Learning to be Chinese: colonial-style boarding schools on the Tibetan plateau

ABSTRACT

Like other colonial state structures, the education system in China aims to manufacture regime loyalty and cultural conformity among its 125 million minority nationalities. The Party-state's lessons in ‘being Chinese’ begin by nullifying traditional languages, cultures and lifestyles, which are deemed primitive and uncouth, and then remould minority students in the image of the Han majority and its perceived superiority. In this article we examine the vast network of boarding schools on the Tibetan plateau, where three out of every four Tibetan children are placed in around-the-clock state care with little access to their home communities: here a rigid and uniform curriculum in Mandarin Chinese promises upward social mobility for those who comply while transforming and homogenising worldviews. We argue these colonial-style boarding schools are slowly and irrevocably erasing aspects of Tibetan culture in ways that fundamentally alter Tibetan identity.

与其他殖民国家的构造一样，中国的教育体系旨在培植1.25亿少数民族的政权忠诚度和文化一致性。党国的‘做中国人’教育首先是废除被认为是原始和粗野的传统语言、文化和生活方式，而后以人数占优的汉族及其优越感为模版来重塑少数民族学生。在这篇文章中，我们研究了西藏高原上庞大的寄宿学校网络。高原上四分之三的藏族儿童被置于全天候的国家照管下，很少能接触到他们的家庭社区。寄宿学校里严格且统一的普通话课程在对服从者承诺向上社会流动的同时也改造和同质化他们的世界观。我们认为，这些殖民式寄宿学校正缓慢而不可逆转地抹去西藏文化的各个方面，从根本上改变藏族身份认同。

KEYWORDS:

• China
• Tibet
• Tibetan culture and language
• Colonialism
• State education
• Boarding schools

关键词:

• 中国
• 西藏文化与语言
• 殖民主义
• 国家教育
• 寄宿学校

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this article, as well as feedback from participants of an online workshop where our first draft was presented. We are also grateful to the co-editors of this special issue, Edward Vickers and Sicong Chen, for their feedback and helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Chinese term minzu (民族) is deeply polysemic and politically loaded. Depending on the context, it can refer to both the collective singularity of the Zhonghua race-nation (中华民族) as well as the distinct identities of the fifty-five officially recognised minority nationalities (少数民族). In the past minorities like the Tibetans were called ‘nationalities’ in English, but in recent years Party officials (and many Western scholars) began using the English term ‘ethnic minorities’, thus erasing the autonomy, sovereign potential, and self-determination of these groups. See Bulag (2021, 2023).

2 Although often translated as ‘quality’ or ‘human quality’, the term suzhi carries distinctly eugenicist connotations and thus is perhaps more accurately rendered as ‘bio-quality’. See Kipnis (2006).

3 This key party-speak phrase is commonly rendered into English as ‘consolidating the sense of community for the Chinese nation’ in state media. The term zhulao (铸牢) is very uncommon, and signifies an active process of casting a secure and firm entity, which is more accurately translated as ‘forging’ or ‘casting’ rather than ‘consolidating’. The seal script (說文) for the Chinese character 铸 shows two hands holding a utensil containing molten metal liquid and pouring it into a mould, and the seal script for the character 牢 shows a secure pen for keeping one's animals. As a recent article points out (Bai 2022), ‘casting’ and ‘forging’ must have both a steady hand and a firm design template. Similarly, the idea of 共同体意识 or a ‘sense of community’ in the official gloss misses the active cognitive and ideological act of forging a collective and unified ‘consciousness’ (意识).

4 Researchers at the Tibetan Action Institute place the percentage of Tibetan students studying in state boarding schools at 78 percent compared to a national average of 22 percent for all students. See TAI (2021); note 35 on page 9. See also Wright (2019, 111–114).

5 As discussed below, many of these autonomous regulations are currently being revised or annulled. According to the 2022 Legislative Work Plan of the Tsolho People's Government, a revised draft of the ‘Regulation on Tibetan Language Work’ is currently being reviewed by the Standing Committee of the People's Government. Source: https://archive.ph/EP3Pu.

6 In their survey of preschool education in rural Yunnan province, the authors found that of the 260 township kindergartens sampled, 83 had boarding classes, accounting for 31.9% of the total number of kindergartens surveyed.

Additional information

Funding

Australian Research Council (ARC), Discovery Grant [DP180101651].

Notes on contributors

James Leibold

James Leibold is a Professor of Politics and Asian Studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. His research interrogates the Chinese Communist Party's policies for subsuming, governing and securitising its colonial periphery with a particular focus on Xinjiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia. He is the author and co-editor of four books and over thirty peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, and a frequent contributor to the international media and popular press on these topics. Professor Leibold was the lead Chief Investigator on an Australian Research Council funded Discovery Project entitled Urbanising Western China: Nation-building and Social Mobilisation on the Sino-Tibetan Frontier (2018–2022) and the Director of the Xinjiang Data Project (2019–2022) at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Tenzin Dorjee

Tenzin Dorjee is a Ph.D. candidate in the political science department at Columbia University, working in the international relations and comparative politics subfields. His research examines the influence of religious beliefs on political preferences and conflict behaviour, and the links between transnational repression and political participation. He received his B.A. in international relations from Brown University and his M.A. in political science from Columbia University. Before joining the Ph.D. programme, he worked at the National Endowment for Democracy, Students for a Free Tibet, and Tibet Action Institute.