Managing voice, exit and loyalty in Singapore

Managing voice, exit and loyalty in Singapore:

Singapore’s ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) government has lost two by-elections in eight months – one in Hougang on 26 May 2012, and most recently in Punggol East on 26 January 2013 to the Worker’s Party (WP). Some commentators describe the losses as symptoms of a sea change in Singapore politics, and some predict more PAP losses in future elections. Supporters of the PAP government, however, remain optimistic that the ruling party can reinvent itself before the next general elections due in 2016.
In his classic work, Voice, Exit and Loyalty (1970), Albert O. Hirschman combines economic principles and political science by analysing voice and exit as mechanisms for improving the quality of products in an economy or governance in a state. He defines the giving of feedback as voice and the choice of turning to a substitute brand or product as exit. Loyalty, according to Hirschman, is a “less rational, though far from wholly irrational” concept when analysing the response of dissatisfied customers of a company or disgruntled voters in a country. From the two by-election defeats suffered by the PAP, voters in Singapore have taken the exit option by choosing an alternative candidate over the PAP.
To be sure, there are many factors that account for the loss of the Hougang and Punggol East seats by the PAP to the WP. Perhaps the WP candidates, Png Eng Huat and Lee Li Lian, connected better with residents in Hougang and Punggol East, respectively. It could also be the popularity of WP as an alternative political party to the PAP. Some opine that both PAP by-election losses were attributed to a broader discontentment with the government’s policies related to immigration, housing, and transportation. But without comprehensive studies and strong data, it is hard to be sure what the reasons are, and even harder to resist the trend.
Between exit and voice, the ruling party clearly chooses voice as a mechanism to improve its quality of governance. The PAP must listen, or at least be perceived to be listening, to the voices of the people. Soon after the general elections of 2011 (GE2011), the PAP government embarked on a structured approach to gather feedback from cross-sections of the population through the “Our Singapore Conversation” (OSC) project. The prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, and other ministers were featured on forums broadcasted on national television in English and Chinese channels, apparently to demonstrate sincerity in listening to the voices of the people. The OSC has drawn more criticisms than applause because of the composition of the committee reflecting the glaring absence of participants from other political parties.
Prime Minister Lee has also started his own Facebook page where he attempts to engage the section of Singapore’s population that actively plugs in to social media. Unlike the use of traditional media such as television and newspapers, PM Lee’s Facebook posts attract mostly encouraging comments. It may well be a sign that the prime minister is making some headway in engaging the people through Facebook.
Despite its ostensible goals, OSC falls short of Hirschman’s definition of voice. The voice in the OSC lacks the spontaneity in most democratic societies where civil rights are respected and protected. Without the freedom to speak up openly on issues deemed to be unjust, Hirschman argues that “dissatisfaction is more likely to take the form of silent exit”.
There are at least two ways that Singaporeans can choose exit over voice. Elections remain a legitimate and effective means to shift allegiance from the PAP to opposition parties. Another form of silent exit comes in the form of migrating overseas. The number of Singaporeans giving up citizenship hovers around 1,200 annually since 2007, and the number of Singaporeans currently residing overseas is approximately 200,000 based on the newly-released Population White Paper.
The PAP government now struggles to create a positive trajectory in guarding PAP votes and retaining Singapore’s best and brightest talents. When weighing the costs of exit, exiting citizens must reckon that the greatest loss is their right as citizens to participate as members of the society to have a voice. Yet since the PAP government has successfully curtailed freedom of speech and public demonstrations, more Singaporeans may pack and leave the country for good.
There is a third group: the PAP loyalists. They, too, may not be fully satisfied with the government’s policies. They remain loyal, however, because they are hopeful that the PAP will deliver on its promises and hold the belief that if they preserve their right to a voice, no matter how small that voice may be, they will eventually be heard. To be sure, the GE2011 results indicate that majority of Singaporeans voted for the PAP. They are the ones putting up “Likes” and supportive comments on the Facebook pages of PAP MPs. But this group looks set to shrink very quickly. To reverse the downward trend, the PAP will have to fight GE2016 on two fronts: One, to retain the support of the loyalists with continuance of policies that worked well in the past; two, to convince the Singaporeans on the threshold of exiting that they have a voice.
Daniel Wei Boon Chua is a PhD Candidate at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University.

