Hello everyone, my name is Qiao Basheng, I am a Mongolian scholar born in Xinjiang, China. I have worked as a judge in Urumqi, Xinjiang for more than ten years, and I'm currently engaged in research on the human rights protection of ethnic minorities at the Northwest University of Political Science and Law in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province. I spent my primary and secondary school years in Bole, a small border city located in northwest Xinjiang. Bole is a beautiful city inhabited by 35 ethnic groups, including Han, Mongolian, Uyghur and Kazakh. My upbringing has witnessed the whole process of making significant progress in the right to education of ethnic minorities in this small border city from China's reform and opening up to high-quality development.

The right to education is a basic right ensured by the State. For the more economically developed countries, this seems to be a natural right, and there is nothing unusual about it. But for economically less developed countries and regions, this is another difficult and complex task. In the 1980s, when China was in the early stages of reform and opening up, the spring breeze of reform also benefited the small border town where I lived, and the local education began to make rapid progress. However, compared with China's coastal areas, the economic conditions of this small border town were not enough to fully meet the development needs of local education. In April 1986, China promulgated the Compulsory Education Law and implemented nine-year compulsory education nationwide. The State uniformly implements compulsory education for all school-age children and adolescents, and emphasizes that this is a public welfare undertaking that the State must guarantee, and no tuition or miscellaneous fees are charged. On the basis of the mechanism established by the State to guarantee funds for compulsory education, Xinjiang has also begun to universalize nine-year compulsory education from primary school to junior high school. Many children from poor families around me, including Han and ethnic minorities, enjoy this basic right of citizenship equally and have the opportunity to receive education. Many of them have now become elites in various fields, dedicating their wisdom and talents to the modernization of various parts of China. Some of them have received the opportunity to study abroad after receiving higher education and have become ambassadors of cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries. I am sincerely happy for the success of these friends of all nationalities who were born in poor families. At present, Xinjiang has begun to gradually popularize the 15-year free education from preschool to senior high school, and has established a complete financial assistance policy system for poor students to ensure that no student will drops out of school and that young people of all ethnic groups living in Xinjiang fully enjoy the right to education. It is believed that in the near future, with the help of the education policy of the new era, more outstanding talents will emerge from Xinjiang.

Many of my high school classmates were from agricultural and pastoral areas. Because of the long distance, they can not return home to rest after school. For them, there is no better option than to live in the school they attend. 

However, at that time, the school could not provide boarding conditions due to financial constraints, so these students could only choose to live in rented houses. In order to save money, some students rented some old houses in poor condition on the edge of the city. These houses have no heating and need to build their own fires to keep them warm during the cold winter months. Not only are the conditions difficult, but there are also great safety risks. In recent years, boarding schools have been set up in many parts of Xinjiang according to actual needs, in order to solve the problem of difficulty for children in remote agricultural and pastoral areas to attend school, to ensure the number of teachers and the quality of teaching, and to ensure that young people of all ethnic groups can enjoy their right to education on an equal footing. Boarding schools have created a good learning environment for students of all ethnic groups from agricultural and pastoral areas. It not only ensures the learning conditions of students of all ethnic groups, but also ensures their personal safety, and avoids the worries of parents in terms of economy and students' health and safety. Boarding students can choose to go home every weekend and holiday, as well as winter and summer vacations, and parents can visit their children at any time or pick them up at any time as needed. At the same time, relevant schools generally offer ethnic minority language, ethnic dance and other traditional culture courses, provide ethnic minority traditional food, and students can wear ethnic costumes during school. Boarding schools have also become vivid examples of the protection of the right to education and cultural traditions of ethnic minorities. If my classmates could have enjoyed such school conditions back then, I think we would have been able to get better results in the college entrance examination.

Due to social, historical, natural, and other reasons, there is still a big gap in the development of social, economic, scientific, technological, educational, and cultural undertakings in Xinjiang, Tibet, and other minority areas compared with the developed coastal areas and inland areas of China. Although the high school I attended was a key local high school, and the teachers and classmates all worked hard, the reality gap was also reflected in the final college entrance examination results, and for many years, there were no students who could be admitted to Tsinghua University and Peking University, which are China's top universities. The quality of teaching has always been a major concern for students and their parents. Since 1997, the central and state organs, central enterprises and 19 provinces and municipalities have begun to select a large number of outstanding talents to carry out Xinjiang aid work in the fields of science and technology, education, medical care and culture. The primary and secondary schools in Bole have also received the support of teachers from Hubei Province, which has also made great progress in the overall quality of local education. My high school has been built as an affiliated high school of Central China Normal University. It has become a well-known school, attracting many students from all over Xinjiang to study here every year, hoping to be admitted to their ideal universities. And this high school does not disappoint everyone, and many people are admitted to China's top universities every year, including many ethnic minority students.

