China has separated nearly one million Tibetan children from their parents, forcing them to live in colonial boarding schools – cutting them off from their families, language, and religion while subjecting them to intense political indoctrination day in and day out.
TIBET'S STOLEN CHILDREN
Nearly 3 out of 4 Tibetan children have been separated from their parents by China.
WE NEED TO STOP THIS. We need to get these boarding schools on the world leaders’ agenda and urge they demand that China shut the boarding schools down!
Tibetan children as young as four to six are being sent to boarding schools where they are deprived of access to their language and their culture.
The Issue
The Chinese government has established a vast network of colonial boarding schools in Tibet where students live separated from their families and are subjected to highly politicized education, primarily in Chinese.
Touted by the Chinese government as a means of providing education to a sparse and far-flung population, the schools are the cornerstone of an assimilationist agenda advanced by Chinese President Xi Jinping himself, intended to preempt threats to Chinese Communist Party control by eliminating ethnic differences.
The impact of the colonial boarding school experience on Tibetan children and their families – including psychological and emotional trauma – and the implications for whole generations of Tibetans and the long-term survival of Tibetan identity are grave.
It is imperative that the United Nations and concerned governments urgently call on China to halt its implementation of this system in Tibet.
Congressional-Executive Commission on China Q & A with Tibet Action's Director, Lhadon Tethong:
How similar are colonial boarding schools to residential school systems in Canada and the United States?
How China forces parents to send their children to colonial boarding schools in Tibet.
News
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Dr Gyal Lo, a Tibetan scholar and education expert, said:
“There is no longer Tibetan education in Tibet. The Chinese government’s colonial boarding school policies are designed to completely subsume Tibetans into the occupier’s culture. As an education expert who fled Tibet in 2020, I’ve been working to sound the alarm on these residential schools and the devastating impact they are having on the well-being of an entire generation of Tibetan children.”
Lhadon Tethong, Director of Tibet Action Institute, said:
“We urge governments to take concerted action to hold China accountable and end China’s colonial boarding school system in Tibet which is in flagrant violation of international law. As a mother of three young children, the idea of being forced to send them away is one of the worst nightmares I can imagine. That this suffering and trauma is being experienced by almost every family in Tibet — right now — is horrifying.”
China: UN experts alarmed by separation of 1 million Tibetan children from families and forced assimilation at residential schools
On 6 February 2023 a group of UN human rights experts released a statement expressing alarm concerning “the residential school system for Tibetan children [that] appears to act as a mandatory large-scale programme intended to assimilate Tibetans into majority Han culture, contrary to international human rights standards.”
Further concern was raised by The UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) in Geneva expert committee members reiterated strong concern about the erosion of Tibetan language “in the push for a unified curriculum and the national common language policy”. This policy has resulted in Tibetan being replaced by Chinese as the medium of instruction in schools throughout Tibet, including in kindergartens where “Tibetan children as young as four to six are being sent to boarding schools where they are completely deprived of access to their language and their culture.”