Emerging Political Apathy in Post-War East Timor | East Timor Law and Justice Bulletin

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Urumqi Faces Soaring Costs

Urumqi Faces Soaring Costs:
Residents of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region’s capital Urumqi say they are barely able to make ends meet due to a ballooning cost of living in the city with the highest inflation rate in all of China.

Urumqi’s 2012 consumer price index (CPI), which measures changes in the price level of consumer goods and services purchased by households, had jumped 3.4 percent in December from the previous year, higher than the CPI for all of China, which rose 2.5 percent for the year in the same month.

Xinjiang’s CPI was even higher at 5.4 percent.

Sources said the rocketing prices of daily goods in Urumqi are now affecting the wallets of all of the city’s inhabitants and that several entrepreneurs have had to shutter their shops because they cannot keep up with the growing costs of doing business.

“Yes, inflation is up,” a Uyghur restaurant owner named Tursun told RFA’s Uyghur Service. “For example, lamb is 50 yuan (U.S. $8) per kilogram (2.2 pounds) at the wholesale market, but if you get it from a regular vendor it costs 53 yuan (U.S. $8.50). Last year it was 43 yuan (U.S. $6.90).”

“Of course it is affecting us very badly. Prices have been raised at many restaurants, but I haven’t increased mine yet,” he said.

“There are some restaurants that have been forced to close their businesses because of the inflation.”

Tursun said that the cost of lamb had risen in Urumqi because it is in high demand across China and is being shipped out of the region to other cities at a high volume. But he said that a growing population in the city and a reduction in the amount of pastureland in the area had also contributed to local demand, further increasing the price.

“In addition to meat,” he said, “rice, flour and other groceries are also getting more expensive.”

“Green peppers are more than 15 yuan (U.S. $2.40) per kilo,” he said, without providing further details.

Salaries inadequate

A young Uyghur woman named Adela, who works in a local restaurant, said what little wage increases she had received had not kept pace with the rising costs.

“I received a salary raise of 300 yuan (U.S. $48) [per year]. I was paid 2,000 yuan (U.S. $321) last year and this year I am making 2,300 yuan (U.S. $369),” Adela said.

“But even with this, I cannot support myself,” she said.

“For 100 yuan (U.S. $16), you cannot buy much and in no time your money is gone. You don’t even know where it went!”

A Chinese resident surnamed Wang, who moved to Urumqi in 2008, said that the average person now needs a salary of about 5,000 yuan (U.S. $802) to live moderately in the city.

“The cost of everything is up now. From food to beverages,” Wang told RFA.

“Of course it affects your life. You need to make 5,000 yuan to live a simple lifestyle, but most people can’t make that much,” he said.

“Things are very bad … A plate of noodles used to cost 5 yuan (U.S. $0.80), but now it’s up to 20 yuan (U.S. $3.21).”

A Uyghur youth named Yasin told RFA that he barely made enough salary to eat.

“I only make 1,000 yuan (U.S. $160) per year, which isn’t even enough to eat, so now I have to live with my sister,” Yasin said.

“In some places, a plate of noodles is as much as 30 yuan (U.S. $4.81)!”

Residents of Xinjiang are no strangers to inflation.

In August 2011, the government earmarked 68 million yuan (U.S. $10.9 million) in temporary subsidies for about 2.3 million low-income residents of the region to help them offset the impact of rising prices after the CPI in Xinjiang rose 6.9 percent year-on-year in July.

