Across China’s west, the party is placing children in boarding schools in a drive to assimilate a generation of Tibetans into the national mainstream and mold them into citizens loyal to the Communist Party.
Tibetan rights activists, as well as experts working for the United Nations, have said that the party is systematically separating Tibetan children from their families to erase Tibetan identity and to deepen China’s control of a people who historically resisted Beijing’s rule. They have estimated that around three-quarters of Tibetan students age 6 and older — and others even younger — are in residential schools that teach largely in Mandarin, replacing the Tibetan language, culture and Buddhist beliefs that the children once absorbed at home and in village schools.
When China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, visited one such school in the summer, he inspected a dormitory that appeared freshly painted and as neat as an army barracks. He walked into a classroom where Tibetan students, listening to a lecture on Communist Party thought, stood and applauded to welcome him.
Mr. Xi’s visit to the school in Qinghai Province in June amounted to a firm endorsement of the program, despite international criticism. Education, he said, must “implant a shared consciousness of Chinese nationhood in the souls of children from an early age.”
Chinese officials say the schools help Tibetan children to quickly become fluent in the Chinese language and learn skills that will prepare them for the modern economy. They say that families voluntarily send their children to the schools, which are free, and that the students have classes in Tibetan culture and language.
But extensive interviews and research by The New York Times show that Tibetan children appear to be singled out by the Chinese authorities for enrollment in residential schools. Their parents often have little or no choice but to send them, experts, parents, lawyers and human rights investigators said in interviews. Many parents do not see their children for long stretches.
Dozens of research papers and reports from experts and teachers within the Chinese system have warned about the anxiety, loneliness, depression and other psychological harm of the schools on Tibetan children.
The Times reviewed and analyzed hundreds of videos posted to Chinese social media sites by Tibetan boarding schools, state media and local propaganda departments that showed how the schools operate and serve the party’s objectives.
Student life is heavy with political indoctrination. Schools, for instance, celebrate what China calls “Serfs’ Emancipation Day,” referring to the anniversary of the Communist Party’s full takeover of Tibet in 1959, after a failed Tibetan uprising and a Chinese crackdown that forced the Dalai Lama into exile. The party accuses the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, of having ruled over a slaveholding society.
The Times also found video accounts of boarding school teachers and travelers that showed how some schools are underfunded and overstretched. We are not crediting some of the accounts by name to avoid drawing a backlash against them.
China has been expanding its boarding schools for Tibetan children even as countries like the United States, Canada and Australia have been grappling with the trauma inflicted on generations of Indigenous children who were forcibly removed from their families and placed in residential schools. (President Biden in October apologized on behalf of the U.S. government for the abuse of Indigenous children in residential schools from the early 1800s to the late 1960s, calling it a “a sin on our soul.”)
China has been eager to show that happy, well-fed Tibetan children are proudly declaring that they are Chinese.
Chugqensumdo Town Tibetan Boarding Central Primary School/Tencent Video
Songpan County Caoyuan Township Central Primary School/WeChat
Strangers in Their Own Homes
Gyal Lo, a Tibetan education researcher, became alarmed by the boarding schools in 2016, when he saw that his two preschool-aged grandnieces, who were attending one in his hometown in northwestern China, preferred to speak Mandarin, not Tibetan.
When the grandnieces, then ages 4 and 5, went home on the weekend, he said in an interview, they appeared withdrawn and spoke awkwardly in Tibetan with their parents, much changed from when he saw them in the previous year. Now they behaved “like strangers in their own home,” he said.
“I said to my brother, ‘What if you don’t send them to the boarding school?’” Gyal Lo said. “He said he had no choice.”
Gyal Lo set out to investigate the changes that families were going through as the schools expanded across Tibetan regions in China. Over the next three years he visited dozens of such schools, and saw that many Tibetan students spoke little of their mother tongue and were sometimes only able to see their parents once every several weeks or even months.
Children as young as preschool age were being sent away, he said, and parental visits were limited. The Times talked to three Tibetan parents with children of elementary-school age in residential schools who said that they had no choice and that they were not allowed to visit their children at will.
