Boarding Schools in Tibet

In a recently published research article, Learning to be Chinese: colonial-style boarding schools on the Tibetan plateau, James Leibold and Tenzin Dorjee examine this vast network where “Tibetan children are placed in around-the-clock state care with little access to their home communities.”

A few factoids they cite help to give an idea of what this really means:

• During the 1990s, autonomous regions at various administrative levels enacted local regulations supporting Tibetan-medium education;
• Over the last two decades, the medium of instruction in ‘bilingual’ schools has gradually shifted towards Chinese. Since 2019, Putonghua has become the official medium of instruction at the primary school level in the Tibetan Autonomous Region;
• At least 800,000 Tibetan children, 78 percent of Tibetan students, live and study in state boarding schools, more than triple the nationwide average for boarding school students;
• Some schools are over 400 kilometers from students’ homes, with the average distance being 60 kilometers, meaning parental visits are limited to special occasions.

The current emphasis on “what the CCP calls ‘patriotic education’ seeks to instill the ‘five identifications’ (五个认同) from childhood: identification with and loyalty to the motherland, Zhonghua race-nation, Zhonghua culture, the Chinese Communist Party, and socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

Under Xi Jinping, the Tibet model is apparently being implemented — with certain localized twists — in both Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. One wonders: How successful will it be in shaping non-Han children into mainstream Chinese citizens? And given the disturbing results of forced colonial-style schooling of indigenous peoples that took place in the United States, Canada and Australia in the 19th century and even fairly late into the 20th century, what sort of post-schooling traumas can one expect to see emerge?