By Chris Buckley
Across China’s west, the Communist Party is placing children in boarding schools in a drive to assimilate a generation of Tibetans into the national mainstream and mold them into citizens loyal to the party.
Tibetan rights activists, as well as experts working for the United Nations, have said that the party is systematically separating Tibetan children from their families to erase Tibetan identity and to deepen China’s control of a people who historically have resisted Beijing’s rule. The activists have estimated that around three-quarters of Tibetan students age 6 and older — and others even younger — are in residential schools that teach largely in Mandarin, replacing the Tibetan language, culture and Buddhist beliefs that the children once absorbed at home and in village schools.
When China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, visited one such school in the summer, he inspected a dormitory that appeared freshly painted and as neat as an army barracks. He walked into a classroom where Tibetan students, listening to a lecture on Communist Party thought, stood and applauded to welcome him.
Xi’s visit to the school in Qinghai province in June amounted to a firm endorsement of the program, despite international criticism. Education, he said, must “implant a shared consciousness of Chinese nationhood in the souls of children from an early age.”
Chinese officials say the schools help Tibetan children to quickly become fluent in the Chinese language and learn skills that will prepare them for the modern economy. They say that families voluntarily send their children to the schools, which are free, and that the students have classes in Tibetan culture and language.
But extensive interviews and research by The New York Times show that Tibetan children appear to be singled out by Chinese authorities for enrollment in residential schools. Their parents often have little or no choice but to send them, experts, parents, lawyers and human rights investigators said in interviews. Many parents do not see their children for long stretches.
Dozens of research papers and reports from experts and teachers within the Chinese system have warned about anxiety, loneliness, depression and other psychological harm to the schools’ Tibetan children.
The Times reviewed and analyzed hundreds of videos posted to Chinese social media sites by Tibetan boarding schools, state media and local propaganda departments that showed how the schools operate and serve the party’s objectives.
Student life is heavy with political indoctrination. Schools, for instance, celebrate what China calls “Serfs’ Emancipation Day,” referring to the anniversary of the Communist Party’s full takeover of Tibet in 1959, after a failed Tibetan uprising and a Chinese crackdown that forced the Dalai Lama into exile. The party accuses the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, of having ruled over a slaveholding society.
Children as young as preschool age were being sent away, and parental visits were limited. The Times talked to three Tibetan parents with children of elementary-school age in residential schools who said that they had no choice and that they were not allowed to visit their children at will.
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 speak of any choice if local schools are all closed down,” said Fernand de Varennes, a human rights expert.
He and two other independent experts with the United Nations investigated the boarding schools and expressed alarm in 2023 at what they said appeared to be a “policy of forced assimilation of the Tibetan identity into the dominant Han-Chinese majority.”
In 2021, a video surfaced online showing an elementary schoolteacher in eastern Tibet beating a child with a chair in his classroom. The video circulated on the internet in China more than 1,000 times before it was taken down.
Physical punishment is outlawed in Chinese schools, but studies by Chinese academics have found that the practice persists in Tibetan boarding schools.
The Chinese government does not say how many Tibetan children are in boarding schools. 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. The group arrived at its estimate, which it published in a report in 2021, based on local government statistics.
Statistics collected by the Times from local government documents across Tibetan areas show similar numbers in boarding schools, with some areas notably higher than others.
In Golog, a Tibetan area of Qinghai province, 95% of middle school students were in such schools, according to a study published in 2017 in China’s main journal on education for ethnic groups. A report from the local Legislature in 2023 said that 45 of the 49 elementary schools in Golog were residential.
The expansion of boarding school enrollment in Tibetan areas runs counter to the national trend. Chinese government guidelines issued in 2018 say that elementary schoolchildren should not, in general, be sent to such schools.
But children from ethnic minorities in border regions seem to be treated as an exception. In the far western region of Xinjiang, children of the Muslim Uyghur ethnic group have also been sent to residential schools in large numbers.
Chinese officials say such schools help children in Tibetan regions avoid long 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.
To counter those threats, Xi said in 2014, children of the right age should “study in school, live in school and grow up in school.” The government’s hope is that those children will then become champions of the Chinese language and the party’s values.
But some of the starkest warnings about the toll that boarding schools are taking on Tibetan children come from within China’s education system.
Teachers, education researchers and local legislators in China have written reports describing Tibetan children as suffering from being separated from their families and from being largely confined within their schools.
Education, especially in minority areas, is a politically sensitive topic. Tibetans who oppose the boarding schools risk imprisonment if they protest.
Yet some still voice their worries. On Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, parents lamented the diminishing role that the Tibetan language plays in their children’s lives.
“After just one month in kindergarten, my child basically no longer speaks Tibetan. Now when we speak to our child in Tibetan, they only respond in Mandarin,” one person wrote in a comment. “No matter how we try to teach Tibetan now, they won’t learn it. I’m really heartbroken.”
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