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Shi Taifeng (1956– )

Party secretary of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (October 2019–April 2022). In August 2020 he forced through a "bilingual education" reform: Chinese language, ethics, and other core subjects in Mongolian-medium schools would switch to nationally unified Chinese-language textbooks — effectively ending Mongolian-medium education. The policy triggered the largest protests Inner Mongolia had seen in decades: a region-wide school boycott met with police crackdowns, mass detentions, and house arrests of parents, teachers, and activists. This page traces his career, the causes and course of the 2020 controversy, and the crackdown's results — with competing figures and disputed claims laid out side by side.

Born

September 1956, Yushe, Shanxi; undergraduate and graduate studies in law at Peking University

Key positions

Vice president of the Central Party School (2010–2015); Governor of Jiangsu (2016–2017); Party secretary of Ningxia (2017–2019); Party secretary of Inner Mongolia (October 25, 2019–April 30, 2022); President of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (May–December 2022); head of the United Front Work Department (2022–2025); head of the Organization Department (since March 2025); member of the CCP Politburo

Key episode

The 2020 Inner Mongolia "bilingual education" controversy and protest crackdown (August–October 2020): Mongolian-medium teaching replaced with Chinese; ~300,000 students boycotted classes (exile-group estimate); 8,000–10,000 people placed under police custody (exile-group estimate); over a hundred parents and teachers detained or placed under house arrest; the 2018 Weizhou Grand Mosque standoff in Ningxia (August 2018): county authorities under his watch ordered the newly built mosque demolished as an "illegal structure"; thousands of Hui Muslims gathered to defend it and forced a postponement — but in 2019 its domes and minarets were torn down anyway and replaced with Chinese-style roofs

1. Career: from Peking University law professor to regional strongman

Shi Taifeng was born in September 1956 in Yushe, Shanxi. Sent down as an educated youth in 1974, he entered Peking University's law department in 1978 — a classmate of future premier Li Keqiang. He joined the Party in 1982, stayed on for graduate studies under legal scholar Shen Zongling (his thesis: A Preliminary Inquiry into Engels's View of Law), and became a professor — a classic scholar-official.

He entered politics after 2000: the Central Party School, then vice president of the school in 2010. In late 2015 he moved to Jiangsu, becoming governor in January 2016. In April 2017 he was appointed Party secretary of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region — his first time running an ethnic autonomous region. His two-plus years in Ningxia featured a series of hardline "de-extremification" measures in religion and education, marking him as "firm" on ethnic and religious questions.

On October 25, 2019, Shi was transferred to Inner Mongolia as Party secretary. Nobody expected that within a year he would personally ignite a protest storm sweeping the entire region.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Shi Taifeng"; Xinhua personnel announcement, October 2019.

2. In office: two terms as regional Party secretary (2017–2022)

To understand what Shi did in Inner Mongolia, start with the backdrop. In September 2019, Xi Jinping addressed the national commendation conference on ethnic unity, calling to "forge a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation" and demanding the promotion of the standard national spoken and written language. Scholars call this the formal launch of the "second-generation ethnic policy": no more emphasis on ethnic autonomy and language protection; instead "fusion" and "integration" — a Western "melting pot" model replacing the Soviet-style ethnic regional autonomy.

Shi was an eager executor of this line. In Ningxia he had already applied it to religion and schooling. In Inner Mongolia he turned the same logic on the Mongolian language itself. The August 2020 "bilingual education" reform was that policy landing in Inner Mongolia — and as regional Party secretary, Shi was its top decision-maker and ultimately responsible for everything that followed.

On April 30, 2022, Shi left Inner Mongolia to head the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; after the 20th Party Congress that October he joined the Politburo, running the United Front Work Department (2022–2025) and then the Organization Department (from March 2025). Judging by his career, the hardline approach in Inner Mongolia did not hurt him — it became a stepping stone.