Reported by Guliqiekela Keyoumu for RFA’s Uyghur service. Translated by Mamatjan Juma. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

‘Last Chance’ to Pay Respects

‘Last Chance’ to Pay Respects:
As crowds mourned Cambodia’s former king at the start of his four-day funeral on Friday, exiled opposition leader Sam Rainsy pleaded with the government to honor the monarch’s commitment to national reconciliation.
The government had rejected Sam Rainsy's requests to be allowed to return for the funeral.
Hundreds of thousands of mourners dressed in black and white gathered since dawn to pay their respects to the King Father Norodom Sihanouk, who died of a heart attack in October at the age of 89.
A procession carried his coffin in a gold float through the crowd-lined streets of Phnom Penh from the Royal Palace to the funeral pyre where his body will be cremated on Monday.
A revered monarch, Sihanouk steered the country as king and politician through six decades of independence, civil war, the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, his own exile, and democratic transition, before abdicating in favor of his son in 2004.
National reconciliation
In a statement paying his last respects to the monarch, National Rescue Party President Sam Rainsy accused Hun Sen’s government of failing to honor Sihanouk’s commitment to national reconciliation.
“I am very sad that some of the Khmer leaders don’t respect the ideas of national reconciliation and unity that the former king encouraged.”
“Those who ignore the former king’s ideas have dragged the country to disaster,” he said.
Sihanouk was seen as a symbol of national reconciliation and unity when after the end of the Khmer Rouge era he retook the throne in 1993, following a U.N.-brokered peace treaty that led to a shaky democratic transition which brought Hun Sen into power.
Hun Sen’s administration has returned Sam Rainsy’s three letters of request to return home for the funeral without providing any explanation, officials of the opposition Sam Rainsy Party (SRP) said in October last year.
They interpreted the return of the letters to SRP to mean that the government had rejected Sam Rainsy’s request.
Sam Rainsy, who is living in exile in France, faces 12 years in prison, on charges he says are politically motivated, if he returns to Cambodia.
He is also aiming to return to the country to challenge Hun Sen’s ruling Cambodian People’s Party ahead of elections in July.
A longtime Cambodian politician, he served under Sihanouk as minister of finance for the royalist Funcinpec Party in 1993.
He said in the statement the government should stick to its commitments of national reconciliation and unity.
“This is the last chance for the country’s leaders to prove their true intentions because they have claimed that they would comply with the former king’s ideals.”
The National Rescue Party, an opposition coalition formed in 2012, is challenging the ruling Cambodian People’s Party on a reform platform and pushing for an overhaul of the electoral system.
The government has announced it is releasing 500 prisoners in an amnesty during the four-day cremation period.
Mourners
Sihanouk is a revered figured in Cambodia, where many elderly people recall the period of his first reign in the 1950s and 1960s as a golden era.
Mourners watching the funeral procession massed near the Royal Palace before dawn, many of them weeping and holding their hands together in a mark of respect.
“I have supported him until he died. He had been with us for a long time,” said villager Him Hoy, 55 who watched the parade.
Vann Von, a volunteer distributing food during the parade, said many of the mourners had traveled from outside of Phnom Penh for the funeral.
“The mourners they are hot and exhausted. They need water so we are giving them water,” he said.
Sihanouk’s body lay in state at the Royal Palace since October after being flown home from Beijing where he was receiving medical treatment when he died.
It will be kept at the cremation site until the cremation ceremony when his wife, Queen Mother Monineath, and King Sihamoni are expected to light the pyre.
Reported by RFA's Khmer Service. Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Rachel Vandenbrink.

Uyghur Scholar Taken Back Home

Uyghur Scholar Taken Back Home:
Chinese authorities have prevented an outspoken ethnic Uyghur scholar from leaving for the United States to take up a post at Indiana University after detaining and interrogating him at the Beijing airport.

Ilham Tohti told RFA's Uyghur Service that he was taken back to his Beijing home late Saturday by Chinese security officers after being held and questioned at the airport for about eight hours.

His teenage daughter, who was to have accompanied him, was allowed to take the American Airlines flight to the U.S.

"I have been told that my daughter boarded a flight for the U.S.," said Ilham Tohti, a professor at the Central Minorities University in Beijing and a vocal critic of the Chinese government's treatment of the minority Uyghurs, most of whom live in the northwestern Xinjiang region and complain of discrimination by the country's majority ethnic Han Chinese.

It is not known why he was prevented from leaving the country to take up the post of visiting scholar at Indiana University.