Among my parents generation, only a handful of them had a higher education, and even fewer had a graduate education. The lack of high-level talents has become an important factor restricting Xinjiang's economic construction and social development. The Chinese Government is very concerned about and attaches great importance to the cultivation and use of minority talents, and has adopted a series of special measures to train a large number of minority talents. Since 1987, the Chinese government has organized college preparatory courses for Xinjiang ethnic minorities in inland universities. In addition, preferential policies have been given to ethnic minority students in terms of admission requirements and scores for the college entrance examination, which has enabled many ethnic minority students in Xinjiang to have the opportunity to go to college. Many of my relatives and friends and I are the beneficiaries of this policy. We are also fortunate to be a member of the college preparatory class and have the opportunity to study in key universities. The systematic study in university has also laid a solid foundation for me to devote myself to the construction of the rule of law and the protection of human rights in China.

In order to run higher education in ethnic minority areas well, promote educational equity, and ensure that ethnic minority students have the opportunity to receive high-quality higher education. In 2006, China began to implement the "Projects for the cultivation of high-level talents from ethnic minority groups" to train post-graduate and doctoral students from ethnic minorities. My wife and I are both beneficiaries of this policy. With the support of this policy, we completed our master's studies, and benefited from the special funding policy. During the period of postgraduate study, all tuition fees were covered by the state and corresponding living allowances were provided. In the process of studying, I also got to know many ethnic minority students from all over China. Our common feeling is that without the support of the Projects, it would be difficult for many of us to get the opportunity to become master's students, let alone doctoral students. In my workplace, there are several ethnic minority scholars who have also completed their doctoral studies through the Projects and have become qualified scientific researchers. The impact of this policy has been far-reaching. Many ethnic minority students have returned to their hometowns to work after completing their studies. After returning to their hometowns, these high-level talents have greatly promoted the economic development and social progress of ethnic minority areas, and have greatly improved the quality of work in various fields in the localities. After I returned to Xinjiang, I entered the court to engage in criminal trial, becoming one of the few judges in the Xinjiang court system at that time with a postgraduate degree, and at the same time, I also became an expert judge trained by my unit. The solid legal skills I gained at the graduate level, coupled with the intensive training of my unit in judicial practice, have enabled me to gradually grow into a qualified judge, and the judgment documents I wrote have been commended many times by higher authorities, including the Supreme Court.

In January 1999, the Chinese government proposed to establish a lifelong learning system by 2010. Lifelong education, as a regulation and a task, has been written into the Education Law of the People's Republic of China and the Outline of China's Education Reform and Development respectively. As an important part of the lifelong education system, continuing education has cultivated a large number of qualified professionals of various ethnic groups for Xinjiang's economic construction and social development. When I first came to work in Xinjiang, there were only a handful of staff members in my unit with graduate degrees. Continuing education provided my colleagues with the opportunity to receive higher education and various types of training through multiple channels. By the time I left, about 50 percent of the young judges had graduate degrees, and nearly half of them were ethnic minority judges. Many ethnic minority judges, including myself, have been given the opportunity to participate in training at the National Judges College and have become the backbone of various judicial posts. With the support of the lifelong education system, my wife and I both completed our doctoral studies while working in Xinjiang and successfully obtained our doctorates. As a result, I became the only minority doctoral judge in Xinjiang's court system at that time. Later, due to our personal development orientation, my wife and I both quit our jobs in Xinjiang and went to Northwest University of Political Science and Law in Xi 'an, Shaanxi Province to conductresearch on human rights protection for ethnic minorities. Since then, I have become one of the few legal educators with judicial trial experience in universities all over the country.

The right to education is a sine qua non for escaping poverty, achieving development, participating in society and realizing one's self-worth. My personal experience tells me that in China, modern education not only guarantees the right of ethnic minorities to preserve their own identity and dignity, but also guarantees the opportunities and channels for ethnic minorities to participate in social and national construction, and lights up the dreams of countless ethnic minority students to change their personal destiny, and also provides a driving force and source for the all-round development of all ethnic groups.

(Qiao Basheng, Northwest University of Political Science and Law)