As Tibetans Celebrate the Dalai Lama, India Launch of New Report Highlights the Threat of China’s Colonial Boarding Schools to Tibet’s Children, Future

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

5 July 2025

Contact: Dorjee Tseten, Tibet Action Institute, +91 7807885951

Dharamsala, India – As Tibetans the world over gather to celebrate the Dalai Lama’s 90th birthday on July 6th, Tibet Action Institute today hosted in Dharamsala the India launch of its new report, “‘When They Came to Take Our Children’: China’s Colonial Boarding Schools and the Future of Tibet,”[1]. The report, released online on May 28, 2025, presents new evidence exposing how Tibetan children face abuse, neglect, indoctrination, and identity erasure in the Chinese government’s vast network of colonial boarding schools and preschools in Tibet. The launch event was attended by key Tibetan leaders, including Sikyong Penpa Tsering, President of the Central Tibetan Administration, alongside government representatives, journalists, researchers, advocates, and community members. 

As the Chinese government maneuvers to co-opt the institution of the Dalai Lama by interfering in the reincarnation process, it is also using Tibetan children as a means to aggressively and forcibly assimilate Tibetans, threatening their survival as a distinct people. Nearly four years after Tibet Action Institute first exposed the Chinese government’s boarding system in Tibet [2], now believed to hold approximately one million Tibetan children [3], the report offers new evidence of the devastating impact of the schools and other education policies. Rare, firsthand accounts show that students suffer physical and mental abuse, and in some cases, even death. Parents report being unable to easily access their children while they are in the schools. Children are also separated from their families at an early age—as young as four years old in some rural areas—and indoctrinated to be loyal to the Chinese Communist Party. 

“The Chinese government’s desperate bid to control the future reincarnation of the Dalai Lama must be seen alongside its sinister attempt to control the lives of an entire generation of Tibetan children through the colonial boarding school system. These are two sides of the same coin—two halves of a single plan—to consolidate China’s rule in Tibet once and for all, by erasing the cultural and spiritual continuity of the Tibetan people,” said education expert Dr. Gyal Lo, Tibet Specialist at Tibet Action Institute. “China’s colonial boarding schools are designed to indoctrinate, not educate Tibetan children. The testimonies in this report confirm my research and my own family’s experience: The Chinese authorities are deliberately taking our children away and disconnecting them from their roots. Within a generation our language and culture could be lost, all because the Chinese government sees Tibetan identity as a threat to its control of our nation.”

The Chinese government has continued to forcibly close Tibetan-run schools in recent years, as well as local village schools. This leaves most Tibetan parents with no choice but to send their children away to live in government-run boarding schools. There, children whose mother tongue is Tibetan, must undergo schooling almost entirely in Chinese. Tibetan-language materials, imagery, or cultural content is purged from the curriculum and the classroom walls, so that children are indoctrinated with Chinese identity and culture.

“An entire generation of Tibetan children is being torn away from their families,” said Dorjee Tseten, Asia Program Manager at Tibet Action Institute. “The social, emotional, and psychological damage this is causing will be felt for decades—not only by these children and their families, but by Tibetan society as a whole. Governments and the UN must act now and demand an immediate end to this harmful and coercive system.”

Tibet Action Institute urges the United Nations, the Government of India, and other concerned governments to call on the Chinese government to immediately conduct a public investigation into the alleged abuses, deaths, and mental health concerns of Tibetan children in Chinese state-run boarding schools, to abolish the coercive system of boarding schools and preschools, and to enable Tibetan children to access high-quality mother tongue education while living at home.

Notes for Editors:

[1] The report title is drawn from a quote by a Tibetan parent: “When they came to take our children, it felt as if they were searching for prisoners we were hiding. They tried every method to take our children from us.” The person was describing the pressure they and other parents faced from Chinese authorities to send their children, who had been attending a monastery school, to government-run boarding schools.

[2]  In December 2021, Tibet Action Institute’s report, “Separated from their Families, Hidden from the World: China’s Vast Network of Colonial Boarding Schools in Tibet,” revealed that Tibet’s education system had become primarily residential, with approximately 800,000-900,000 Tibetan students ages 6-18 living in a vast system of Chinese government-run colonial boarding schools. It alerted the world to the plight of Tibetan children and parents and led UN experts to express alarm at a residential school system that they said was “aimed at assimilating Tibetan people culturally, religiously and linguistically.”

[3] This number includes 900,000 students aged 6-18, the higher end of the range documented in Tibet Action Institute’s 2021 report (which we believe is more accurate due to continued expansion of preschool and grade school boarding and forcible transfer of more monks and nuns under 18 to state boarding schools over the past three years). Additionally, fieldwork by Dr. Gyal Lo, a Tibetan educational sociologist who fled Tibet and China in 2020—now employed by Tibet Action Institute—confirms the existence of a system of colonial boarding preschools for rural Tibetan children that he estimates houses 100,000 boarding preschoolers aged four to six. (See https://tibetaction.net/eyewitness-confirms-mandatory-boarding-preschools-operating-across-tibet).