U.S. authorities have issued him a J-1 visa, which is for "work- and study-based exchange visitor programs."  His daughter has a J-2 visa, usually issued to dependents of J-1 visa holders.

Detained several times
Ilham Tohti has been detained several times before, and he and his family have faced a number of restrictions in Beijing since July 2009 when deadly ethnic violence between Uyghurs and Han Chinese rocked Xinjiang region's capital Urumqi, leaving about 200 people dead.

He had told his friend via text messages earlier Saturday that he and his daugter were detained "as they were going through security checks" at the airport and were watched over by several policemen.

He was the founder of Uyghur Online, a moderate, intellectual website addressing social issues. It was shut down by authorities in 2009.

A new version of the site, which reports Xinjiang news and discusses Uyghur social issues, reopened last year and is hosted overseas and blocked by censors in China.

Ilham Tohti was taken away from Beijing to Urumqi and Atush, his hometown in the Xinjiang region, in October last year ahead of the 18th National Congress of the ruling Chinese Communist Party in the Chinese capital.

His six-year-old son was refused entry to primary school in Beijing last year.

Afraid

Ilham Tohti told RFA in December that he was afraid that speaking out about Uyghur social issues in Xinjiang was negatively affecting his family’s life in Beijing in addition to his own.

In August, Chinese authorities interrogated the professor, warning him not to speak to foreign media or discuss religion online, after he alleged on his website that the authorities had sent armed forces to mosques in Xinjiang to monitor Muslims during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

In September 2011, the Central Minorities University cancelled a class taught by him on immigration, discrimination, and development in Xinjiang, where many Muslim Uyghurs chafe under Beijing's rule.

Ilham Tohti, who has called for implementation of regional autonomy laws in his home region, was also detained for two months following the July 2009 ethnic violence.

Uyghurs say they have long suffered ethnic discrimination, oppressive religious controls, and continued poverty and joblessness despite China's ambitious plans to develop its vast northwestern frontier.

Chinese authorities often link Uyghurs in Xinjiang to violent separatist groups but experts familiar with the region have said Beijing exaggerates what it calls a terrorism threat to take the heat off domestic policies that cause unrest.

Reported by Mihray Abdilim for RFA’s Uyghur Service. Written in English by Parameswaran Ponnudurai and Jennifer Chou.

Malaysia Hit for Deporting Uyghurs

Malaysia Hit for Deporting Uyghurs:
Malaysia has secretly deported six Uyghur asylum seekers to China even though they could be persecuted or tortured on their return home, according to a U.S.-based rights group, citing "credible" sources and criticizing the move as unlawful.

The Uyghurs were repatriated on Dec. 31 in "grave violation of international law" and ahead of a visit to Malaysia this week by China's top political advisor Jia Qinglin, Human Rights Watch said in a statement.

This is the second time predominantly Muslim Malaysia has deported asylum-seeking mostly Uyghur Muslims back to China. In 2011, 11 Uyghurs were deported and they were thrown in jail on their return on separatism charges.

Malaysia is among several Asian nations which have bowed to demands by Beijing to repatriate the Uyghur minority fleeing persecution in their homeland in China’s restive northwestern Xinjiang region.

“While Malaysians were celebrating the New Year, their government was forcibly returning Uyghur asylum seekers to a dangerously uncertain fate in China.” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, which has protested the Malaysian action in a letter to Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak.

“The government has an obligation to explain how this happened, China’s role, and the steps being taken to ensure it doesn’t happen again,” he said in a statement.

False passports

Human Rights Watch said the six Uyghur men had been detained earlier in 2012 allegedly for attempting to leave Malaysia on false passports.

While in detention, they were registered with the office of the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR and were permitted to proceed with refugee status determination (RSD) interviews.

"Although all six had asylum claims being reviewed, Malaysian police clandestinely transferred the men in late December into the custody of Chinese authorities, who escorted them from Malaysia to China on a chartered flight," Human Rights Watch said.

Under international law, it is unlawful for any country to return individuals to a place where they are likely to face persecution or torture.

UNHCR spokeswoman Yante Ismail expressed regret that despite the agency's representations to the Malaysian government over the cases of the six men, they had been deported to "a country where their human rights might be at risk," Agence France-Presse reported.

