China Steals Language and Home Life From Tibetan Kids as Young as 4

Wall Street Journal, June 28, 2025
By Josh Chin and Niharika Mandhana

Original link: https://www.wsj.com/world/china/tibet-dalai-lama-china-schools-4733d519?st=W4ZNAX&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

China has for at least two decades directed children in Tibet to state-run boarding schools at ever-younger ages, trying to gut Tibetan culture and blunt generations of opposition to Communist Party rule.

It didn’t work as well as Chinese leaders hoped. 

Authorities frustrated by continued resistance to Beijing are now prying children as young as four years old from their homes—before they have a chance to fully absorb the Tibetan language and way of life.

Across Tibet, a mountainous region rich in natural resources where many people harbor dreams of independence, China is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build schools, recognizing how social identity forms early in life. The education project includes a network of daylong preschools, where children are taught in Mandarin, and lessons emphasize Chinese culture.

The preschool classes offer a familiar menu of games, crafts, songs and stories. Yet beyond teaching basic skills, the lessons glorify the Communist Party and Chinese identity. Campus signs read, “I am a Chinese child, I love speaking Mandarin.” Teachers stage skits telling children their clothes, shoes and well-being are gifts from the party.

From there, most Tibetan students graduate into an expanded system of primary boarding schools, spanning grades one through six, which keep them away from home for weeks or months at a time. They study almost entirely in Mandarin and live under the supervision of teachers and wardens, including Han Chinese who don’t speak Tibetan.

Chinese officials in some Tibetan areas are experimenting with funneling children into boarding schools at the start of preschool, according to government documents, social-media posts and independent researchers.

The campaign reflects the convictions of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who said the country needs to reach children as babies “so that the red gene seeps into their blood and permeates their hearts.”

The resistance of the Tibetan people, a religious and culturally distinct minority, has persisted under the influence of the current Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism since the mid-20th century. He remains a potent force despite decades of propaganda, political crackdowns and education drives aimed at undermining his authority.

Beijing views the religious leader, who lives in exile in India, as a dangerous separatist. The Dalai Lama, who turns 90 in July, recently declared his reincarnation will take place outside China “in the free world,” setting the stage for a hearts-and-minds battle for the future of Tibet. That has added to the urgency of Chinese leaders racing to cultivate a generation of Tibetans loyal to Beijing rather than the religious leader’s successor.

Several Tibetans in their 20s lamented in interviews that China’s ongoing indoctrination of young children seems to be working. 

One 21-year-old woman, who attended a Tibetan-language elementary school and went to boarding school in seventh grade, said her younger relatives entered Chinese boarding school as early as age 6. At the school, they learn entirely in Mandarin, she said, straining communication with their parents and grandparents, who understand very little of the language.  

The woman, who left China last fall, said she has scolded younger children for speaking to one another in Mandarin. “Even if they speak Tibetan,” she said, “the first language that comes to their mind is Mandarin.”

Such experiences point to a remarkable change, said Tenzin Dorjee, a political scientist at Columbia University who studies Chinese ethnic policy. “This has never happened in Tibetan history,” he said. “Tibetans have never spoken to each other in Chinese.”

The Tibet Action Institute, a human-rights group, estimates there are more than 800,000 students in boarding schools across Tibetan areas of China, which includes the Tibet Autonomous Region and portions of four nearby provinces. That represents three-quarters of all school-age Tibetans, said the institute, which extrapolated its estimate based on boarding rates in Tibetan areas reported by local governments and researchers. 

The Wall Street Journal couldn’t verify all of the official documents cited by the group, many of which appear to have since been deleted. Authorities regularly scrub the internet of sensitive information and intimidate Tibetans, even those living abroad, into silence. Foreign journalists are banned except on state-approved propaganda tours. 

This account is based on government procurement orders and other official documents, state-media reports, academic studies, classroom videos posted on social media, written accounts from former teachers and students and interviews with former students. The Journal analyzed government procurement data provided by ChinaFile, an online magazine run by the New York-based nonprofit Asia Society.

Chinese officials didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Tibetan homeland

Tibetans have resisted Chinese influence through most of their 1,400-year history, protected in large measure by living in one of the most inhospitable spots on Earth. Roughly seven million Tibetans are spread across an area of southwest China three times the size of California, living at an average elevation of more than 14,000 feet.

When Mao Zedong sent Communist forces into Tibetan areas in 1950, he urged his commanders to move slowly, warning the troops were in a place “where there were no Chinese in the past.” Mao’s push fed a 1959 uprising that ended with a bloody crackdown, and the Dalai Lama fled into exile.

Chinese leaders in the decades since have ricocheted between accommodation and oppression of Tibetans, earning derision for Beijing outside of China and a Nobel Peace Prize for the exiled spiritual leader.

The government is stepping more softly in Tibet than it has in Xinjiang, where it used internment camps to carry out political indoctrination of recalcitrant Uyghurs, a Turkic-Muslim minority. Yet the goal is similar. 

Chinese authorities in Xinjiang have left scattered mosques and other outward symbols of local Islamic culture intact, while suppressing behaviors they deem a threat—such as keeping a copy of the Quran on smartphones—and imposing a Chinese worldview. 

“They are not trying to eradicate these cultures,” said Robert Barnett, a Tibet expert at SOAS University of London. “They are surgically removing and they’re surgically grafting.”

