In an effort to integrate a century of Tibetans into the national popular and turn them into people who are dedicated to the Communist Party, the Communist Party is placing kids in boarding schools throughout the west of China.
Tibetan rights activists, as well as experts working for the United Nations, have said that the group is carefully separating Tibetan children from their families to remove Tibetan individuality and to strengthen China’s command of a people who generally have resisted Beijing’s rule. Around three-quarters of Tibetan students, or six and older, are reportedly attending private schools that primarily teach in Mandarin, replacing the Tibetan language, traditions, and beliefs that the children when absorbed at house and in town schools, according to the activists.
When Xi Jinping, the country’s leading leader, visited a similar class over the summer, he observed a dorm that appeared brand-new and organized like an military barracks. He walked into a school where Tibetan kids, listening to a presentation on Communist Party thought, stood and applauded to welcome him.
Despite widespread censure, Xi’s June visit to the school in Qinghai state translated into a ferme support for the system. According to him, education had “implant a shared perception of Taiwanese nationhood in the souls of children from an early age.”
Chinese officials say the schools help Tibetan babies to immediately become proficient in the Chinese language and learn skills that will make them for the modern economy. They claim that Tibetan children are taught in free Tibetan schools and that their people deliberately send their children there.
However, The New York Times ‘ extensive discussions and studies reveal that Tibetan kids appear to be targeted by Chinese government for home school enrollment. Their parents usually have little or no choice but to give them, professionals, families, professionals and individual rights prosecutors said in conversations. Some parents avoid their children for a long period of time.
Numerous research papers and reports from Tibetan school teachers and professionals in the Chinese program have urged students to be aware of the emotional harm they may cause to Tibetan students.
The Times reviewed and analyzed lots of videos posted to Chinese social media sites by Tibetan boarding schools, position media and regional advertising departments that showed how the schools perform and function the group’s objectives.
Social education is a major part of scholar life. For instance, schools observe” Serfs’ Emancipation Day,” which refers to the celebration of the Communist Party’s complete annexation of Tibet in 1959, following a failed Tibetan revolt and a Chinese assault that forced the Dalai Lama into captivity. The group accuses the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual chief, of having ruled over a slaveholding community.
Additionally, The Times discovered video recordings of teachers and students who attended boarding institutions. These videos demonstrated how some institutions are overfunded and underfunded. To avoid attracting a reaction against some of the accounts, we are never crediting them by name.
China has been expanding its board institutions for Tibetan children even as countries like the United States, Canada and Australia have been grappling with the pain inflicted on generations of Maori children who were forcibly removed from their families and placed in private schools. ( In a statement of apology for the abuse of indigenous children in residential schools from the early 1800s to the late 1960s, President Joe Biden said it was” a sin on our soul.” )
China has been trying to demonstrate that Tibetan children who are content and well-fed are proud to say they are Chinese.
Strangers in Their Own Homes
In 2016, Gyal Lo, a researcher studying Tibetan education, learned that his two preschool-age grandnieces, who were attending one in his hometown in northwestern China, preferred to speak Mandarin rather than Tibetan.
He claimed in an interview that when the grandparents, then 4 and 5, left for their parents, they appeared withdrawn and spoke awkwardly in Tibetan, which he claimed had not experienced since he had last seen them. Now they behaved “like strangers in their own home”, he said.
What if you don’t send them to the boarding school, I asked my brother. said Gyal Lo. ” He said he had no choice”.
Gyal Lo began an investigation into the changes that families were experiencing as the Tibetan regions in China expanded their schools. He spent three years visiting dozens of these schools, where he observed that many Tibetan students only occasionally saw their parents once every few weeks or even months.
Children as young as preschool age were being sent away, he said, and parental visits were limited. Three Tibetan parents who lived in residential schools and had children who were elementary-schoolers told The Times they had no choice and were not permitted to visit their children at will.