Sources: Xinhua, September 2019 ethnic-unity conference; Wikipedia, "Shi Taifeng"; Caixin, October 2022, on the United Front appointment.

3. Ningxia: the Weizhou Grand Mosque and the "Sinicization" of Islam (2018–2019)

Ningxia, the region Shi took over in April 2017, is home to China's largest concentration of Hui Muslims — roughly 2.5 million people, more than a third of the region's population. Under Shi, Ningxia pressed ahead with the "Sinicization of religion": Arabic signage was scrubbed from public spaces, so-called "pan-halal" practices were targeted, and mosque architecture was ordered to shed its Middle Eastern features. In the summer of 2018, that campaign ran into the fiercest public resistance Ningxia's Hui had ever mounted.

The Weizhou Grand Mosque stands in Weizhou town, Tongxin County, under Wuzhong city. The original mosque dated to the Ming dynasty and was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution; reconstruction was approved locally in 2015 and completed in 2017 — a white, Middle Eastern-style building with nine onion domes and four soaring minarets. In May 2018 the Wuzhong discipline-inspection authorities disciplined local officials for lax supervision. Then, on August 3, 2018, the Tongxin County authorities issued a notice: the mosque had been built beyond its approvals, its management committee must demolish it by August 10, or the state would demolish it by force. A mosque that had taken two years to build and had stood finished for a year was declared an "illegal structure" only once it was complete — and the notice, spread online, ignited the Hui community.

From August 9, thousands of Hui Muslims converged on Weizhou and kept vigil day and night in the square before the mosque. Many carried Chinese national flags and insisted they were patriotic citizens who only wanted to keep their mosque (Reuters, the Associated Press, the BBC and the South China Morning Post all reported from the scene; crowd estimates vary — international media generally said "thousands," while Bitter Winter, a magazine covering religious freedom in China, put the peak gathering at 30,000). Around midnight on August 10 the Tongxin county head came to the site and promised the mosque would not be touched until a rectification plan had been agreed with the community. Days later the crowd dispersed; the authorities formally postponed the demolition. It was a rare public retreat for the Sinicization campaign.

The retreat was only temporary. According to local residents later interviewed by Bitter Winter, from November 2018 officials went door to door pressuring families to sign consent forms for a "renovation"; in May 2019 heavy machinery moved in and tore down the main dome, while checkpoints screened traffic on the roads into Weizhou. In the end the domes and minarets came down entirely, replaced by Chinese pagoda-style roofs — the building survived, its Islamic identity did not. By the time Shi left Ningxia in October 2019, the de-Arabization of mosque architecture across the region was a fait accompli. Weizhou thus became a specimen case: mass gathering could delay a demolition order by a year, but it could not stop the same outcome delivered under the name of "renovation." And as the region's Party secretary — the official ultimately responsible for religious policy in Ningxia — Shi presided over every link of that chain, from the demolition notice to the final remodeling.

Sources: Reuters, BBC, Associated Press and South China Morning Post reporting on the Weizhou Grand Mosque standoff, August 2018; Bitter Winter's follow-up reporting on the renovation (2019–2020); Wikipedia, "Weizhou Grand Mosque."

4. The 2020 language-education controversy: causes

The fuse was lit in June 2020. During a Ministry of Education inspection in Tongliao, Inner Mongolia, an inspector let slip that starting that September, Mongolian-medium "ethnic schools" in Tongliao would pilot the nationally unified Chinese Language textbook, and politics, history, and language arts would switch from Mongolian to Mandarin instruction. Mongolian communities erupted online; discussion groups were shut down, and teachers, students, and parents were "advised to watch their words."

On August 26, 2020, Inner Mongolia's education department formally announced the primary-school curriculum reform: from September 1, first-grade Chinese Language in Mongolian-medium schools would use the unified national textbook; from autumn 2021, Ethics and Rule of Law would switch to the unified textbook taught in "the national common language" (Mandarin). On August 31 the department spelled it out: Mongolian would be removed from language arts, history, politics, and literature subjects in favor of Chinese instruction, with other subjects to follow.

