The boarding schools where China tries to ‘erase’ young children’s culture: report

Distressed Tibetan children as young as four sent to Chinese state-run boarding schools for indoctrination have been beaten for praying and wearing Buddhist blessing cords, forced to sleep on sheepskins and taught only in Mandarin, a new report has found.

Researchers and activists say the boarding schools have been used by authorities to suppress the local culture and language of people in China’s Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR).

Details of the violence and coercive indoctrination have emerged in a new report from the US-based Tibet Action Institute (TAI) titled When They Came To Take Our Children.

Two Tibetans interviewed told the TAI that children were reprimanded for practising their religion.

“Students are restricted from wearing any sungdue [Buddhist blessing cords] around their necks and wrists and chanting Tibetan prayers,” the report quotes them saying.

A former student, who has left Tibet, told the TAI if school authorities inspected dormitories and “found that we had not kept it clean, we were beaten as a punishment”.

Along with the allegations of beatings, the report says Tibetan children are indoctrinated to praise the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and taught only in Mandarin.

“It’s an effort to move Tibetan children away from family and community … expanding its control over what they’re learning and thinking,” Freya Putt, the author of the report and TAI’s Director of Strategy, says.

The TAI said its research was based on rare firsthand accounts from people in Tibet, and with those who have recently fled — as well as Chinese news reports and research papers.

Human Rights Watch Associate China Director Maya Wang said they too have gathered evidence of the CCP’s enforcement of Mandarin instruction of Tibetan schoolchildren.

“It’s part of a bigger forced assimilation drive, where the intention is to punish any kind of expression of Tibetans that are not following the Chinese government script,” she told the ABC.

Chinese authorities have denied children have been mistreated, and have used state media to cast the schools in a far more positive light.

In a 2023 letter to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, China’s permanent mission said the country prioritised the rights of students from ethnic minorities to learn in both the national language and their own language.

“Allegations of the so-called “assimilation” of Tibetan culture are completely untenable, and we firmly reject them,” the letter said.

Almost a million kids in the system

TAI’s previous research found that 800,000-900,000 Tibetan children aged 6-18 were living in state-run boarding schools.

Fieldwork by educational sociologist Gyal Lo suggests another 100,000 aged four to six are also in boarding preschools.

“Some people do not want to send their children to boarding school but they don’t have any other choice,” a Tibetan who recently fled is quoted as saying in the report.

“Parents do not want their children to be illiterate, so with that hope they send their children to the schools. But when these children return home, they cannot speak in Tibetan with their family members, they only communicate in Chinese.

Dr Lo said he had even seen this happen to his two grand-nieces.

He described it as a “sort of cultural genocide”, and that his grand-nieces seemed to be uncomfortable sharing the family’s Tibetan identity.

“They became a stranger at home,” he said.

“That’s just the result of the three months in the boarding preschool.”

The TAI’s report detailed terrible conditions in boarding preschools.

A student teacher’s online diary is quoted, describing how “children in the lower bunks were prevented from falling off by boards; children in the upper bunks were tied up with a strap. For nap time, children have to sleep with their heads on their desks”.

Another account from a Tibetan still in Tibet described how the young child of a friend was so distressed they had to be locked in a room so their parent could leave them at boarding school.

“China is using Tibetan children as the final frontier on the battleground to eliminate the Tibetan identity language and the culture,” Dr Lo said.

Former UN Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues, Fernand de Varennes, described these practices as an “existential threat” to Tibetan people.

“Within two generations, if this situation does not improve, the language, much of the identity [and] culture will be lost,” he said.

Tibetan traditions and language discouraged

Tibetan-Australian Yangkyi Dolma Sangpo, 25, attended a boarding school as a young child.

Yangkyi’s parents fled Tibet when she was only four months old.

“My father, he got in trouble with the Chinese government because he was bringing Tibetan scriptures and Tibetan political texts from India back into Tibet,” Yangkyi said.

Her parents could not risk taking her on a month-long journey through the Himalaya mountains to India, she said.

So she was left in the care of her grandmother.

Yangkyi remembers being taught in Mandarin at school in the village where she lived with her grandmother.

She said they did learn Tibetan “on the side”, but the school was closed down when she was about six.

She was then told she would have to go to a boarding school.

At that school, students were strongly discouraged from speaking Tibetan or keeping possessions tied to Tibetan traditions, like prayer beads, she said. 

“We received a lot of bullying from other students who were there a long time … they were looking down on us,” she said.

At boarding school, Yangkyi says they were only taught Chinese culture and language.