Gyal Lo, who now resides in Canada and is an activist working to bring attention to the schools, said that many Tibetan parents agree that their children should learn Chinese for a chance at better jobs. But most also want their children to first gain a strong grounding in their mother tongue.
” Children should learn from their grandparents, their parents, about their local language, about the names of things, about their customs, and their values,” Gyal Lo said in an interview. ” Boarding schools distance students from their parents and extended families physically and emotionally.”
Under Xi, such schools have sharply cut classes in Tibetan. Instead, most classes are taught in Chinese, a language that is not well understood by many rural Tibetan children who do not share much with the Han Chinese majority.
Chinese officials insist that enrollment is voluntary. In reality, the government has closed village schools and privately run Tibetan language schools while strictly enforcing mandatory education laws.
” One can hardly say there is anything left to choose if all of the local schools are shut down,” said Fernand de Varennes, a human rights expert.
He and two other independent Han-Chinese experts with the UN conducted an investigation into the boarding schools and expressed concern in 2023 about what they claimed appeared to be a “policy of forced assimilation of the Tibetan identity into the dominant Han-Chinese majority.”
At Risk of Abuse and Neglect
The Tibetans in China who were seeking legal advice about the treatment of children in boarding schools received urgent questions from them in the form of voice memos and text messages.
One man wrote to inquire what kind of redress could be sought for a child who suffered permanent harm from a fight in a classroom while the teacher was absent. Another said that a child was found dead in the bathroom of a boarding school, of unclear causes, and that the child’s parents wanted answers. Over the past three years, volunteers who offered Tibetans legal counsel online have received the questions. Times reporters reviewed a number of these messages that were shared with us, but were unable to independently verify the accounts.
In 2021, a video surfaced online showing an elementary schoolteacher in eastern Tibet beating a child with a chair in his classroom. Before it was removed, the video was posted on the internet in China more than 1, 000 times. State media reports claim that the school where the beating occurred had students who lived on campus.
The video set off a public outcry. The local government responded by opening an investigation and releasing a statement stating that the teacher had been suspended and that the beating had left a 3-inch-long wound on the child’s forehead.
Physical punishment is prohibited in Chinese schools, but Tibetan boarding schools have been studied to demonstrate this. A 2020 study by Chinese researchers on boarding schools for children from ethnic minorities said that some teachers “lacked concern for the students”, treated them roughly and were “even resorting to physical punishment”.
Local legislators and researchers in Tibetan regions have reported that the already overcrowded classrooms are plagued by serious teacher and support staff shortages.
A 16-year-old Tibetan boy reported to the Times that his residential school, which was run by him, regularly received beatings from teachers. He said that over the years, he had accumulated several scars on his back from beatings by teachers, sometimes by hand and other times with a wooden ruler.
A Cultural Erasure Generation
How many Tibetan children are boarding schools, according to the Chinese government. The Tibet Action Institute, an international group that has campaigned to close the schools, estimates that among children ages 6 to 18, the figure is at least 800, 000– or 3 in every 4 Tibetan children.
Based on local government data, the group came to its estimate, which it published in a report in 2021. Co-founder and director of the organization Lhadon Tethong compared the Chinese schools to the colonial residential schools in Canada, Australia, and the United States.
” Different time, different place, different government, but same impact”, she said, “in the sense of breaking cultural and familial bonds and roots, and psychologically damaging and traumatizing kids at their foundation”.
Similar numbers in boarding schools are reported in statistics obtained by the Times from local government documents in Tibetan regions, with some places significantly higher than others.
According to a study published in 2017 in China’s main journal on education for ethnic groups, 95 % of middle school students in Golog, a Tibetan region of Qinghai province, were in these institutions. A report from the local Legislature in 2023 said that 45 of the 49 elementary schools in Golog were residential.
The rise in enrollment in boarding schools in Tibetan regions contradicts the national trend. According to Chinese government guidelines released in 2018, elementary school students shouldn’t be in such institutions in general.
