The desire of the Chinese authorities to control the narrative regarding its borderland peoples has been dealt a blow with the opening of the exhibition, Genghis Khan: Comment les Mongols ont changé le monde at the Chateau des ducs de Bretagne in Nantes, France.
In Blockbuster show on Genghis Khan opens in France after row with China, the Guardian reports:
The museum row in 2020 focused on the project’s collaboration with the Inner Mongolia Museum in Hohhot, China. Chinese authorities demanded that certain words, including “Genghis Khan”, “empire” and “Mongol”, be taken out of the French show. They asked for power over exhibition brochures, explainers and maps at a time when the Chinese government had hardened its discrimination against ethnic Mongols, many of whom live in the northern Chinese province of Inner Mongolia.
The Nantes museum pulled the plug and refused the demands, saying Chinese authorities wanted “elements of biased rewriting of Mongol culture in favour of a new national narrative”.
Instead, the French worked with museums based in the Republic of Mongolia, primarily the Chinggis Khaan National Museum in Ulaan Bataar.
Interestingly, the year 2020 also saw large-scale protests in Inner Mongolia, when the authorities announced the transition to Mandarin-medium teaching in Inner Mongolia schools. Some schools taught largely in Mongolian, a policy similarly applied to schools in Xinjiang and Tibet, that were formerly — but are no longer — permitted to teach mainly in Uyghur and Tibetan, respectively.
However, as of September 2023, all Inner Mongolia schools were ordered to switch to teaching the core curriculum in Chinese. Mongolian is now to be used only for Mongolian language classes a few hours a week.
(***Note: To view comments or add one, pls scroll to bottom of page)
Ethnic ChinaLit 