Slop.

the National People's Congress in Beijing, which has never rejected an item on its agenda

As well as being misleading (the NPC can change proposed laws to an unlimited degree as suits them, sometimes over the course of years, so why would you not eventually pass it). This line has been repeated at every media outlet. And 20 seconds of reading Wikipedia shows it's just.. objectively false.

in 2015, the NPC refused to pass a package of bills proposed by the State Council, insisting that each bill require a separate vote and revision process

The time for legislation can be as short as six months, or as long as 15 years for controversial legislation such as the Anti-Monopoly Law.

Weird how this democratically elected "rubber stamp" parliamentary body are constantly changing and rejecting laws as suits them under Xi's DICTATORSHIP. It's almost like China is actually just a parliamentary democracy with more sensible structures and incentives.

I'm also not sure how I feel about the languages thing. I can see the reasoning to do it, but I can also understand the fear of losing local languages (and the consequent value lost). BBC has zero right to talk about it though - the UK government ALSO requires that English be taught in all schools, and more prominent on all signs before Cornish, Welsh, Scottish or Irish Gaellic, etc, so labelling it as SCARY CHINA EVIL attitude is quite amazing hypocrisy.

Out of interest I read the rest of the draft but it's not that interesting. It repeats itself a lot by having multiple articles roughly say the same thing but for different facets of government (perhaps that's why it feels "sweeping" to Westerners). There's stuff about economic development, interethnic exchange and persecuting acts that threaten national unity.

Article 29 talks about people learning eachothers' culture and language and promoting that in cultural institutions, which was nice. Article 55 talks about creating "model areas" of interethnic unity; Article 56 stipulates a "National Unity and Progress Publicity Week" in September. Notably there are no changes to the governance of autonomous regions.

It reads more like a policy guideline or to-do list than a law that itself changes how the government functions.

It makes sense that Chinese ethnic minorities should have a proficiency in Putonghua since that is a necessary skill for living in China, but it is an extra step to say that Chinese characters must be displayed more prominently when displayed in public. That is assimilationist and will likely promote ethnic disunity rather than unity.

Also the law explicitly states that “preserving minority languages” means digitizing and recording them so they are not lost to posterity. It explicitly states that maintaining them as living languages is not a goal. I think this is poor policy as well.

Americans cannot imagine anything worse than being forced to learn a second language

"China ~~mandates~~ sponsors Mandarin as a second language education for all its citizens."

Don't let libs forget the complacency of the BBC in the Palestinian genocide. Smash it again and again, that they're echoing Zionist media that engages in genocide denial.

It's possible that the law has something bad, but they don't explain this being anything more than mandating everyone be taught Mandarin, which is a good policy to have because as many people as possible in a country should have at least one language in common.

It mandates that all children should be taught Mandarin before kindergarten and up until the end of high school.

As-expressed, this is a good policy, but then the next sentence (of the two-sentence paragraph) says:

Previously students could study most of the curriculum in their native language such as Tibetan, Uyghur or Mongolian.

Which does not contradict the previous claim? Being taught a language is not the same as the rest of your schooling being taught in that or another language, unless they are complaining that classes teaching Mandarin will not exclusively be taught in e.g. the Uyghur language because it will need to use Mandarin in order to teach it, which is a bizarre and worthless complaint.

Also, even then they say "most of the curriculum," which should logically still be true unless "most" meant "a slim majority" and this is pushing it over, something they never explain, let alone substantiate.

"The children of the next generation are now isolated and brutally forced to forget their own language and culture."

This is never substantiated.

Beijing has long been accused of restricting the rights of minority ethnic groups in regions like Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia.

Accused by who? This is a great example of the passive voice actually being used for propagandistic purposes.

Aside from the UN in the Xinjiang case, the article just goes on to cite other reporting by the BBC, so I guess they mean "Beijing has long been accused by us"

Also OP, you left out another classic buzzword:

Authorities moved quickly to crackdown on what it saw as dissent.

Good thing the west never forces people to learn languages or selects a single language for their state and stamps out minority dialects. Definitely not something the UK, France, etc have any experience with and certainly something Americans are blameless on. They're all so egalitarian about people speaking other languages and not full of people who immediately fly into a frothing rage at the suggestion some child within their borders may not speak their national language.

I've seen the French, British, Americans, Germans, all basically say of the migrants that they have to learn and speak their language to stay.

I think people need to divorce the idea that school education should be expected to be in the exact same variety of language that the students would use with their family and friends. It's honestly not even a good thing. Unless there's a grand total of 100 native speakers, nobody uses the same exact variety of language. Tibetans don't all speak a single variety of a Sino-Tibetan language called Tibetan. They speak various closely related varieties, what most people would called dialects. What's called Tibetan is Standard Tibetan, which is based on a particular dialect or group of dialects along with various other changes to smooth over any regionalism. And if it's done right, Standard Tibetan wouldn't just be the Tibetan spoken in the largest Tibetan city with some token regionalisms thrown in to disguise the copypasta job, but a constructed variety that is equaldistant enough from major Tibetan varieties that no speaker of a Tibetan variety can say, "See, I'm speaking real Tibetan that's taught in school and used in government, unlike you dumbass losers who are speaking grammatically incorrect Tibetan." You're just replacing ethnic majority chauvinism with a regional chauvinism.

The ideal policy would be students are taught the regional lingua franca and the national lingua franca, especially if the regional lingua franca and national lingua franca are too different from each other. Both the standardized regional lingua franca and standardized national lingua franca ought to be different enough from an actually spoken variety in order to suppress regional chauvinism. But I don't agree with the idea that education ought to be done in the same exact variety spoken at home or by the local village at all. People are more than capable of learning multiple languages.

idk if this would be considered reactionary but I'm kind of against language barriers. I do think it's better when more people speak the same language. And if everyone in the world has to learn one language, it should probably be Chinese I guess

This reminds me of that all-timer rage bait where that anarchist tweeted "We must remember that literacy is not an unalloyed good."

"Hey Lemmy.World, how's it going?"

https://lemmy.world/post/44186892

I don't go over there, like ever. Randomly checked today and saw they had the same thread we're talking about now. Just non-stop thought-terminating clichés. And they're not Stormfront, so these libs are just posting fed talking points out of pure love for the game. Anyone suggesting students can't even graduate high school in the US unless they have English credits are all down voted.

It's really hard to parse through the article wether this is actually a rare China L or just typical bad reporting

One major point, the article frames this as being used to suppress "non-han" ethnicities. In fact, the biggest loss of linguistic diversity going on is with han Chinese losing dialects of yue, wu, etc.

The article is scant on what the actual changes the law will bring is. My preference for every country is that elementary school should be taught in the students home language, where possible, and middle to high should be a world language like Chinese, Arabic, English, Spanish, etc.

Put this shit in the Inventing Reality comm

It is my understanding that every child in China is required to complete at least grade 9 (basically junior high) and in school you already learn Mandarin so even if this was mandated then what would it change?

Controversial take: literacy good, language skills also good

Glad to see that evidently the Hexbear party line is that colonial policies that destroy the cultures of Indigenous groups are actually Cool and Based as long as it's a Chinese Person doing it.

This website is such a joke with the China circlejerking sometimes, come on, the reflexive defense of everything China does has gone way too far when we have a thread like this where people aren't even investigating the law in question and arguing about how it's 'not that bad' or whatever to actively regress in policy towards linguistic minorities and take away schooling in local languages that already existed.