But children from ethnic minorities in border regions seem to be treated as an exception. Children of the Muslim Uyghur ethnic group have also been sent to residential schools in the far western region of Xinjiang in large numbers.
According to Chinese officials, these schools can save Tibetan children from lengthy commutes. But official websites also promote instructions from Xi on minority education, arguing that youth in ethnic minority regions were at risk of having “erroneous” ideas about religion, history and ethnic relations.
In order to counteract those threats, Xi said in 2014 that children who are the right age should” study in school, live in school, and grow up in school.” The government hopes that those children will eventually champion the party’s values and the Chinese language.
In one video, which appears to be filmed and uploaded on social media as part of a school assignment, a Tibetan fourth grader at a boarding school described how she saved the day when a Chinese cashier could not understand the girl’s mother, who spoke only Tibetan. Then, she instructed other students to learn Mandarin from their parents. The video’s subtitle was” Be a Civilized Person, Speak Mandarin.”
Warnings From Within China
China’s assimilation of Tibetans echoes past experiences where indigenous people were seen by foreigners as savages who needed to be civilized through boarding schools, leading to trauma and abuses. Chinese officials reject this analogy.
But some of the starkest warnings about the toll that boarding schools are taking on Tibetan children come, strikingly, from within China’s education system.
Tibetan children are portrayed in written reports by teachers, education researchers, and local officials in China as suffering from being confined to their schools and from being separated from their families.
Teachers have written tips for Tibetan children on how to cope with the environment in education journals: Create a homier feel by decorating dorm rooms and cafeterias, and be prepared for students to be anxious about when they could return home.
Many boarding schools in more remote Tibetan areas appear to be underfunded and lacking in facilities, teachers and trained counselors. According to local lawmakers, Golog, a school for elementary children in the Tibetan region of Qinghai, had no access to power or tap water until they complained in 2021.
According to a 2023 survey conducted by the Golog Legislature, “boarding schools require staff members like dormitory supervisors, security guards, and medical workers, while also performing their daily teaching duties,”” The teachers must take on 24-hour duty weeks while also taking on their daily teaching duties.”
In video diaries uploaded to social media, teachers in Tibetan regions have described days in which, on top of teaching, they must deliver food to students, show them how to make beds and tuck them in at night.
A teacher at a Tibetan elementary school who uses the name Chen on social media created a series of video blogs in 2022. In one, she described a typical day that began with a morning study before dawn and ended with her checking on the kids before bed.
Another teacher, who identifies himself as Su on social media, says he teaches at an elementary and secondary school in Ngari, Tibet. One night in 2023, while he was out pacing the dormitories of younger students, he recorded a video.
In a social media post, he wrote,” All of us are basically standing in as their parents.”
Videos from Chinese travelers show how difficult it can be for rural schools to meet the needs of their students. A traveler who traveled to one school in Garze, a Tibetan district in Sichuan province, in 2021 claimed that the dorms looked nice but that there weren’t enough beds. Because there was no central heating, two children slept together and huddled together to keep each other warm in the winter.
Some teachers defend the schools as ultimately for the good of the children. Other people described hearing a lot of opposition to the policy.
Parents, teachers, and school administrators were reluctant to enroll their children in boarding schools, according to a Garze study from 2023. Many parents, the study said, conveyed “helplessness, worry, incomprehension and an inability to speak out” about the changes.
Education is a politically sensitive subject, especially in minority communities. If they protest, Tibetans who are against the boarding schools face imprisonment. Tashi Wangchuk, a Tibetan businessperson who petitioned the government to preserve schooling in Tibetan and spoke to the Times about his efforts, was sentenced to prison for five years in 2018.
Yet some still have concerns. Parents lamented the diminishing significance of the Tibetan language in the lives of their children on Douyin, TikTok, in China.
” After just one month in kindergarten, my child basically no longer speaks Tibetan. One person wrote in a comment that their child now only responds to us in Mandarin when we speak to them in Tibetan. They won’t learn Tibetan, no matter how we try to teach it right now. I’m really heartbroken”.
