Rights activists have accused Chinese authorities of indoctrinating Tibetan children and eroding their culture by forcing them to attend “colonial” boarding schools.
The Tibet Action Institute, a movement advocating for Tibetan independence founded by Tibetan-Canadian activist Lhadon Tethong, published a new report on Thursday warning that schools are teaching children as young as four to be loyal to the Chinese Communist Party.
The activists estimate that one million children in the Tibet Autonomous Region and Tibetan districts study at such boarding schools, though the number is difficult to confirm. The group has claimed that the schools are a smaller part of a broader strategy to dilute Tibetan identity and assimilate Tibetans into the majority Chinese culture, with the Xi Jinping-led government perceiving Tibetan identity as a “threat”.
China has shuttered village schools across Tibet and replaced them with centralised boarding schools over the last dozen years, leaving parents with little choice but to send their children to such facilities. Many students come from remote farming villages and live at the schools full-time.
Through these boarding schools, the report warned, the Chinese government was trying “to deracinate Tibetan children from their culture, language, and identity”.
The report found students were restricted from enrolling in Tibetan language classes or engaging in religious activities. Tibetans view the practice of their language as the fundamental guarantee of their future as a distinct people within the broader Chinese region.
The group said it documented numerous instances of negligence and abuse in Tibetan boarding schools.
“Tibetan children’s lives are being irrevocably altered to serve the purposes of the Chinese government,” the Tibet Action Institute said after conducting 15 in-depth interviews with Tibetans between 2023 and 2024.
It added: “The separation from family and deliberate reshaping of children’s identity in boarding schools is causing emotional and psychological harm, including attachment trauma and alienation.”
The report quotes a Tibetan who fled to India saying that “the indoctrination process begins from a very young age”, when children are removed from their parents.
“Children cannot study Tibetan and Tibetan history. They are taught the Chinese language and the history of China written by Chinese writers,” the interviewee was quoted as saying.
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Another person alleged that the materials on classroom walls were in Chinese, including pictures of leaders such as Mr Xi, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. “Xi Jinping Thought” is taught in classes as part of the curriculum, the person said.
“Essays and drawings were judged based on how much we were able to praise the Party, the state, and the army.”
The group found that in 2022, a 13-year-old Tibetan girl with underlying medical conditions died after her family persistently tried to reach her with prescription medicine at her boarding school. The school first neglected to provide the medicine, and then failed to seek medical attention, it added.
China has long sought to eradicate any possibility of unrest in regions home to sizeable ethnic populations by imprisoning dissenters, reshaping societies and religions to align them with the views of the Communist Party. The approach has hardened in the past decade under the leadership of Mr Xi, who has been accused of a brutal crackdown on the Uyghur community in the Xinjiang region north of Tibet.
The Chinese government has repeatedly denied allegations of human rights abuses in Tibet, as well as other regions like Xinjiang. Xu Zhitao, vice chair of the Tibet region’s government, rejected similar criticism in 2023, arguing that China opened the boarding school system to improve education for children from remote areas.
“The claim that Tibetan children are forced to go to boarding schools is deliberate smearing with an ulterior motive,” he told reporters at the release of an official report on the Communist Party’s policies in Tibet.
He said the curriculum at the schools included Tibetan language and culture. “These are all implemented to effectively secure our Tibetan children’s rights to access high-quality education, and it is an important expression of the development and progress of human rights in Tibet.”
The Chinese government and Tibet’s government-in-exile offer competing versions of whether the remote, mountainous territory was historically ruled as part of China, or whether it has legitimate claims to independence or autonomy.
“A generation of Tibetan children is being harmed by China’s colonial boarding school policy – socially, emotionally, and psychologically,” said Lhadon Tethong, the co-founder and director of Tibet Action Institute.
“The lifelong negative impact on each of these children and their families, and on the future health of Tibetan society overall, cannot be overstated. The international community must step up all efforts to urgently push the Chinese government to abolish this abusive and coercive system.”
In February 2023, a group of UN experts raised alarm over reports of Tibetan children being separated from their families. “We are alarmed by what appears to be a policy of forced assimilation of the Tibetan identity into the dominant Han-Chinese majority, through a series of oppressive actions against Tibetan educational, religious, and linguistic institutions,” the UN experts said.
The rights group urged the UN and concerned governments to call on the Chinese government to conduct a public investigation into the alleged abuses, deaths, and mental health concerns of Tibetan children in Chinese state-run boarding schools.