What this meant to Mongolians is not hard to grasp. Mongolian-medium schools were the last fortress of the Mongolian language — with urbanization and migration already shrinking its everyday use, schools were the only place children systematically learned their mother tongue. Moving core subjects to Chinese cut the next generation off from it. Many Mongolian parents' first reaction: this will make our children unable to speak Mongolian — "cultural genocide." The official line was "bilingual education" and "promoting the national common language," claiming Mongolian-language classes themselves were untouched. Parents didn't buy it — when language arts is taught in Chinese, Mongolian becomes just another "foreign language" class.

There was a practical factor too: unified textbooks meant unified exams, and the language of instruction directly affected scores on crucial tests like the national college entrance exam. Many parents took to the streets out of both cultural identity and fear for their children's futures.

Sources: Wikipedia, "2020 Inner Mongolia protests" (English and Chinese editions); Deutsche Welle, August 2020; Al Jazeera, September 2020.

5. The controversy: protests erupt, crackdown follows (August–October 2020)

Protests began on August 30, 2020, with students spontaneously taking to the streets. After the education department's August 31 announcement, defiance spread into a region-wide boycott and demonstrations — the largest mass protests Inner Mongolia had seen in decades.

In Tongliao, parents who had just dropped their children at boarding schools learned of the reform after the fact; furious parents besieged school gates and were repelled by police. Many families announced they would keep their children home until Mongolian-medium teaching was restored. On social media, Mongolian users vented in Mongolian and Chinese; the posts were swiftly deleted.

The authorities responded with the standard stability-maintenance playbook. First, administrative pressure: civil servants and public employees were ordered to send their children back to school or face suspension without pay from September 8, pending expulsion. Two banner-level (county-level) officials in Zhenglan Banner were suspended for "failing to implement" central directives — a public signal that the order came "from the very top" and local officials had no choice. Second, police force: riot squads and state-security police fanned out across the region. Radio Free Asia reported on September 7 that hundreds of ethnic Mongolians had been arrested or forced to resign from public office; rights lawyer Hu Baolong was seized at his Tongliao home on "picking quarrels and provoking trouble" charges, and activist Yang Jindulima was detained. Third, information blackout: the episode was scrubbed from the mainland Chinese internet, keywords filtered, domestic media silent — only the BBC, NHK, and other foreign outlets covered it.

Notably, the protesters stayed disciplined: boycotts, petitions, gatherings — no large-scale violence. The authorities offered no concessions whatsoever: the policy went ahead as planned, and arrests continued.

Sources: Radio Free Asia, September 7 and October 20, 2020; BBC and NHK, September 2020; Wikipedia, "2020 Inner Mongolia protests"; Sing Tao Daily, September 1, 2020.

6. Results: figures, arrests, and the policy's fate

On the scale of the protests and the crackdown, the figures stand as follows:

A caveat: the 300,000 boycotters and 8,000–10,000 detentions come from the overseas Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center; with the mainland information blockade, independent verification is extremely difficult, so treat them as activist estimates, not precise counts. But multiple sources corroborate the crackdown's breadth: from Tongliao to Xilingol, Hohhot to Ordos, arrests spanned the region.

The outcome: the protests were suppressed, the policy implemented as planned. Mongolian-medium schools switched to the unified textbooks on schedule; Mongolian lost its place as a language of instruction in core subjects. After 2021, similar policies spread to ethnic Korean areas in the northeast (Korean-language teaching phased out), Xinjiang (Uyghur instruction shrinking), and Tibetan areas of Sichuan (private Tibetan-language schools closed) — Inner Mongolia became the template for rolling out the "second-generation ethnic policy" nationwide.

Sources: SMHRIC statement, October 2020; Radio Free Asia, September–October 2020; Wikipedia, "2020 Inner Mongolia protests"; BBC, September 2020.

