Why was this ethnic Mongolian school teacher branded an enemy of China?

Even after fleeing to Thailand the Chinese state chased him down

By Alice Su

My Mongolian name is Adiya, though the name on my passport is Wu Guoxing. I’m 34 and was born in the eastern part of Inner Mongolia, a region in northern China. When I was little all my lessons were in Mongolian and I used Mongolian in my daily life. That changed as I grew up.

The Chinese government sent tens of thousands of Han Chinese, who make up more than 92% of China’s population, as migrants to Mongolian areas. Many people in Inner Mongolia married Han Chinese and their children went to schools that taught in Mandarin. Gradually, it seemed as though there were fewer and fewer Mongolians. As a child I just thought, oh, there are more Chinese people, so we need Chinese to communicate. Only later, when I was in my 30s, did I realise that the shift was permanent.

In the early 2000s we started having to use Mandarin for anything official. In school, even our English lessons were taught in Mandarin, which was already our second language. The price tags and product names in the supermarkets began to be written in Chinese; you had to speak Mandarin with the cashiers. The party is clever – it spent 20 or 30 years implementing this process.

I didn’t go to university. I studied software engineering at a technical high school. After that there was no further education in computing available in Mongolian, only Mandarin. In 2008 I moved to Beijing and got a job working in computer maintenance. I studied computer skills on my own, in Mandarin; after eight years I began to lose my Mongolian. I can still speak it, but I end up using Mandarin for many nouns – I’ve forgotten how to say them in my native language.

I moved back to Inner Mongolia in 2016, to Hohhot, the capital, home to 3m people. It’s more Chinese than any other city in the region, and we don’t use much Mongolian in daily life. In Beijing I’d spent a few years working for a company that offered coding classes for children. I decided to start my own company teaching computer skills to Mongolian children aged 8-12, who otherwise have little access to this kind of education. I ran lessons in coding and mathematical thinking, some in Mandarin and some in Mongolian.

At first, parents thought their kids were just playing computer games, so I didn’t charge for the lessons. The students liked the classes and their grades started rising. Many parents were pleased, so I collected tuition fees in the second year. But when the local education and commerce departments found out I was teaching some classes in Mongolian, they told me to stop. They couldn’t point to any specific law I’d broken: they just said I had to teach in Mandarin. I decided to keep going.

In the past I’d been too busy working to think about politics, but because of my computer skills I knew how to get past China’s internet firewall. In 2019 I used a VPN to watch the protests in Hong Kong. I recorded some of them and made a short video out of the clips, which I posted on WeChat and Weibo. I was impressed by Hong Kongers’ unity and wanted to support them. Within a few minutes of posting the film my accounts were shut down, but I didn’t think much more about that at the time.

Fighting talk Opening image: In Ulaanbaatar, capital of Mongolia, people demonstrated against plans by the Chinese state to introduce Mandarin-only classes in Inner Mongolia, a province of China that neighbours the country of Mongolia. Some school textbooks have been translated into Mandarin (top). As Mandarin became the dominant language, people worried that children could lose their native tongue (above)

Most people in Inner Mongolia didn’t notice or care about what was happening in Hong Kong. I told my friends: if this is Hong Kong today, it could be Inner Mongolia soon. Most of them laughed. We don’t have any problems, we don’t make trouble, they said. But a year later the trouble started.

In 2020 the Chinese government passed an education reform, cutting the number of primary-school subjects taught in Mongolian and using Mandarin for teaching instead. This was a big deal to Mongolians. The early years are crucial for language learning. People were worried that children would lose their mother tongue – that their culture would slowly become extinct. I thought about my experience of losing my own language. I had a strong feeling that I wanted to protect my mother tongue, to protect my people.

The government’s new policy provoked protests in every city in Inner Mongolia. On September 1st, the first day of school, I went with some friends to the entrance of a high school affiliated with Inner Mongolia Normal University. More than 100 people were gathered outside that morning as parents arrived with their kids. The students went in but many refused to go to their lessons, instead standing on the sports fields and shouting: “Protect our language, protect our people, reject the new educational policy”. There were police on the street and the parents tried to stop them going into the school. We stood with them and shouted, too. That lasted an hour or so, but in the end the police dispersed the crowd and the students went back to class.

I joined two other protests that month – smaller ones, with only a few dozen people. One was outside a local university, and the other was in front of the Hohhot city-government building. We wrote banners in Mongolian and Mandarin that said: “Protect our mother language and culture”. There are cameras on every street in China, so the government had pictures of all the protesters. They were also monitoring our WeChat groups. When we shared photos and videos of the protests online, they were censored. Most Mongolians are farmers or nomads and don’t have the technological knowledge to jump over the firewall. People can only send images to WeChat friends or take videos on Douyin (as TikTok is known in China). So many precious records of what happened have been lost.

People from both the State Security Bureau and the Public Security Bureau came to my home in Hohhot. They took my phone, laptop and hard drive to look at all my videos, images and teaching materials. They deleted everything. They also went to my parents’ house five times in the two to three months after the protests, and called them each week. They said that I’d participated in illegal activity and advised them to make me stop.

My company was effectively shut down. That was the only source of income for my entire family: I’d put all my savings into it and we’d just rented a new building and renovated the classrooms. For two months I visited government offices, asking what laws I’d violated. No one ever gave me a specific answer. I just got kicked back and forth between departments.