Representatives for Malaysia's Home Ministry, which handles police and security issues, said they could not immediately comment, according to the Associated Press.

Evidence

The Chinese government frequently accuses ethnic Uyghurs, particularly those seeking asylum, of being terrorists or separatists without providing evidence to substantiate such claims, Human Rights Watch said.

“This isn’t the first time the Malaysian government has violated international law on Beijing’s behalf, but it has the chance to make it the last,” Robertson said.

“Announcing Malaysia’s commitment to protecting refugees and ratifying the refugee conventions would be a good place to start,” he said.

A mother of one of the 11 Uyghurs repatriated by Malaysia in 2011 told RFA’s Uyghur Service in December that her son is serving a three-year sentence for separatism in Hotan prison in Xinjiang, following a secret trial in July.

Friends of his and the other 10 deported men said they have heard that all of them had been thrown in jail for up to 15 years, though they did not wish to be named and the sentences could not be confirmed.

Other countries that have repatriated Uyghurs allegedly following pressure from Chinese authorities are Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos.

Jia heads a 60-member delegation on a four-day visit to Malaysia beginning Monday, during which he will sign a series of agreements and open a joint industrial park, Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported.

China hopes Jia's visit makes the "China-Malaysia traditional friendship last forever" and "underscores the "good momentum in strategic [bilateral] cooperation," it said.

Reported by Parameswaran Ponnudurai.

Custom Date Range Tips for Google Search

Custom Date Range Tips for Google Search: Google's search engine has a cool feature that lets you restrict the results to a certain time range. It's mostly used to find recent results, so the default options are: past hour, past 24 hours, past week/month/year, but you can customize the time range. Just click "search tools" below the search box, then click "any time" and select "custom range" from the list.

You can use Google's calendar widget to pick the dates, but there are some tricks that help you enter dates faster:

1. Enter "2011" in the "from" field, instead of "1/1/2011". Obviously, you can use any other year.

2. Enter "3/2011" or "March 2011" in the "from" field, instead of "3/1/2011" (or "1/3/2011", depending on your country).

3. Enter "2011" in the "to" field, instead of "12/31/2011" (or "31/12/2011", depending on your country). Obviously, you can use any other year.

4. Enter "3/2011" or "March 2011" in the "to" field, instead of "3/31/2011" (or "31/3/2011", depending on your country).

5. To restrict the results to pages from 2011, enter "2011" in the "from" and "to" fields.

6. To restrict the results to pages from March 2011, enter "3/2011" in the "from" and "to" fields.

7. Leave the "to" field empty instead of entering today's date.

8. Leave the "from" field empty to find pages created before the day entered in the "to" field.

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“Matenek Lokal, Timor Nian!” (Traditional Knowledge of Timor!): a proceeding of the national workshop on promoting Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems (LINKS) and Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in Timor Leste

Full-text report in Tetum and English
http://portal.unesco.org/geography/en/ev.php-URL_ID=15178&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

Organs Seized From Uyghurs

Organs Seized From Uyghurs:
A “high” number of Uyghurs, including youngsters seized by security forces following ethnic unrest in China’s Xinjiang region, may have become victims of forced organ harvesting, according to an independent researcher.

Ethan Gutmann said that the forced disappearance of hundreds of Uyhgur men and boys following the 2009 ethnic riots in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi “should be of great concern to the world no matter what else may be occurring.”

“But I suspect it goes further than that,” Gutmann, an expert at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told RFA’s Uyghur Service when asked about the possibility that many ordinary Uyghurs, apart from political prisoners, would have been victims of forced organ harvesting.

“I’ll just say this: I think what has happened to the Uyghur community inside China since 2009 is a great mystery. And I have some ideas, some clues that suggest some very disturbing possibilities, but I am not willing to make any definitive statement until I have proof in hand.”

The Munich-based Uyghur World Uyghur Congress (WUC), an exile group, last year called on China to account for the thousands of Uyghurs believed to have disappeared in custody after deadly violence following long-simmering tensions between Han Chinese and Uyghurs.