7. Responsibility: a scholar's loyalty test, a people's price

What makes Shi Taifeng distinctive is his scholarly background. A Peking University law professor ought to know what "governing according to law" and the constitutional protection of minority languages (Article 4 of the PRC Constitution; the Law on Regional Ethnic Autonomy) actually mean. In Inner Mongolia he used the law as a fig leaf for power instead.

Politically, the 2020 reform was a textbook loyalty demonstration. After Xi's September 2019 "community of the Chinese nation" speech, every ethnic-region chief was watching to see who would implement the line first and hardest. Shi had already proven his "firmness" in Ningxia; in Inner Mongolia he needed an even harder credential — and the Mongolian language became it. The timing (late August 2020, rammed through just before the autumn term with no room for public discussion) shows this was not routine education administration but a top-down political campaign.

As regional Party secretary, Shi bears inescapable responsibility for two things: first, the policy itself — stripping Mongolian of its role in core subjects, striking directly at the intergenerational transmission of the language; second, the crackdown — region-wide arrests, house arrests, and suspension threats could not have moved with such uniformity without the Party secretary's sign-off. The two suspended banner officials are the proof: the order came from the top, and failure to execute meant punishment.

The bitter irony of the outcome: the man who caused such an upheaval saw his career not damaged but advanced — into the Politburo in 2022, then the United Front Work Department, then the Organization Department, which oversees ethnic-religious affairs and personnel. The message to every official: crushing a minority is a fast track to promotion.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Shi Taifeng"; PRC Constitution, Article 4; Law on Regional Ethnic Autonomy; Radio Free Asia reporting.

8. Contested narratives

The official narrative: Beijing calls it normal curriculum reform to "strengthen national common-language education" and "advance bilingual education," denies targeting the Mongolian language, and insists Mongolian-language classes remain. On the protests, the official line is "lawful handling of incitement by a tiny handful with ulterior motives." In this telling, Shi is a model implementer of central decisions.

The Mongolian activist and exile narrative: Groups like SMHRIC call it "cultural genocide," arguing that removing Mongolian from core subjects severs the lifeline of Mongolian culture. "Bilingual education," they say, is wordplay — when every important subject is taught in Chinese, Mongolian is reduced to a dispensable "foreign language." In this telling, Shi is the executor who destroyed Mongolian culture.

International observers: BBC, Al Jazeera, and others reported relatively straight — policy content, protest scale, crackdown methods. Scholars of ethnic policy (e.g., James Leibold) place Inner Mongolia in the "second-generation ethnic policy" framework: one link in Beijing's systematic remaking of ethnic-region governance, with Shi as one executor among several — but the most aggressive, provoking the largest backlash.

Sources: BBC, September 2020; Al Jazeera, September 2020; SMHRIC statements; James Leibold's research on the "second-generation ethnic policy."

9. Historical impact

The 2020 Inner Mongolia protests were China's largest ethnic-region mass protests since Lhasa 2008 and Ürümqi 2009. They proved one thing: even under today's information lockdown, a people fighting to keep its language can still organize region-wide non-cooperation — 300,000 students boycotting classes is itself the sharpest rebuke to "ethnic unity" propaganda.

But the protests' defeat also produced a chilling effect: after Inner Mongolia, the tightening of language policy in Korean, Uyghur, and Tibetan areas met no organized resistance. Beijing's lesson from Inner Mongolia: move fast, hit hard, and the cost of repression stays manageable. The "Inner Mongolia model" — surprise policy drops just before term starts, collective punishment of civil servants, total information blackout — became standard procedure for ethnic-region policy.

For Mongolians, autumn 2020 was a cultural watershed. Many parents told foreign media their deepest fear was not arrest but that their children would grow up unable to speak Mongolian. "Our generation may be the last to speak our mother tongue" — the sentence circulated widely among that year's protesters. And the man who engineered it all now sits on the Politburo running the Organization Department.

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