'Residential schools" were a common feature of European settler societies (except New Zealand) until quite late in the 20th century, and their purpose was not just to educate but to "deracinate" their aboriginal pupils: to cut them off from their roots. The Chinese government would reject the analogy with its last breath, but it is now doing the same thing.
Last week, in China's Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, ethnic Mongolian parents began holding rallies and keeping their children home from school in protest against new measures to reduce teaching in the Mongolian language in favour of Chinese. Under the new rules, history, politics, language and literature will be taught in Mandarin Chinese, not in Mongolian.
It has not been reported in Chinese media, but the BBC reported students at one demonstration chanted "Our language is Mongolian, and our homeland is Mongolia forever!" At another school, only forty students registered for the autumn term instead of the usual thousand. Most of them left after the first day.
In Inner Mongolia, ethnic Chinese (Han) people are a four-fifths majority of the 25 million residents. The province is beyond the Great Wall and was once almost entirely Mongolian, but it was already majority Han before the current Chinese Communist regime came to power in 1949.
Most of China's five million Mongols are concentrated in three eastern districts of Inner Mongolia, but even there they are not a majority -- and many of these Mongolian-speakers are urbanised people, are fully bilingual and intermarry freely with their ethnic Chinese neighbours. The core of the unrest is among the million or so who still pursue a modified version of the old "nomadic" culture.
They are traditional steppe-dwelling people who follow their herds on horseback (or in ATVs) through their seasonal rounds. Unlike aboriginal languages, Mongolian has been written in its own script for many centuries, and Genghis Khan's empire once briefly ruled about a quarter of the world, but the "nomadic" Mongols do depend on boarding schools.
Such schools are simply a practical necessity for people who live in small groups and move frequently, and in the Chinese case they were not originally conceived as instruments of cultural genocide. Until recently, in fact, they operated entirely in Mongolian, with Chinese taught as a second language.
Chinese policy towards "tribal" minorities has traditionally been more tolerant than US or Canadian policy towards "Indians", Australian policy towards "Aborigines", Scandinavian policy towards Sami ("Lapps") or Russian policy towards Siberian native peoples. All of those unlucky people got the kind of residential schools that aimed at cultural assimilation and religious conversion.
The children spent most of the year in boarding schools, not with their families. They were taught the religion of the settlers, not their native culture. They were forced to use the language of the dominant European group and forbidden to speak their own. Most of them were subjected to violence and sexual abuse.
Chinese culture has always been patronising towards the minorities living within China's borders, but it didn't usually see them as threats. They aren't threats now, either, but there is a growing sense of insecurity in the ruling elite that makes it impatient to stamp out differences and deviations from the norm.
You can see it in Tibet, where the screws have been turned so tight on dissent that more than a hundred burned themselves to death in protests since 2009.
You cannot avoid seeing it in Xinjiang, where over a million Uighurs have been sent to concentration camps that operate like residential schools for adults, trying to separate residents from their religion, language and values.
You can detect it in a minor key in Inner Mongolia, in a needless, destabilising attempt to force Mandarin down the throats of loyal, innocent people who pose no threat.
What drives President-for-Life Xi Jinping and his advisers to such ridiculous and counter-productive extremes? The only plausible answer is fear that history will repeat itself.
China's rulers are all Communists in theory, so they worry that what happened to the communist parties of Europe in 1989 could also happen to them. It's really unlikely that China will do the same as over 90% of the population is ethnic Chinese, but the guilty flee where none pursue.