On the 1st of September 2020 Korean-Chinese users of the most popular Chinese Social media app WeChat were widely sharing news and videos of protests happening in Inner Mongolia. Mongolian parents had kept their children from attending school and had come out on the streets to protest the newly implemented curriculum reforms in China. The reforms replaced Mongolian as the medium of instruction by Standard Mandarin in three particular subjects at high school level, while also replacing the regional textbooks that are printed in Mongolian script with those by the nationally unified textbook series. It soon became apparent that the same policy was being implemented in the Korean Autonomous Prefecture of Yanbian.

The reforms are part of a wider attempt by Xi Jinping and the communist regime to attempt to assimilate the ethnic minorities in China. These changes, however, are seen by the minorities in China to be in direct violation with the constitutional laws upon which the autonomous prefectures in China are built. It is for this reason that minorities with their own languages, including the Korean-Chinese community, see this as a direct attack from the central government to undo their identity.

This paper will focus on the ways the Korean-Chinese community reacted and debated the curriculum reforms in Yanbian. I will pay special attention to how its choice of methods in their resistance towards the reforms shows the opportunities and limitations of their freedom of expression. With the Chinese state clamping down on critical voices towards their policies, the Korean-Chinese make use of pseudonyms to debate the new policies. They also resort mostly to blogs and forums outside of China as a vehicle to disseminate their views.The debate itself spurred renewed interest among the Korean-Chinese community to reflect and debate on how they envision their community in the present and in the future. While some argue that the reforms itself pose no significant change to the inevitable demise of the Korean ethnic identity of the Korean-Chinese, most are seeing the reforms as the starting point of a new and more precarious position of their status as minorities within Chinese society, where the bilingual ability of the minorities are seen as a threat to the regime.