China’s state-run Global Times on Sunday claimed Tibetans are tickled pink by China’s aggressive new educational program of kidnapping their children and dragging them off to “boarding schools” to learn Communist dogma.
One thing the tykes are taught is to stop thinking of themselves as Tibetans. The tyrants of Beijing decreed in October that Tibet would henceforth be known as “Xizang Province,” much as occupied East Turkestan was renamed “Xinjiang Province.”
The Uyghur Muslim residents of Xinjiang were also treated to “boarding schools” by their Chinese educational advisers, at which they were taught to renounce Islam and embrace dictator Xi Jinping’s writings instead.
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The Global Times claimed China is doing a favor for the formerly Tibetan children by shipping them off to boarding schools because “the mountainous terrain and scattered living patterns make commuting to school difficult for Xizang’s students.”
“During a recent visit to various areas in Xizang, Global Times reporters noted that atop the snow and frozen earth, boarding schools serve as a warm harbor for children, propelling them toward their dreams amid mountains and rivers,” the Chinese Communist paper burbled.
Tibetan parents are supposedly thrilled because China’s boarding schools “provide care and opportunities for their children that they could not offer themselves,” including “growth and occasional surprises.” And if there’s one thing every subject of a Communist tyranny loves, it is the occasional surprise!
The Global Times huffed:
A Tibetan scholar who attended boarding schools said that this is the most effective way for Tibetan children to succeed and see the world. For some children, it is the only way. The malicious smearing of Xizang’s boarding education is a great injustice to these children.
The Associated Press (AP) quoted critics who were unimpressed when China showed off its boarding schools in October. Skeptics, including not just Tibetan activists but U.S. and U.N. human rights experts, denounced them as centers for “forced assimilation” and noted a million Tibetan children have now been herded from village schools into Chinese facilities.
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“You just do not in good conscience take young children away from their parents and families and communities and put them in boarding school at the rate that they are in Tibet,” said Lhadon Tethong, Canadian director for the U.S.-based Tibet Action Institute.
Tibet Action described the school network as “an ideological conspiracy to pull children out of their culture as early as possible so they won’t want to speak or be Tibetan.”
The U.N. convened an expert panel in March that called on China to “abolish immediately the coerced residential school system imposed on Tibetan children and allow private Tibetan schools to be established.”
The U.N. panel noted the schools conduct lessons only in Mandarin Chinese, teach little about Tibetan history or culture, avoid mentioning spiritual leaders like the Dalai Lama, and allow the children to return to their parents for only a week or so every year. When the kids return home, they struggle to communicate with their now alien-seeming parents.
“The residential school system for Tibetan children appears to act as a mandatory large-scale program intended to assimilate Tibetans into majority Han culture, contrary to international human rights standards,” said U.N. Special Rapporteur Fernand de Varennes.
The AP noted:
China has long sought to eradicate any possibility of unrest in regions home to sizable ethnic populations by imprisoning those who dare to protest while reshaping societies and religions — including Tibetan Buddhism, Islam and Christianity — to align them with the views and goals of the long-ruling Communist Party.
“The approach has hardened in the past decade under leader Xi Jinping, notably in a brutal crackdown on the Uyghur community in the Xinjiang region north of Tibet,” it concluded.