Learning to Be Chinese: Colonial-Style Boarding Schools on the Tibetan Plateau

Learning to Be Chinese: Colonial-Style Boarding Schools on the Tibetan Plateau

James Leibold and Tenzin Dorjee argue that China’s education system, like colonial school systems elsewhere, is designed to produce loyalty to the Party-state and cultural conformity among the country’s minority peoples. It first dismisses their languages, cultures and ways of life as primitive and then remoulds students in the image of the Han majority.

Their focus is the vast network of boarding schools on the Tibetan plateau. Citing research by the Tibet Action Institute, they note that about 78 percent of Tibetan students live in state boarding schools, compared with a national average of around 22 percent, so most Tibetan children spend much of the year away from their families and communities. In these schools a rigid, uniform curriculum taught in Mandarin offers social mobility to those who comply while reshaping how they see the world. The authors also point to the revision or cancellation of regional regulations that protected the use of the Tibetan language.

They conclude that these colonial-style boarding schools are slowly and irreversibly erasing parts of Tibetan culture and fundamentally changing Tibetan identity.

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