Tibetans ‘forced into’ Chinese state schools

TIBETAN children as young as four are being separated from their parents and placed into a vast network of state-run boarding schools to strip them of their national identity and build loyalty to the Communist Party of China (CPC), according to research.

As many as 900,000 Tibetan pupils are in the school system, which forces children to study primarily in Chinese, bans them from practising their religion and indoctrinates them, according to a report by Tibetan Action Institute, an advocacy group.

The policy has echoes of the mass detention and re-education schemes in Xinjiang, where more than a million Uyghur Muslims are said to have been locked up and forced into work.

Using first-hand testimonials from Tibetans in China, the 61-page report alleges that three out of four Tibetan students are separated from their families and communities – and called upon the international community to intervene on their behalf.

“By uprooting Tibetan children from their families and culture and making them live in state-run boarding schools, the [Chinese] are using one of the most heinous tools of colonisation to attack

Tibetan identity,” Lhadon Tethong, director of Tibet Action Institute, said.

“China’s unprecedented campaign of forced Sinicisation in Tibet targets even the youngest children and demands the urgent intervention of the United Nations and concerned governments.”

Parents are coerced into parting with their child by being threatened with fines or being told that their child would not get further schooling if they are not sent away to boarding kindergartens.

“I know of children aged four to five who don’t want to be separated from their mothers.

“They are forced to go to boarding schools,” one source told researchers.

Once at the schools, the children often fail to thrive as they are given limited care while they studied primarily in Chinese, are barred from practising their religion and are subjected to political indoctrination, the institute said.

At the boarding schools, all children are taught from Chinese-only texts.

Examples of mandated textbooks provided by the report include smiling students in various ethnic garb and the sentence “I am Chinese”.

A London tribunal investigating alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang concluded yesterday that China committed genocide in the region by preventing births in the Uyghur population.