“We were not practising Tibetan religion or any other type of traditions,” she said.

Yangkyi remembers the culture shock when she returned home.

“Because my grandmother and my extended family … they don’t speak Mandarin, and me coming home [I was] completely speaking Mandarin all the time and correcting little words,” she said.

“Like if they said ‘socks’ in Tibetan, I’d be correcting them to say it in Mandarin.”

Yangkyi said she had a kidney condition as a young child.

Her family used that as an excuse to keep her at home in the village instead of returning to the state-run boarding school.

She eventually went to another privately run boarding school that taught Tibetan language and traditions.

Then in 2010, Yangkyi was reunited with her parents who had been relocated to Australia on humanitarian grounds.

Even outside of Tibet, people like Yangkyi and Dr Lo put themselves at great risk by speaking publicly about their experiences and research.

When Dr Lo was recently in India, his father died.

“My brothers and sister could not directly inform me that my dad passed away because they’re afraid of Chinese authorities’ intimidation,” he said.

Accounts from Tibet have been extremely difficult to verify.

Yangkyi tried for months to get documents or photos from family still there, to help the ABC verify her story.

But it was not possible without putting them at risk.

Even chatting briefly with Yangkyi spooked one of her relatives.

“He left me a note saying: ‘Hey, I’ll be MIA for a while, I don’t want to get in trouble,'” she said.

Censorship and controlled access

There have long been accusations and documentation of religious and cultural suppression in Tibet.

In 1950, the then-newly proclaimed People’s Republic of China sent troops into Tibet.

It was annexed by China and after a failed uprising in 1959 the Dalai Lama — Tibet’s spiritual leader — fled to India, where he set up a government in exile that still exists.

Tibetans living overseas say communication with relatives is limited, and there is great risk talking about anything political or controversial.

People in Tibet are also routinely restricted from travelling and being issued passports, according to the Central Tibetan Administration, the India-based government in exile.

Foreign journalists and officials are rarely allowed into the region.

The US State Department’s East Asia and Pacific bureau stated in May that five requests in 2024 and three in 2023 by American officials to visit were rejected.

Diplomats visiting Tibetan areas outside the TAR are subject to “conspicuous surveillance to intimidate, monitor, harass, and restrict [their] movements”, it says.

It says the TAR is the only part of China its officials need to formally request permission to visit.

The ABC has made repeated requests to visit Tibet to report on the devastating earthquake in January, which killed at least 120 people.

They were all denied, with officials citing safety concerns.

CCP media accuses critics of lying

The CCP has mobilised its media outlets to portray the schools in a positive way.

A video posted on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, by China Tibet Net — a state media outlet — shows children in class, playing outside, conducting chemistry experiments and dancing.

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The description emphasises that enrolment in the boarding school system was voluntary, and students received free food and accommodation with tuition in both Tibetan and Mandarin.

There was another video posted by The Tibet Daily, the official newspaper of the CCP’s Tibet Autonomous Region Committee.

It features footage said to be from foreign media reports, accusing them of spreading fake information about boarding schools.

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In the video, two Chinese reporters visit a school in Tibet where a teacher tells them they give classes in Tibetan language, culture and dancing.

The video says the boarding schools are the only way to provide high quality education in such a large and sparsely populated region.

In 2020, China’s State Council introduced measures aimed at “promoting and popularising the national common language and script”, with policies encouraging teachers from other regions to support teaching in Tibet and improve Chinese proficiency among local teachers.

There was no requirement for teachers to have Tibetan language skills, according to a 2024/2025 recruitment document issued by the Shenzhen Municipal Education Bureau.

Australia raises concerns over schools

Zoe Bedford from the Australia Tibet Council said her organisation had asked the Australian government to sanction Chinese government officials responsible for Tibet’s boarding schools.

“We get the reply back that the government raises the issue of these colonial boarding schools publicly and privately in their conversations with Chinese officials,” Ms Bedford said.

A Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade spokesperson said they would not speculate about potential sanctions.

“The Australian government has serious concerns about the erosion of educational, religious, linguistic, and cultural rights in Tibet, including through the boarding school system,” it said in a statement.

In October, Australia’s ambassador to the United Nations, James Larsen, raised concerns about the “separation of children from families in boarding schools; and erosion of linguistic, cultural, educational and religious rights and freedoms”.

The ABC contacted China’s embassy in Canberra for a response.

Professor de Varennes, the former UN special rapporteur, called on UN institutions and democratic countries to do more.

The boarding schools where China tries to ‘erase’ young children’s culture: report