“In Dongsheng, and even the banner centers (Mongol administrative units equivalent to counties), there are hardly any work units in which Mongolian language knowledge is required or even useful. Because almost all jobs are controlled by Chinese, university-level knowledge of Mongolian is no different from illiteracy. It is this bitter personal experience that compelled my cousins to make sure that their children never repeat their "tragedy." ... Under this tremendous Chinese economic and political pressure... one finds that many Mongol-speaking Mongols are forced to "collaborate in the destruction of their instruments of expression" – as Pierre Bourdieu (1991:7) has said in regards to the French peasants' willing abandonment of their dialects in favor of official language. Many newly urbanizing Mongols denounce my own steadfast counsel of linguistic resistance as idealist and impractical and sometimes hold it responsible for their further subordination under the Chinese. ... They have little patience for any argument favoring retention of the Mongolian language bilingually or trilingually along with Chinese plus a foreign language. Instead, they often advocate learning English to outperform the Chinese (cf. Naran Bilik 1998a, 1998b).”

Uradyn E. Bulag, Mongolian Ethnicity and Linguistic Anxiety in China

American Anthropologist, Vol 105, No. 4, Special Issue: Language Politics and Practices (Dec. 2003), p754-755