Anjali Sharma
GG News Bureau
UNITED NATIONS, 7th Feb. UN human rights experts on Monday that one million Tibetan minority children in China have been separated from their families and placed into Government-run boarding schools, forced their assimilation into the dominant culture.
“We are very disturbed that in recent years the residential school system for Tibetan children appears to act as a mandatory large-scale programme intended to assimilate Tibetans into majority Han culture, contrary to international human rights standards,” they said in a statement.
According to the independent experts: Fernand de Varennes, Special Rapporteur on minority issues; Farida Shaheed, Special Rapporteur on the right to education, and Alexandra Xanthaki, Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rightsstated that residential schools provide educational content and an environment centred around Han culture.
They said children from the Tibetan minority are forced to complete a “compulsory education” curriculum in the Mandarin Chinese language, or Putonghua, with no access to traditional or culturally-relevant learning.
Government schools do not provide for substantive study of Tibetan language, history and culture, it added.
“As a result, Tibetan children are losing their facility with their native language and the ability to communicate easily with their parents and grandparents in the Tibetan language, which contributes to their assimilation and erosion of their identity,” they added.
They were concerned about a reported substantial increase in the number of residential schools operating in and outside of the Tibet Autonomous Region, and the number of Tibetan children living in them.
It said that residential schools exist in other parts of China, their share in areas with Tibetan minority populations is much higher, and this percentage has been increasing in recent years.
They noted that nationally, the percentage of students boarding is over 20 per cent, but the information they received, points to the vast majority of Tibetan children being in these institutions, nearly one million.
The experts said that the increase has been achieved through closing rural schools in areas that tend to be populated by Tibetans, replacing them with township or county-level schools where teaching and communications are exclusively in Putonghua (standard Mandarin), and students are usually required to board.
“Many residential schools are situated far from the family homes of students boarding in them,” they added.
“We are alarmed by what appears to be a policy of forced assimilation of the Tibetan identity into the dominant Han-Chinese majority, through a series of oppressive actions against Tibetan educational, religious and linguistic institutions,” they added.
These policies run contrary to the prohibition of discrimination and the rights of the Tibetan people to education, linguistic and cultural rights, freedom of religion or belief, and they represent a reversal of measures that were more inclusive or accommodating, the experts noted.
They recalled that in August 2021, China’s Central Conference on Ethnic Affairs called on all ethnic groups to be guided to always place the interests of the nation, above all else.
“This call re-affirmed the idea of building a modern and strong socialist State based on a single Chinese national identity,” they said.
“In this context, initiatives to promote Tibetan language and culture are reportedly being suppressed, and individuals advocating for Tibetan language and education are persecuted.”
The experts wrote to the Chinese Government in November and remain in contact with the authorities regarding the issue, the statement concluded.
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