Many Tibetan parents accept that their children should learn Chinese for a chance at better jobs, said Gyal Lo, who now lives in Canada and is an activist working to draw attention to the schools. But most also want their children to first gain a strong grounding in their mother tongue.
“Children should learn from their grandparents, their parents, about their local language, about the names of things, about their traditions and their values,” Gyal Lo said in an interview. “Boarding schools create a physical and emotional distance from their parents and family members.”
Under Mr. Xi, such schools have sharply cut classes in Tibetan. Instead most classes are taught in Chinese, a language unfamiliar to many rural Tibetan children, who mix little with the Han Chinese majority.
Chinese officials insist that enrollment is voluntary. In reality, the government has closed village schools and privately run Tibetan language schools, while strictly enforcing mandatory education laws.
“One can hardly speak of any choice if local schools are all closed down,” said Fernand de Varennes, a human rights expert.
He and two other independent experts with the United Nations investigated the boarding schools and expressed alarm in 2023 at what they said appeared to be a “policy of forced assimilation of the Tibetan identity into the dominant Han-Chinese majority.”
At Risk of Abuse and Neglect
The text messages and voice memos trickled in, carrying urgent questions from Tibetans in China seeking legal advice about the treatment of children in boarding schools.
One man wrote to ask about what redress to demand for a child who suffered permanent injury from a classroom fight while the teacher was absent. Another said that a child was found dead in the bathroom of a boarding school, of unclear causes, and that the child’s parents wanted answers. The questions had been sent over the past three years to volunteers offering online legal advice to Tibetans. Times reporters reviewed several such messages, which were shared with us, but were unable to independently verify the accounts.
In 2021, a video surfaced online showing an elementary schoolteacher in eastern Tibet beating a child with a chair in his classroom. The video circulated on the internet in China more than 1,000 times before it was taken down. The school at which the beating took place has been described in state media reports as having students who lived on campus.
The video set off a public outcry. In response, the local government conducted an investigation and said in an official statement that the beating had left a three-inch-long wound on the child’s forehead and that the teacher had been suspended.
Physical punishment is outlawed in Chinese schools, but studies by Chinese academics have found that the practice persists in Tibetan boarding schools. A 2020 study by Chinese researchers on boarding schools for children from ethnic minorities said that some teachers “lacked concern for the students,” treated them roughly and were “even resorting to physical punishment.”
Local legislators and researchers in Tibetan areas have reported that the already overcrowded schools face serious shortages of teachers and support staff.
A 16-year-old living in a Tibetan village in Sichuan Province told The Times that beatings by teachers were a constant at the residential school he attended. He said that over the years he had accumulated several scars on his back from beatings by teachers, sometimes by hand and other times with a wooden ruler.
A Generation of Cultural Erasure
The Chinese government does not say how many Tibetan children are in boarding schools. The Tibet Action Institute, an international group that has campaigned to close the schools, estimates that among children aged 6 to 18, the figure is at least 800,000 — or three in every four Tibetan children.
The group arrived at its estimate, which it published in a report in 2021, based on local government statistics. Lhadon Tethong, a co-founder and director of the group, likened the Chinese schools to the colonial residential schools in Canada, Australia and the United States.
“Different time, different place, different government, but same impact,” she said, “in the sense of breaking cultural and familial bonds and roots, and psychologically damaging and traumatizing kids at their foundation.”
Statistics collected by The Times from local government documents across Tibetan areas show similar numbers in boarding schools, with some areas notably higher than others.
In Golog, a Tibetan area of Qinghai Province, 95 percent of middle school students were in such schools, according to a study published in 2017 in China’s main journal on education for ethnic groups. A report from the local legislature in 2023 said that 45 of the 49 elementary schools in Golog were residential.
The expansion of boarding school enrollment in Tibetan areas runs counter to the national trend. Chinese government guidelines issued in 2018 say that elementary school children should not, in general, be sent to such schools.
