New report accuses China of ‘indoctrinating' Tibetan children in boarding schools

Hindustan Times

4 days ago

Tibetan children face abuse, neglect, indoctrination, and identity erasure in the Chinese government's network of colonial boarding schools and preschools in Tibet, an advocacy group has accused.
The Tibet Action Institute (TAI) in its recent report has accused the Chinese government of using Tibetan children as a means to aggressively and forcibly assimilate Tibetans, threatening their survival as distinct people. The report found that students are restricted from enrolling in Tibetan language classes or engaging in religious activities, even during school breaks.
As per activists, such boarding schools are now believed to house approximately one million Tibetan children, however, the exact number is difficult to confirm.
The report titled 'When They Came to Take Our Children': China's Colonial Boarding Schools and the Future of Tibet' says the children are 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.
'There is now additional evidence that even younger children are being compelled to board across Tibet. At present, Tibetan children aged three or four to six must attend Chinese-language preschool,' the report states.
TAI, is a US based advocacy group created in 2009 to assist Tibetans after large protests were held before the Beijing Olympics in 2008.
The research for the report is based on rare firsthand accounts by Tibetans either still in Tibet or who have recently escaped. This includes fifteen in-depth interviews conducted between 2023 and 2024 with Tibetans who had recently fled to India, statements published online by people still in Tibet, and approximately 75 private or public comments by people in Tibet from January 2022 to April 2025 that were documented by Tibetans in exile.
The report stated that China's education policies in Tibet seek to deracinate Tibetan children from their culture, language, and identity. In the colonial boarding school system, children are first separated from their families, and then bombarded with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ideology through carefully curated images, texts, and songs, all in Chinese language.
The report also added that as one of the persons who recently escaped from Tibet as saying: In boarding schools, the indoctrination process begins from a very young age. The children are taken away from their parents, restricted from speaking their mother tongue – Tibetan – taught in Chinese language, forced to learn and speak Chinese, and taught only state-approved history.
A stated in the report, former boarding school student described how politicised education was implemented in their classroom: 'All the materials put on our class walls were in Chinese. All [my] class teachers [were] Chinese…. In all the classes, we had pictures of Xi Jinping, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao.'
The report outlined that all students in China are subjected to a politicised curriculum that is intended to cultivate loyalty to Xi Jinping and the Communist Party. However, in Tibet, education is part of a larger effort to methodically strip away a sense of Tibetaness and manipulate students' primary identification to be Chinese, rather than Tibetan.
Notably, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights echoed the Special Rapporteurs', in March 2023, concern that the colonial boarding schools violate China's obligations under the ICESCR, urging the Chinese government to 'abolish immediately the coerced residential (boarding) school system imposed on Tibetan children.
'A generation of Tibetan children is being harmed by China's colonial boarding school policy — socially, emotionally, and psychologically,' said Lhadon Tethong, director of TAI, calling on the international community to step up all efforts to push the Chinese government to abolish this abusive and coercive system.
TAI urges the United Nations and 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.