Tongue ties From top to bottom: In 2020 the Chinese government cut the number of primary-school subjects Inner Mongolia’s schools could teach in the Mongolian language. (top). In Inner Mongolia many protesters were arrested (above)

The parents of one of my students told me that the police had come calling, saying: “This teacher, Mr Wu, he is anti-government. He is part of a terrorist group. Don’t go to his school anymore. If you have any proof of his terror activities, report it to us. You’ll get a reward.” Many parents had received such visits, but only a couple told me about them.

We Mongolians are a minority. We want to protect our language, but there’s nothing we can do to resist the power of the state. Friends started telling me that the party was arresting people who’d participated in the protests. They told me I should try to leave: we didn’t know if the people who’d been carted off were even alive.

In January 2021 I left China. I was able to fly from Inner Mongolia to the city of Tianjin, and then eventually on to Phnom Penh in Cambodia. I brought a camera with me from home and told border officials I was a photographer on assignment for my company.

A friend introduced me to a Cambodian smuggler in Poipet, a town in western Cambodia close to Thailand. We took a motorcycle towards the border and then walked through a forest. After swimming across a river that runs between the two countries, we walked through fields for hours. When we finally got to the road, a pickup truck took me somewhere to spend the night. I’d paid the smuggler 15,000 Thai baht ($400). We didn’t say anything to each other the whole time.

I was finally out of China – for the first time – but I was still afraid. In Cambodia I’d seen news of two Chinese nationals who’d been murdered in Phnom Penh; their killers were Chinese, too. Thailand didn’t feel safe, either. My brother, his wife and their child were already living in Chiang Mai. But we noticed people following us around town who didn’t look like they were Thai. We moved to Bangkok, where I applied to the United Nations for refugee status. That was approved in July last year. The UN office was closed because of covid, so I didn’t get a refugee card for months. In the meantime we moved to a small town north of the capital, called Suphan Buri, where life was less expensive.

On October 3rd this year I was at home when my landlord knocked on the door. Two Thai immigration officers were with him. They took me to the local immigration office and told me that the Chinese embassy had sent a notice that I was wanted. I asked to see the notice. They said they didn’t have it, but that they had to keep me in detention until I could be deported.

Two weeks later they sent me to an immigration detention centre in Bangkok, where I was told that my permit to return to China was ready. I hadn’t applied for one, but was told that the embassy had applied on my behalf. The following day, four people came to see me. Two were Chinese embassy officials. One woman, whose surname was Chen, said she was a police officer from Inner Mongolia. The fourth was a younger Chinese policeman.

Speak for yourself Protests took place in every city in Inner Mongolia (top). There is a heavy police presence in the region (above)

I was sick and confused: I was coughing and sweating, and my eyes were red. They thought I had covid so they stood several metres away from me. I didn’t really understand what they were saying. The younger policeman showed me a document on his phone. “Sign this and you’ll be fine,” he said. I refused. We know everything about your parents and siblings, they said: where they live, what they do, we know it all. I was so afraid that I signed a confession and an agreement to return to China. They told me what to write, word for word. I confessed to a crime of “illegally taking deposits from the public”. I don’t even know what that means. I asked them why they sent police all this way to find me, to which they didn’t respond.

I didn’t know that members of my family were outside the detention centre that day. They were calling the UN refugee agency asking for help, and they were trying to visit me. A UN official came to the jail later that day. She said my case was complicated because I’d signed the agreement to return to China, which made it harder for them to protect me. So I wrote another statement saying I didn’t want to go.

The UN official came every day for about a week, to stop me from being deported. The Chinese booked three different flights for me; I refused to get on a plane, but the detention centre still wouldn’t let me go. On October 26th the younger Chinese policeman visited and told me that my refugee status would eventually expire. “I’m going to screw you after those 15 months,” he said. When I told him he was being recorded threatening a Chinese civilian in a Thai immigration centre, he immediately denied everything he had said. But the following day seven Chinese police and government officials came and threatened me again.

It was scary in the immigration jail. My cell had nearly 200 people in it. Every day we ate the same soup and plain rice. Sometimes it was rotten. We slept on the floor, crammed in. There were eight other Chinese people, but after finding out that I was a refugee they became unfriendly. They said I was a traitor to China. Most of them were Han Chinese who had fled to Thailand from Myanmar or Laos after getting involved in telecoms fraud. All badly wanted to go back to China. Some had been waiting for six to eight months but couldn’t get permission to leave. Whereas I, who didn’t want to return, had my application done for me in a day. I’d even been given six covid tests in preparation for the flight, when most people have to pay for them. The expedited process was clearly supposed to get me back to China as fast as possible.

On November 2nd, after a month in detention, the Thai police told me I could leave. My family somehow got the help they needed to bail me out. I arrived back at my brother’s house at 9pm and was so happy to see everyone. But I still feel in danger. I’ve noticed people who are obviously not Thai hanging around our neighbourhood. Tomorrow I’m going to spend the night at a friend’s house. Maybe I’ll stay with other people for a while and not linger in one place for too long. I have to live knowing that the Chinese police can threaten me even here, far beyond their borders. It’s hard to feel safe.

As told to Alice Su, senior China correspondent for The Economist. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. You can read her previous story for 1843 here

IMAGES: GETTY, ALAMY, PANOS, ALICE SU

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