But children from ethnic minorities in border regions seem to be treated as an exception. In the far western region of Xinjiang, children of the Muslim Uyghur ethnic group have also been sent to residential schools in large numbers.
Chinese officials say such schools help children in the Tibetan region avoid long commutes. But official websites also promote instructions from Mr. Xi on minority education, arguing that youth in ethnic minority regions were at risk of having “erroneous” ideas about religion, history and ethnic relations.
To counter those threats, Mr. Xi said in 2014, children of the right age should “study in school, live in school and grow up in school.” The government’s hope is that those children will then become champions of the Chinese language and the party’s values.
In one video, which appears to be filmed and uploaded on social media as part of a school assignment, a Tibetan fourth-grader at a boarding school described how she saved the day when a Chinese cashier could not understand the girl’s mother, who spoke only Tibetan. She then called on other students to teach their parents Mandarin. “Be a Civilized Person, Speak Mandarin,” the video was titled.
Warnings From Within China
China’s drive to assimilate the Tibetans echoes history elsewhere in the world where Indigenous people were seen by their foreign occupiers as savages who needed to be civilized with boarding schools, causing trauma and abuses. It’s a parallel that Chinese officials reject.
But some of the starkest warnings about the toll that boarding schools are taking on Tibetan children come, strikingly, from within China’s education system.
Teachers, education researchers and local legislators in China have written reports describing Tibetan children as suffering from being separated from their families and from being largely confined within their schools.
In education journals, teachers have shared advice on helping Tibetan children cope: Create a homier feel by decorating dorm rooms and cafeterias, and be ready for students to be anxious about when they could return home.
Many boarding schools in more remote Tibetan areas appear to be underfunded and lacking in facilities, teachers and trained counselors. Local lawmakers found in 2021 that one school for elementary children in Golog, the Tibetan area of Qinghai, had no tap water or power connection for its cafeteria until they complained.
“Because boarding schools lack staff like dormitory supervisors, security guards and medical carers, the teachers must take on 24-hour duty weeks while also fulfilling their daily teaching duties,” said a 2023 survey conducted by the Golog legislature.
In video diaries uploaded to social media, teachers in Tibetan regions have described days in which, on top of teaching, they must also deliver food to students, show them how to make beds and tuck them in at night.
A teacher at an elementary school in Tibet, who goes by Ms. Chen on social media, posted a series of video blogs in 2022. In one, she documented a typical day that started with a morning study session before dawn and ended with her checking on the children before bedtime.
Another teacher, who identifies himself as Mr. Su on social media, says he teaches at an elementary and secondary school in Ngari, Tibet. He shot a video while patrolling the dormitories of younger students while on duty one night in 2023.
“All of us are basically standing in as their parents,” he wrote in one social media post.
Videos from Chinese travelers show how difficult it can be for rural schools to meet the needs of their students. In 2021, a traveler who recorded a visit to one school in Garze, a Tibetan area in Sichuan Province, said that the dorms looked nice but that there weren’t enough beds. Two children shared a bed and huddled to keep each other warm in the winter, as there was no central heating.
Some teachers defend the schools as ultimately for the good of children. Others described encountering widespread opposition to the policy.
A 2023 study from Garze concluded that parents, teachers and school administrators were reluctant to send young children to boarding schools. Many parents, the study said, conveyed “helplessness, worry, incomprehension and an inability to speak out” about the changes.
Education, especially in minority areas, is a politically sensitive topic. Tibetans who oppose the boarding schools risk imprisonment if they protest. Tashi Wangchuk, a Tibetan businessman who petitioned the government to preserve schooling in Tibetan and spoke to The Times about his efforts, was sentenced to prison for five years in 2018.
Yet, some still voice their worries. On Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, parents lamented the diminishing role that the Tibetan language plays in their children’s lives.
“After just one month in kindergarten, my child basically no longer speaks Tibetan. Now when we speak to our child in Tibetan, they only respond in Mandarin,” one person wrote in a comment.
“No matter how we try to teach Tibetan now, they won’t learn it. I’m really heartbroken.”
