Bilingual education cartoon… propaganda?

Featured today: A bilingual language learning cartoon aired in Xinjiang.

Details from a post on the autonomous region blog:

[A] weekly children TV program called Bille Ögüneyli (“let’s learn together”; in Chinese, it’s Shuangyu genwoxue, “learn the bilingual with me”), broadcast on the Youth Channel (XJTV-12) of the state owned Xinjiang Television…

Yet I doubt if Chinese kids in Xinjiang would understand any of the Uyghur dialogue in the program. Indeed, if you follow the dialogue carefully and pay attention to the ways new vocabularies are introduced, you’d have little doubt that the program is created exclusively for Uyghur-speaking kids to learn Chinese, not vice versa. The mutuality thus implied in discourses such as “bilingual” or “learn each other’s language” is at best hypocrisy, if not also a hoax.

Subtitles read: “We love our mother country since we were small…”

Watch the full clip here (via autonomous region).