PRC’s residential schools aim to erase Tibetan, Uyghur culture, experts fear
FORUM Staff
United Nations experts have warned that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is increasingly separating children from families with an expanding network of boarding schools. The institutions appear to demonstrate the CCP’s strategy of forced assimilation for Tibetan, Uyghur and other minority populations.
In Tibet and in China’s northwest Xinjiang region, reports have documented the systematic closing of local schools, which are replaced by schools that require students to use Mandarin Chinese almost exclusively and a curriculum that rejects study of the students’ native culture. Most students also are required to board.
In Xinjiang, the U.N. said its independent experts “received information about large-scale removal of children, mainly Uyghur, from their families, including very young children whose parents are in exile or ‘interned’/detained. These children are treated as ‘orphans’ by state authorities and placed in full-time boarding schools, pre-schools or orphanages where the language used is almost exclusively Mandarin.” An estimated 2 million Uyghurs and other Muslims have been detained in so-called reeducation camps in Xinjiang. Human rights advocates say the CCP has committed crimes against humanity with its targeting of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities.
Media reports also detail allegations of physical and emotional abuse in the state-run boarding schools.
Most Tibetan children — almost 1 million — are enrolled in CCP-run residential schools, where students complete “compulsory education” in Mandarin Chinese without substantive study in the language, history or culture of the Buddhist-majority Himalayan region, formerly an independent nation, according to U.N. reports. While such schools exist elsewhere in the People’s Republic of China, the institutions are more prevalent in areas inhabited by Tibetan students. Nationally, about 22% of students attend boarding schools, compared to 78% of Tibetan students, U.N. experts said in a 2022 letter to the CCP. Teachers and activists have been jailed on charges of “inciting separatism” for offering or arranging Tibetan language instruction.
Conditions are similar in Xinjiang, where researchers said students “have little or no access to education in the Uyghur language and are under increasing pressure to speak and learn only Mandarin as opposed to education aimed at achieving bilingualism.” Teachers can be punished for using the Uyghur language outside specific language classes, experts say. As a result, young children are losing fluency in their native language and with it the ability to communicate with parents and grandparents. Enrollment in “highly regulated and controlled” schools does not allow for interaction with parents, extended family or communities, undermining ties to cultural and religious identities, the U.N. reported.
The CCP has stepped up assimilation campaigns in recent years, notably with a 2021 mandate that ethnic groups prioritize the party-state’s interests above all.
Communist threats to Tibetan culture have existed since the 1950s, when CCP forces invaded and annexed the neighboring state. In today’s context, the call to establish a single “Chinese national identity” has led to the further suppression and persecution cited by the U.N.’s experts.
CCP restrictions on religious customs have also stoked tensions in Xinjiang for decades. Protests led to government crackdowns that restricted Muslim practices such as fasting for Ramadan, introduced community surveillance and created a network of detention camps now linked to forced labor and other abuses. The U.N. experts called Beijing’s boarding schools a continuing violation of rights, including those to family life, culture and an education without discrimination.
