China steals language and home life from Tibetan kids aged four

Xi Jinping wants to reach children as babies ‘so that the red gene seeps into their blood and permeates their hearts’.

Tibetan students leave class passing a poster showing Xi Jinping at Nagqu High School in Lhasa. Picture: Getty Images

China has for at least two decades directed children in Tibet to state-run boarding schools at ever younger ages, trying to gut Tibetan culture and blunt generations of opposition to Communist Party rule. It didn’t work as well as Chinese leaders hoped.

Authorities frustrated by continued resistance to Beijing are now prying children as young as four years old from their homes – before they have a chance to fully absorb the Tibetan language and way of life.

Across Tibet, a mountainous region rich in natural resources where many people harbour dreams of independence, China is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build schools, recognising how social identity forms early in life. The education project includes a network of day-long preschools, where children are taught in Mandarin, and lessons emphasise Chinese culture.

The preschool classes offer a familiar menu of games, crafts, songs and stories. Yet beyond teaching basic skills, the lessons glorify the Communist Party and Chinese identity. Campus signs read, “I am a Chinese child, I love speaking Mandarin”. Teachers stage skits telling children their clothes, shoes and wellbeing are gifts from the party.

From there, most Tibetan students graduate into an expanded system of primary boarding schools, spanning grades one through six, which keep them away from home for weeks and months at a time. They study almost entirely in Mandarin and live under the supervision of teachers and wardens, including the dominant Han Chinese who don’t speak Tibetan.

Chinese officials in some Tibetan areas are experimenting with funnelling children into boarding schools at the start of preschool, according to government documents, social media posts and independent researchers.

Tibetan students at a boarding school in Sichuan province. Picture: AP Photo/Andy Wong

The campaign reflects the convictions of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who said the country needs to reach children as babies “so that the red gene seeps into their blood and permeates their hearts”.

The resistance of the Tibetan people, a religious and culturally distinct minority, has persisted under the influence of the current Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism since the mid-20th century. He remains a potent force despite decades of propaganda, political crackdowns and education drives aimed at undermining his authority.

Beijing views the religious leader, who lives in exile in India, as a dangerous separatist. The Dalai Lama, who turns 90 in July, recently declared his reincarnation will take place outside China “in the free world”, setting the stage for a hearts-and-minds battle for the future of Tibet. That has added to the urgency of Chinese leaders racing to cultivate a generation of Tibetans loyal to Beijing rather than the religious leader’s successor.

Several Tibetans in their 20s lamented in interviews that China’s ongoing indoctrination of young children seems to be working.

One 21-year-old woman, who attended a Tibetan-language elementary school and went to boarding school in seventh grade, said her younger relatives entered Chinese boarding school as early as six. At the school, they learn entirely in Mandarin, she said, straining communication with their parents and grandparents, who understand very little of the language.

“Even if they speak Tibetan,” she said, “the first language that comes to their mind is Mandarin.”

Such experiences point to a remarkable change, said Tenzin Dorjee, a political scientist at New York’s Columbia University who studies Chinese ethnic policy. “This has never happened in Tibetan history,” he said. “Tibetans have never spoken to each other in Chinese.”

The Tibet Action Institute, a human rights group, estimates there are more than 800,000 students in boarding schools across Tibetan areas of China. That represents three-quarters of all school-age Tibetans.

It is impossible to verify all of the official documents cited by the group, many of which appear to have since been deleted. Authorities regularly scrub the internet of sensitive information and intimidate Tibetans, even those living abroad, into silence. Foreign journalists are banned except on state-approved propaganda tours.

Children in front of a screen reading ‘every day, a new sentence in Mandarin’ at a Lhasa bilingual preschool.

Tibetans have resisted Chinese influence through most of their 1400-year history, protected in large measure by living in one of the most inhospitable spots on Earth. About seven million Tibetans are spread across an area of southwest China almost the size of the Northern Territory, living at an average elevation of about 4300m.

When Mao Zedong sent Communist forces into Tibetan areas in 1950, he urged his commanders to move slowly, warning the troops were in a place “where there were no Chinese in the past”. Mao’s push fed a 1959 uprising that ended with a bloody crackdown, and the Dalai Lama fled into exile.

Chinese leaders in the decades since have ricocheted between accommodation and oppression of Tibetans, earning derision for Beijing outside China and a Nobel Peace Prize for the exiled spiritual leader.

The government is stepping more softly in Tibet than it has in Xinjiang, where it used internment camps to carry out political indoctrination of recalcitrant Uighurs, a Turkic-Muslim minority. Yet the goal is similar.

Chinese authorities in Xinjiang have left scattered mosques and other outward symbols of local Islamic culture intact, while suppressing behaviours they deem a threat – such as keeping a copy of the Koran on smartphones – and imposing a Chinese worldview.