“Many Uyghurs have attempted to uncover the whereabouts, condition, and fate of their forcibly disappeared loved ones, but continually find their requests for information being rejected or ignored,” said WUC president Rebiya Kadeer.

China has been extracting organs from living prisoners in addition to its much publicized and criticized practice of taking vital body parts from executed convicts, Gutmann told a U.S. congressional hearing in September last year.

A new issue

Most victims are said to be practitioners of China’s banned Falun Gong spiritual group, but Gutmann told the hearing he believes that the practice of taking organs from prisoners began in the remote Xinjiang region—where ethnic Uyghurs say they are discriminated against by Han Chinese—in the 1990s and had expanded nationwide by 2001.

When asked by RFA to compare the plight of Uyghur organ-harvesting victims to those of the Falun Gong group, Gutmann said that though it is “indisputable” that the vast majority of victims have been members of the spiritual group, Falun Gong media outlets have begun listing Uyghurs as victims as well.

“That’s a real shift for Falun Gong practitioners, who start from a base of being unavoidably influenced by mainland cultural norms and prejudices.”

“Personally I estimate 65,000 of them [Falun Gong members] went under the knife—and there’s nothing surprising about those numbers as Falun Gong comprised fully 70 million people at its height in 1999,” he said.

“How many Uyghurs were harvested? Hard to answer, and although it may be high in a per-capita sense, it will always be much smaller than Falun Gong in absolute numbers.”

Also, he said research on forced organ-harvesting among Uyghurs is a relatively new issue.

“Keep in mind too that it’s a relatively new issue. Researchers have been looking into Falun Gong harvesting since 2006; I only came out with “The Xinjiang Procedure” a year ago,” he said, referring to a report he has published on the systematic live harvesting of organs by the Chinese regime.

Testing ground

Gutmann said he was aware of Chinese nuclear tests in Xinjiang during the 1960s and of allegations of birth defects and unusual cancers among the Uyghur population and “couldn’t help but wonder if the region was being used as a testing ground again, this time, for live organ harvesting.”

In conducting his own research on organ harvesting in China, “Uyghur organizations and individuals were extraordinarily helpful,” Gutmann said.

“[I also tried to] cut down on possible contact with spies. You know, espionage is just a fact of life for any organized force which is going up against the [ruling] Chinese Communist Party.”

Gutmann noted that the U.S. government has so far taken a “passive role” in the controversy.

“[But] if you accept that organ harvesting of prisoners of conscience has taken place, if you accept the existence of this mini-genocide, then, as the world’s superpower, you are honor-bound to do something about it,” Gutmann said.

“And the U.S. feels that conflict with China at a time when the economy is so shaky is an unaffordable luxury.”

Simple and practical steps can still be taken, though, Gutmann said, suggesting that efforts be made to “criminalize the ‘organ tourism’ procedure in China” and forbid American companies from conducting “clinical tests of transplant patients on [China’s] mainland.”

U.S. medical schools should also refuse to train surgeons from China, “unless they can verify they are not going to conduct forced organ harvesting,” Gutmann said.

'Unsustainable'?

“The U.S. government opposes illegal or unethical harvesting of, or trafficking in, human organs,” the State Department said in a Dec. 19 reply to a congressional letter asking for information on transplant abuses in China.

"The U.S. government has urged China to cease the practice of organ harvesting from executed prisoners," the State Department said.

"There are indications that Chinese authorities are rethinking their policies and revising their practices ... [but] we will continue to make known our concerns and urge China to take steps to stop such abuses.”

Interviewed last year in the World Health Organization's Bulletin, Wang Haibo, an organ transplant expert for China's Ministry of Health, acknowledged ethical problems with the use of organs taken from executed prisoners and called the system unsustainable.

"The implementation of [a] new national system will start early next year [2013] at the latest," Wang said.

But though civil hospitals in China may perform transplant surgery, the harvesting of organs itself is done by China's military and police, said Torsten Trey, executive director of the Washington-based Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting.

"The military hospitals operate on their own decisions, and don't have to follow orders from the civil side, including the Ministry of Health," Trey said.

