China Power | Society | East Asia

In Inner Mongolia, China’s Assimilation Campaign Moves Online

A January 2026 report suggests Beijing is now targeting the digital communities that were Mongolian speakers’ last refuge – in a region that never posed a separatist threat.

When Chinese authorities replaced Mongolian with Mandarin as the language of instruction for core school subjects in 2020, the move triggered the largest public protests Inner Mongolia had seen in decades. Six years on, the classroom fight is effectively over, and the campaign has followed Mongolian speakers into the one space they had left: the internet.

A report released in January 2026 by PEN America and the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center documented the systematic removal of Mongolian-language content from Chinese online platforms – social media groups shut down, accounts deleted, and informal digital communities dismantled. 

The findings are difficult to verify independently, as is much reporting from a region under tight information control. But the censorship fits a clear trajectory. The target of the linguistic crackdown is no longer Mongolian as a language of formal instruction. It is Mongolian as a living language of everyday life.

Notably, the careful deletion of Mongolian is targeting an ethnic group that has never posed a separatist or terrorist threat – the rationale the Chinese government uses to justify similar campaigns of cultural erasure in Xinjiang and Tibet.

The online deletions are the endpoint in a longer chain of events, where each step has narrowed the space for the Mongolian language a little further. In 2020, Beijing mandated that literature, history, and politics – the subjects that carry cultural transmission – be taught in Mandarin rather than Mongolian, recasting “bilingual education” from Mongolian-medium schooling with Mandarin as a subject into Mandarin-medium schooling with Mongolian as a subject. By 2023, regional authorities had ordered schools to complete the switch to Mandarin-only instruction and had cut weekly Mongolian classes sharply, including in kindergartens. The college entrance examination, the single most consequential test in a Chinese student’s life, is being steadily de-Mongolianized – the Mongolian-language gaokao has been phased out, and from 2026 the bonus points long awarded to ethnic Mongolian and other minority candidates are being halved, from 10 to five.

Each measure on its own can be defended in the language of opportunity, Mandarin proficiency, after all, is a real advantage in the Chinese labor market, which is precisely how officials have framed the reforms. The idea, apparently, is to let economic self-interest kill off any incentive to learn the language. But Beijing wasn’t done yet.

The digital campaign documented in the January report is the logical endpoint of this approach. Now that the Mongolian language has been pushed out of schools, exams, and official life, the places where it survives are informal and largely online: chat groups, content creators, and diaspora-linked communities where Mongolian still circulates. Removing that content closes the last venue where the language reproduces itself outside the home. 

It is also consistent with a broader rebranding effort: a 2023 campaign reclassified Mongolian heritage as 边境文化, or “frontier culture,” a framing that absorbs a distinct identity into a peripheral variant of a Han-centered national story. References to Chingghis Khan have reportedly been pared back from museums and curricula. The aim is not merely to........

© The Diplomat