“They are not trying to eradicate these cultures,” said Robert Barnett, a Tibet expert at the School of Oriental and African Studies University in London. “They are surgically removing and they’re surgically grafting.”

Chinese officials see Tibetan Buddhism as a Chinese religion that can be handled with a more subtle approach than Islam, he said. The government’s chosen avenue is education.

In their first history lessons, the children are told that Tibet was a backward place before China took over in the 1950s.

For years, schoolteachers in Tibetan areas adopted a mix of Tibetan and Mandarin. Families also could send children to monasteries and monk-run independent schools. A former student who graduated in 2009 from the Ragya School, a noted Tibetan institution in the remote region of Golog that drew male students from across Tibet, remembered his alma mater as a sanctuary. The school offered classes in maths, English, Chinese, computer science and video production, as well as Buddhism and Tibetan literature.

“There wasn’t much pressure from the state so we had free space to learn,” the former student said. He belonged to a student group that campaigned against Mandarin influence on the Tibetan language, handing out stickers with Tibetan words they invented for mobile phones, electric kettles and other modern objects.

After Xi came to power in 2012, the party turned sharply against expressions of separate ethnic identity among minorities. Officials cracked down on Tibetan alternatives to public schools and expanded the boarding school system.

In 2021, Beijing deleted references to bilingual education from China’s childhood development plan. Xi that year was the first Communist Party chief in three decades to visit Tibet. In the capital, Lhasa, he urged officials to cultivate “a stronger sense of identifying with the great motherland, Chinese people, Chinese culture, the Chinese Communist Party and socialism with Chinese characteristics”.

The government schools appeal to many Tibetan parents. Their children can study maths and science, subjects that open a path to jobs in civil service or other sectors that pay better than farming or herding.

A dormitory at Nyingchi school. Picture: Reuters/Go Nakamura

Many of the schools are newly built with desktop computers, digital blackboards and sports fields. The brightest students also get a shot at a university education.

The schooling is free for nomadic and farming families, but there are hidden costs.

Sonam Choesto, 15, spent a year in a state-run boarding primary school about seven years ago. She described a life there that was simultaneously well-resourced, regimented, disorienting and lonely.

Students slept eight to a room on bunk beds in a renovated dorm with new bedding. Wardens punished unruly children by hitting them on the palms with a stick. Teachers made students repeatedly squat and jump the length of an outdoor basketball court barefoot as punishment for poor test scores, she said.

She could visit home only for a two-month break during her school year. Some of her classmates’ parents visited on weekends but not Sonam’s. In a way, she said, that was easier.

“For a day or two after their parents visited, the other kids would get really quiet,” Sonam said. At night, she would sometimes hear them crying, reflecting a sense of isolation that Chinese researchers say has triggered mental health problems among boarding school students in Tibet. Students had exercise at 7am, ate breakfast at 8am and were in class or studying until 8pm, with breaks for lunch and dinner, Sonam said. Except for a lone Tibetan language course, every class was taught in Mandarin and almost all the teachers were Han Chinese.

“The Han teachers didn’t pay much attention to newcomers like me who couldn’t speak Mandarin,” said Sonam, who knew only a smattering of Chinese words when she arrived.

Xi Jinping at a Lhasa monastery. Picture: Xie Huanchi/Xinhua via AP

There have been sharp increases in preschool construction – far outpacing every other region of China. The number of preschools in the Tibet Autonomous Region reached almost 2500 in 2022 from about 500 in 2012. Enrolment among the region’s preschool-age children exceeds 90 per cent compared with 52 per cent a decade ago.

Classroom videos show students learning patriotic rhymes and stories celebrating the Communist Party. In their first history lessons, the children are told that Tibet was a backward place before China took over in the 1950s. Officials in Tibetan areas recently began testing Mandarin proficiency among preschoolers.

There is no official tally of boarding preschools, but there is evidence showing an increase. In May, officials in the heavily Tibetan prefecture of Aba announced the near completion of four boarding schools for preschoolers, according to a government report obtained by the Tibet Action Institute.

Ginger Duan, a worker for a Chinese non-profit organisation that assisted at the Ragya School, said creating a generation of Mandarin-speaking Tibetans would not solve ethnic tension or break Tibetan resistance. “You’re just going to cultivate a bunch of rebels who can understand Mandarin,” she said. Duan left the Ragya School before it was closed and now lives in the US.

Others believe Xi’s mandate is working. One 25-year-old man recalled that he was in the middle of third grade when teachers swapped Tibetan textbooks for those printed in Mandarin. Then came lessons on the theories of Marx and Lenin.

“I didn’t learn any of it,” said the man, who fled China last year.

Yet the new, more aggressive schooling of the youngest students “is creating a generation of Tibetans that is very different”, he said. When his younger cousins and relatives come home from school, there is a language barrier, he said, and a different way of thinking.

“They are brainwashed by Chinese thoughts and propaganda,” the man said.

The Wall Street Journal