"Once an organ is procured and offered for transplantation to civil hospitals, it is almost impossible to track down the organ source on the military side."
Reported by Rukiye Turdush for RFA’s Uyghur Service. Written in English with additional reporting by Richard Finney.

Language Boost Debated

Language Boost Debated:
Authorities in northern China’s Inner Mongolia region are considering adopting new rules to boost the use of the Mongolian language, following a proposal by ethnic minority lawmakers.
The proposed rules are aimed at making existing regulations on promotion of the Mongolian language more explicit, including by setting language proficiency standards for officials and adding guarantees that Mongolians can use their native tongue.
The proposals are expected to be considered for adoption by Inner Mongolia’s regional government this year, according to the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center (SMHRIC), a U.S.-based group that monitors rights developments in the region.
“Mongolians are demanding this and they will be able to use these [new rules] as a weapon to defend their rights,” SMHRIC’s director Enhebatu Togochog told RFA.
“They can use these rules to continue to pursue their lawsuits and complaints.”
More binding
Authorities informed ethnic Mongolian lawmakers in December 2012 that they could proceed with writing up proposed articles to tighten existing laws and that they would be included in the regional government’s legislative work plan for 2013.
The Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region—which borders the country of Mongolia in the north and is home to some 4 million ethnic Mongolians—adopted its current Regulation on the Work of Usage of Mongolian Language and Script in 2004.
The regulation, which went into effect a year later, set out requirements for regional government organs to promote the use of the language.
The new rules, if adopted, will require government officials to have the ability to communicate in Mongolian and will help ensure equal treatment in government employment for native Mongolian speakers, among specifying other requirements, Togochog said.
Togochog said that existing laws promoting and protecting native language rights lack teeth because they are too general and ethnic Mongolian lawmakers were proposing the detailed stipulations in order to make the existing regulations more binding.
“China is not a country of rule of law. Even if [laws are] passed, there is a problem of implementation.”
“That’s why Mongolians are concerned that every article [in the new rules] be detailed, addressing specific issues instead of general statements,” Togochog said.
In response to the text of the new rules circulated online to solicit public feedback, one commenter, G. Sainbayar from Heshigten banner (county) in Ulaanhad (in Chinese, Chifeng), said more specific rules were needed to strengthen the current regulation.
“Due to their lack of legally binding features and accountability to responsible parties, the Mongolians’ legal rights can hardly be protected by the regulations,” the commenter said, according to a translation provided by SMHRIC.
Others posted suggestions that the new articles should include provisions for the creation of additional Mongolian-language schools, stipulations that the heads of government organs must be ethnic Mongolians, and requirements that officials who don’t use the language be dismissed.

Ongoing problems
Scholars say the number of Mongolian speakers is difficult to determine—though some have estimated around 3 million—because China provides no figures and the number is declining under the influence of Chinese language.
“The use of the Mongolian language is largely neglected by the Chinese authorities,” Togochog said, even though the 2005 regulation requires that state organs carry out their duties using mainly the Mongolian language.
The existing regulation also says all levels of government in the region should encourage use of the Mongolian language.
Another complaint among Mongolians is that college graduates educated in the language have a hard time finding jobs, Togochog said.
“Ordinary Mongolians who speak Mongolian are discriminated against,” he said.
In 2011, thousands of university and high school students in the region demonstrated to call for better rights protection for Mongolians, following protests sparked by the death of a Mongolian herdsman run over by the driver of a mining company’s coal truck in a grassland area.
Authorities clamped down on the demonstrations by putting schools under lockdown and closing Mongolian-language websites.
In recent years, Mongolians in the region have used existing laws to challenge restrictions on the use of the language rights, including by forcing government agencies to use and accept documents and signatures in Mongolian instead of Chinese and advocating for more use of Mongolian in schools.
In one case, a man sued the postal service several for failing to deliver mail with addresses written in Mongolian on the envelope.
Togochog said he hoped the new rules could be used as a tool by ethnic Mongolians to further defend their rights.
“There will not be a huge change because China is not a country with the rule of law. But still, it’s better than nothing,” he said.
Reported by Rachel Vandenbrink.