Le Monde: The Tibetan children taken to boarding schools to sever their roots
China is increasingly creating boarding schools for Tibetan children, who are often separated from their families as young as 4 years old. The policy of deliberate assimilation creates distance between parents and children and contributes to the erosion of Tibetan culture.
By Harold Thibault (Haidong (China), special correspondent)
Construction sites in China progress at breakneck speed, and the one for the new high school in the Tibetan prefecture of Golog, launched a year ago, was no exception. Behind the hoardings, cranes and dump trucks, the structure of the buildings was already complete. “Girls’ dormitory” was written in blue letters on one building. Another indicated that it would house classrooms.
From the start of the 2026 school year, 3,000 middle and high school students will move into this new boarding school. More than half of the high school students from the Golog prefecture, a region that is 92% Tibetan, will thus be distributed between two institutions, this one and another smaller one that opened in 2019 a few dozen kilometers away in the large provincial capital, Xining.
These two high schools for the youth of the Golog prefecture have a surprising point in common: They are not located in Golog. From the new facility under construction in the city of Haidong, situated at the foot of the Tibetan plateau, to the largest town in the region, it is actually 480 kilometers – at least seven and a half hours by road – and many families live even further away. The official press emphasizes that the average altitude of 4,200 meters, isolation and harsh climatic conditions on the Tibetan plateau contribute to poor quality education up there. The articles argue that in boarding schools off the plateau, the results of these youths on the Chinese equivalent of the high school diploma improve.
Classes in Chinese
But everything suggests that the project is at least as political as it is educational. It aims to integrate these students into Chinese society to assimilate them further, to the detriment of their mother tongue and local culture. In these high schools, located in cities with a predominantly Han Chinese population, most classes are taught in Chinese, and patriotic education permeates everyday life.
A 14-year-old Tibetan girl we will call Dolma explained that she was sent at age seven to one of these boarding schools, located more than 12 hours away from her home, in Sichuan, a western Chinese province that covers part of historic Tibet. Since education is compulsory, parents cannot really object to their children leaving. In any case, Dolma’s parents were not opposed to the authorities’ request. They thought she would have more opportunities to succeed in Chinese society than they had.
Given Dolma’s young age, her mother had asked an older girl sent to the same boarding school to look after her before her departure. But they were not placed in the same dormitory and rarely saw each other. Dolma felt very lonely. At such a distance, it was unthinkable to return home on weekends, so she spent eight months a year away from her family. She could only make the journey for the nearly two months of winter vacation (between the Gregorian New Year and the Tibetan New Year) and the two months of summer vacation. “When I returned, the first weeks, I no longer understood the dialect spoken by my family; I had to re-learn it in a way. A distance was created, and we lost our closeness,” she recounted from another country where she now lived.
At school, Chinese was the main language. There was indeed a Tibetan class, but the teacher seemed to come from a region so far from hers that she could not understand him. Political education, however, was central. “We were taught to love China, that China protects the Tibetans, that China is the best country,” the teenager recounted.
Instances of violence
NGOs abroad, such as the Tibet Action Institute, have revealed the distress caused to these very young Tibetans who are sent to live without their parents. Videos available online also highlight instances of violence. Dolma explained that having learned Chinese very well, she was appointed class delegate, but she saw other children who were less successful being subjected to violence, including a girl who had her eyelids pinched by a teacher.
China has been building boarding schools for young Tibetans for decades, but the policy has changed. Rural schools are being closed, new facilities are further away, and teaching and living through Chinese have become the norm, explained Gyal Lo, a Tibetan who long taught sociology of education at a university in Lanzhou, a major Chinese city at the foot of the plateau.
He himself said he had observed the evolution in his own family when, one day in November 2016, his brother expressed concern about the change in attitude of his two daughters: They had recently become reluctant to speak to him in Tibetan. “When you are an education professor, you often use the concept of ‘social reproduction,’ he said. “Now, these children become somewhat foreign at home, and they no longer have the appetite to share your language and culture.” Over the following four years, Lo investigated the rise of this boarding school policy, visiting about 50 schools, before deciding to go into exile in Canada.
This policy is being pursued at the highest level. In June 2024, President Xi Jinping himself visited the high school in Xining, which was inaugurated in 2019. An official television report on this visit showed the establishment still looking brand new, with a running track, dormitories and modern classrooms, but not the slightest hint of Tibetan culture. The president arrived in a class during a political education course on the theme “New Era, New Homeland” and, according to the official press, Xi emphasized during this visit the necessity “to instill the sense of community for the Chinese nation in the hearts of children from a young age.”
Nearly One Million Children
President Xi began using this phrase in 2014 when he set his policy regarding minorities. They still enjoy privileges often highlighted by the official discourse, such as a few extra points in exams or prefectures labeled as “autonomous.” But, over the past decade, the focus has been much more on assimilation, especially for minorities considered potentially problematic, as they have had political autonomy aspirations – the Uyghurs, Mongols, and Tibetans.
As early as 2016, an article in one of the official dailies, Global Times, made this observation: “While in the past many schools in Tibetan regions taught all courses in Tibetan, today more and more institutions – especially in urban areas – use Mandarin as the main language of instruction, while Tibetan is only used during the Tibetan language course, if it is taught at all.”
Boarding schools also exist in other regions, but sending children there is much less systematic – just over 20% of students in China. The NGO Tibet Action Institute estimates that 78% of Tibetan children aged 6 to 18 are schooled in boarding schools and that some are sent there as early as age 4. UN rapporteurs estimated in 2023 that nearly one million Tibetan students were in boarding schools and expressed concern about a “mandatory large-scale program intended to assimilate Tibetans into majority Han culture, contrary to international human rights standards.”
The phenomenon is only intensifying, and now, private schools that, while respecting the general school curriculum, also taught Tibetan culture are being forced to close. Such is the case of the Jigme Gyaltsen school, located in the Golog prefecture, whose founder had been invited in 2014 to share his ideas on education at the region’s annual participatory political conference. The institution was forced to close on July 12, 2024, after having been tolerated for 30 years by the authorities.
The subject is a sensitive one for China. Upon leaving the regional airport, Le Monde’s reporter was followed by at least three cars and five individuals, plainclothes agents sharing the same hotel in the evening, the same breakfast, and then ensuring at the terminal that he took a return flight.