The year that passed. Another year without Mom and Dad.
In China, millions of children are separated from their parents in order to attend boarding schools. The practice is particularly widespread in Tibet and the western region of Xinjiang, but it is also becoming more common in other parts of the country. The aim is to shape the children into true patriots, good socialists, and resolute supporters of Party leader Xi Jinping. “Uncle Xi, you are our friend and guide,” they sing in the schoolyard every morning.
In Tibet and the neighboring provinces with large Tibetan populations, around 800,000 children attended such schools in 2021, according to a report. An additional 100,000 children between the ages of four and six had been torn away from their parents to live in kindergartens. Today’s figures may be even higher.
The boarding schools and kindergartens are located in cities and densely populated areas, often several days’ travel from the children’s homes. Both teaching and play take place in Mandarin Chinese.
As time passes, parents and children gradually become strangers to one another. When the children are rarely allowed to visit their parents, they struggle to express themselves in their own mother tongue. The Tibetan sociologist Gyal Lo says of the children that they feel disoriented and uncertain about where they truly belong: “It is both tragic and painful to witness what is happening.”
At the same time as the number of boarding schools continues to grow, village primary schools are being shut down. Parents therefore have no real choice but to send their children away.
The report from the Tibetan Action Institute in India is thorough and rich in statistics and examples. Its findings suggest that at least 80 percent of all Tibetan children grow up in these new institutions. The corresponding share in the rest of the country is just over 20 percent. “These schools are a deliberate attempt to erase Tibetan identity,” the researchers write.
The Dalai Lama, the Tibetans’ spiritual leader, accuses China of attempting cultural genocide.
China is a mosaic of many ethnic groups, but nine out of ten inhabitants are Han Chinese. Almost all leaders at the highest level belong to this dominant group. In the new millennium, the Han Chinese language and the ideology of the Communist Party are meant to bind the country together. By channeling Tibetans, Uyghurs, and other minority peoples into the Han fold, the regime aims to turn all the country’s inhabitants into “new people” and obedient citizens.
The government’s campaign gained momentum in 2015, after Xi Jinping urged regional and local authorities to strengthen “patriotic education” among minority populations. In Tibet and Xinjiang, new boarding schools were built at a furious pace. At the same time, thousands of Mandarin-speaking teachers traveled to the two problem regions to “help” the children.
For years, Tibetans have struggled to preserve their national identity. Now the outlook is darker than it has been in a long time. “There isn’t even a light at the end of the tunnel,” says an exile Tibetan who recently visited his homeland. In the capital, Lhasa, he discovered that a large majority of children were being forced to live in boarding schools, even though their parents lived just a stone’s throw away.
Conditions are arguably even worse in Xinjiang. Of the region’s 25 million inhabitants, half are Uyghurs. In addition to their Turkic cultural background, they are Muslims. At a time when Islamic fundamentalists are baring their teeth in several countries, the leaders in Beijing view the Uyghurs as a security threat.
Today, several hundred thousand Uyghurs are serving sentences in detention camps across the region. Families have been split apart and torn to pieces, and a large but unknown number of Uyghur children are growing up in newly built kindergartens and boarding schools. In many cases, party officials move into Uyghur households to conduct propaganda and monitor their lives.
At a hearing in Oslo two years ago, several Uyghurs spoke about conditions in Xinjiang. In different ways, they had managed to get out of China. One of them, a woman, had worked in a kindergarten. She explained that Uyghur children were required from the very first day to learn Chinese as quickly as possible. A four-year-old girl who forgot herself and repeatedly spoke a few words in Uyghur was punished by having tape placed over her mouth. For the rest of the day she was mute. In the kindergarten, an almost military discipline prevailed, creating fear and anxiety among the children.
As the Communist Party intensifies its campaign, there is little the UN or others can do, even though several countries have condemned the abuses. Last year, UN special rapporteurs expressed their concern in a lengthy letter to the government in Beijing. Since the rapporteurs were not allowed to visit Tibet, they based their conclusions on official Chinese sources, Tibetan documents, and a large number of testimonies.
In the letter, they noted that young Tibetans are “to a large extent” forced to attend boarding schools, and that instruction takes place exclusively in Chinese. Parents who protest against the new system are punished with fines and threats.
The rapporteurs concluded that children in boarding schools suffer from “apathy, feelings of loneliness, fear, alienation, homesickness, inability to interact, and other forms of physical and psychological distress.”
The government’s draconian measures are accompanied by increasingly aggressive attacks on religious practice in Tibet and Xinjiang. Party leader Xi aims to “Sinicize” both Buddhism and Islam. Both religions are to adapt to “Chinese tradition and ways of thinking.” Above all, Xi wants control over what goes on in temples, monasteries, and mosques, so that they do not develop into breeding grounds for opposition to the Communist Party.
As a consequence of the tightening, security police have established themselves in or near the most important religious institutions. Video cameras monitor everything and everyone. Monks and nuns are arrested for minor offenses; a small portrait of the Dalai Lama hidden in a mattress is enough to qualify for punishment.
On top of everything else, the government in Beijing has decided that Tibet shall henceforth be called Xizang. The name means “The Western Treasure House,” which is apt enough, for the treasures of the Tibetan realm are many. Tibet is all of Asia’s water tower and the source region of rivers such as the Yangtze, the Yellow River, the Mekong, the Indus, and the Brahmaputra. The region also contains valuable minerals that China needs on its path forward.
In Xinjiang and the neighboring provinces of Ningxia and Gansu, the authorities are busy demolishing mosques. Human Rights Watch (HRW) believes that two-thirds of the mosques in Xinjiang have been demolished or repurposed since 2017. In Shadian, in Yunnan province, police and Muslims clashed when the authorities sought to tear down the minarets and the dome of the city’s grand mosque. The plan has for the time being been postponed. Around 1,600 Muslims were killed in a similar confrontation in Shadian in 1975.
The alarming reports tell us that something is seriously wrong in Xi Jinping’s realm. This suspicion is reinforced by the fact that independent investigators are denied access to the sensitive areas—even those from the UN. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are completely excluded, for China hates them like the plague. Xi, the great leader with the grand visions, clearly has something he wants to hide
