ulanhu as chairman — the first provincial-level ethnic autonomous government founded under CCP leadership, more than two years before the People's Republic itself. After 1949 the region's boundaries were adjusted repeatedly: in 1954 Suiyuan Province was merged into it and the capital moved to Hohhot. From the start, the autonomous government held no independent power over finance, personnel or legislation; major matters were decided by the Party Centre and its North China Bureau. Mongolian-language schooling and Mongolian publishing were the main space the system left to the Mongols — and precisely what was taken away in 2020.

The "digging and purging" campaign and the Inner Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party case — the key record this page adds. When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, Ulanhu was branded head of an "anti-Party, treasonous clique." From 1967, Teng Haiqing, then a senior military commander in the region, launched the "digging and purging" (挖肃) campaign in the name of "digging out Ulanhu's black line and purging his poisonous influence"; in 1968 it escalated into a hunt for the so-called Inner Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (IMPRP). That party had been founded in 1925 and dissolved itself in 1945; the claim that it had been "revived" more than twenty years later as a "new IMPRP" was never supported by any physical evidence and was assembled entirely from extorted confessions. The method was torture and the coerce–confess–believe cycle: whole villages and production teams were screened, cadres and herders were hung up, beaten and branded, forced to name one another as "party members," and each confession became the arrest list for the next round. The figures must be kept apart. First, the rehabilitation-era official count: statistics compiled by Inner Mongolian authorities in the 1980s and cited by multiple party histories and scholarly works hold that about 346,000 people across the region were detained and investigated, 16,222 were persecuted to death, and more than 80,000 were beaten and maimed; the overwhelming majority of victims were ethnic Mongols, alongside large numbers of Han cadres and civilians. Second, scholarly and exile estimates: some Mongol scholars and overseas Mongol organisations put the death toll above the official rehabilitation figure, at 20,000 to 30,000 — a single-side estimate that has not been independently verified and is marked unverified here. In May 1969 the Party Centre ordered the campaign's expansion halted; after 1979 large numbers of cases were rehabilitated, but Teng Haiqing, the campaign's principal organiser, was never prosecuted or sentenced. The catastrophe sits only half a century before 2020: many of the parents who took to the streets in 2020 grew up hearing their grandparents' accounts of the digging and purging.

The 1981 student movement. In the summer of 1981, a central Party document on Inner Mongolia work proposed encouraging Han cadres and settlers to support the frontier and develop the grasslands, provoking a sharp backlash among Mongol students and intellectuals. From August to October 1981, Hohhot saw large-scale Mongol student protests: tens of thousands of students at Inner Mongolia University, Inner Mongolia Normal College and other schools boycotted classes and marched, demanding the document be withdrawn, the grasslands protected, and Mongol autonomous rights respected; the protests at one point spread to pastoral areas. It was Inner Mongolia's first large-scale Mongol collective action after reform and opening began. Hada, who later founded the Southern Mongolian Democratic Alliance, was then a student at Inner Mongolia University and took part in the movement, according to his own account and multiple scholarly records. The authorities moved against some organisers while quietly softening the document's implementation — "protest bought delay" became the shared memory of a generation of Mongol intellectuals.

Hada and the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center. Hada (born 1955) founded the Southern Mongolian Democratic Alliance in Hohhot in 1992, advocating protection of Mongol cultural rights and genuine ethnic regional autonomy. In December 1995 he was arrested; in 1996 the Hohhot Intermediate People's Court sentenced him to fifteen years for "splitting the state" and "espionage." The Mongolian-studies bookshop run by his wife, Xinna, was shut down, and Xinna herself was convicted (with a suspended sentence). When Hada's sentence expired in 2010 he was not freed, but held for a further four years at an undisclosed location; after his nominal release in December 2014 he has lived under house arrest and close surveillance, his health steadily deteriorating, according to his family and the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center's reporting over the years. Hada's full case is carried on the Persecution section's dedicated page. The Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center (SMHRIC) was founded in New York in 1998 by Enghebatu Togochog; it was the principal publisher of information during the 2020 protests, and its figures — including arrest counts — are single-source estimates, presented in this page's numbers table separately from official and media figures.

The situation since 2020. After the protests were suppressed, the assimilation drive did not pause: the regional People's Congress Standing Committee amended multiple local regulations, deleting provisions on ethnic-language instruction; in January 2021 the regional education department explicitly banned schools from organising any extracurricular Mongolian teaching; national common-language education was pushed down into kindergartens; and Mongolian-language newspapers and publishing continued to shrink. Under the announced schedule, Mongol students' secondary-school and university entrance examinations will be set entirely in Chinese from 2028 and 2025 respectively (see the principal's announcement quoted from the leaked parents'-meeting recording in the 2020 section above). Linguists note that once a language's education system is interrupted for a single generation, restoration is close to impossible — which is why hundreds of thousands of parents in 2020 chose to keep their children out of school and protest.

Impact

Ended the "model autonomous region" myth. Inner Mongolia was long paraded as a model of "ethnic unity"; the 2011 protests proved that where coal interests collide with steppe ecology, ethnic tension ignites instantly. The state executed the driver to "cut off" the case but refused to touch mining interests or grassland controls — a "life for a life, system unchanged" formula that became the standard response to ethnic protests.

Seventy years of Mongolian education rolled back. After the 2020 reform, Mongolian's place in the region's schools regressed to pre-1947 levels. The 2021 extracurricular ban, the reported 2023 blanket ban, the 2025/2028 Chinese-only exams — a clear timeline toward "completed assimilation." Mongols became the third ethnicity after Tibetans and Uyghurs to lose their mother-tongue education system.

"Second-generation ethnic policy" turned from theory into reality. The Xi era shifted ethnic policy from "pluralistic unity" to the melting pot: scrapping ethnic preferences, enforcing the national language, diluting ethnic identity. The 2020 protests were the most public social backlash against this turn, moving "second-generation ethnic policy" from academic debate to street reality.

A third track, distinct from Xinjiang and Tibet. Inner Mongolia's plight is often eclipsed by Xinjiang and Tibet, but the logics differ: Xinjiang is a camp system under the "counterterrorism" banner, Tibet a religious/Dalai Lama question, Inner Mongolia a double squeeze of steppe ecology and linguistic culture. Lumping the three as one "ethnic question" obscures each mechanism — which is why this page stands alone.

Videos

SMHRIC-released footage of the 2020 protests: students and residents demanding restoration of Mongolian-language classes (cited by NPR and others).

South China Morning Post: September 2020 — over a hundred people protested in Ulaanbaatar against Beijing's Inner Mongolia language policy as Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited Mongolia.

Related images (external links)

• Inner Mongolia image category — Wikimedia Commons (steppe and city photos)
• Steppe landscape category — Wikimedia Commons (public-domain / CC images)
• Note: 2011 and 2020 protest photos are mostly news-agency copyrighted and are not embedded; see media links under Sources.