Chinese officials see Tibetan Buddhism as a Chinese religion that can be handled with a subtler approach than Islam, he said. The government’s chosen avenue is education.

For years, schoolteachers in Tibetan areas adopted a mix of Tibetan and Mandarin. Families also could send children to monasteries and monk-run independent schools.

A former student who graduated in 2009 from the Ragya School, a noted Tibetan school in the remote region of Golog that drew male students from across Tibet, remembered his alma mater as a sanctuary. The school offered classes in math, English, Chinese, computer science and video production, as well as Buddhism and Tibetan literature.

“There wasn’t much pressure from the state so we had free space to learn,” the former student said. He belonged to a student group that campaigned against Mandarin influence on the Tibetan language, handing out stickers with Tibetan words they invented for mobile phones, electric kettles and other modern objects. 

After Xi came to power in 2012, the party turned sharply against expressions of separate ethnic identity among minorities. Officials cracked down on Tibetan alternatives to public schools and expanded the boarding school system.

In 2021, Beijing deleted references to bilingual education from China’s childhood development plan. Xi that year was the first Communist Party chief to visit Tibet in three decades. In the capital Lhasa, he urged officials to cultivate “a stronger sense of identifying with the great motherland, Chinese people, Chinese culture, the Chinese Communist Party and socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

Comprehensive statistics on the number of boarding schools in Tibetan areas aren’t available. A Journal review of education data found primary school dorm space in the Tibet Autonomous Region grew almost 120% between 2012 and 2022 to a total of more than 13 million square feet. The Journal found that all or nearly all primary schools are boarding institutions in a half dozen Tibetan counties, a small sample of the total. 

The government schools appeal to many Tibetan parents. Their children can study math and science, subjects that open a path to jobs in civil service or other sectors that pay better than farming or herding. Many of the schools are newly built with desktop computers, digital blackboards and sports fields. The brightest students also get a shot at a university education.

The schooling is free for nomadic and farming families, but there are hidden costs.

Early education

Sonam Choesto, 15, spent a year in a state-run boarding primary school about seven years ago. She described a life there that was simultaneously well-resourced, regimented, disorienting and lonely.

Students slept eight to a room on bunk beds in a renovated dorm with new bedding. Wardens punished unruly children by hitting them on the palms with a stick. Teachers made students repeatedly squat and jump the length of an outdoor basketball court barefoot as punishment for poor test scores, she said. 

She could visit home only for a two-month break during her school year. Some of her classmates’ parents visited on weekends but not Sonam’s. In a way, she said, that was easier.

“For a day or two after their parents visited, the other kids would get really quiet,” Sonam said. At night, she would sometimes hear them crying, reflecting a sense of isolation that Chinese researchers say has triggered mental-health problems among boarding-school students in Tibet.

Students had morning exercise at 7 a.m., ate breakfast at 8 a.m. and were in class or studying until 8 p.m., with breaks for lunch and dinner, Sonam said. Except for a lone Tibetan language course, every class was taught in Mandarin and nearly all the teachers were Han Chinese.

“The Han teachers didn’t pay much attention to newcomers like me who couldn’t speak Mandarin,” said Sonam, who knew only a smattering of Chinese words when she arrived.

Over the past decade, county plans and spending data reviewed by the Journal also show sharp increases in preschool construction—far outpacing every other region of China. The number of preschools in the Tibet Autonomous Region reached nearly 2,500 in 2022 from around 500 in 2012. Enrollment among the region’s preschool-age children now tops 90% compared with 52% a decade ago.

Building plans, procurement paperwork and social-media videos show the preschools are designed to run from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., equipped with rows of beds for naps. 

Classroom videos show students learning patriotic rhymes and stories celebrating the Communist Party. In their first history lessons, the children are told that Tibet was a backward place before China took over in the 1950s. Officials in Tibetan areas recently began testing Mandarin proficiency among preschoolers. 

There is no official tally of boarding preschools, but there is evidence showing an increase. In May, officials in the heavily Tibetan prefecture of Aba announced the near completion of four boarding schools for preschoolers, a $1.4 million pilot project, according to a government report obtained by the Tibet Action Institute.

The group also found a government report this month announcing a boarding preschool with 171 students in a neighboring prefecture. The head of the school is quoted saying he arranged for a bus to take children home on weekends. The Journal found documents that point to preschool-age boarding schools in three other Tibetan areas.

Ginger Duan, a worker for a Chinese nonprofit that assisted at the Ragya school, said creating a generation of Mandarin-speaking Tibetans won’t solve ethnic tension or break Tibetan resistance. “You’re just going to cultivate a bunch of rebels who can understand Mandarin,” she said. Duan left the Ragya school before it was closed and now lives in the U.S. 

Others believe Xi’s mandate is working. One 25-year-old man recalled that he was in the middle of third grade when teachers swapped out Tibetan textbooks for those printed in Mandarin. Then came lessons on the theories of Marx and Lenin.

 “I didn’t learn any of it,” said the man, who fled China last year.

Yet the new, more aggressive schooling of the youngest students “is creating a generation of Tibetans that is very different,” he said. When his younger cousins and relatives come home from school, there is a language barrier, he said, and a different way of thinking. 

“They are brainwashed by Chinese thoughts and propaganda,” he said.

Write to Josh Chin at [email protected] and Niharika Mandhana at [email protected]

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