More than a million Tibetan children have been separated from their families and placed in Mandarin-speaking schools that suppress their Buddhist heritage and mother tongue.
BY Navin Upadhyay
Geneva, July 2, 2025 — As the 59th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) proceeds in Geneva, a Tibetan delegation has drawn international attention to China’s coercive boarding school system in Tibet. The group participated in a sideline event jointly organized by the UK Mission and the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, and held a two-day closed-door consultation with senior UN officials from June 30 to July 1, 2025.
The Tibetan delegation included:
- Dorjee Tseten, Member of the 17th Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile and Asia Program Manager at the Tibet Action Institute,
- Tobjor Tenzin Tsultrim, Communications Director at Students for a Free Tibet (US),
- Thinley Chukki, Representative of the Tibet Bureau in Geneva, and
- Phuntsok Topgyal, UN Advocacy Officer, Tibet Bureau.
During the forum, Dorjee Tseten and Tobjor Tsultrim presented findings from the Tibet Action Institute detailing China’s extensive use of colonial-style boarding schools to suppress Tibetan cultural identity. According to their report, more than one million Tibetan children have been forcibly enrolled in Chinese state-run residential schools, some as young as four years old.
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The Tibetan delegation strongly opposes this policy, arguing that it represents a deliberate state strategy to sever young Tibetans from their families, language, religion, and cultural heritage. Within these schools, Tibetan children are taught almost exclusively in Mandarin Chinese, immersed in Communist Party ideology, and denied access to their native language, traditional beliefs, and Tibetan way of life.
“This is not education—it is cultural erasure,” said Dorjee Tseten. “When children are forcibly removed from their homes and taught to forget who they are, it is a violation of both human rights and the right of a people to preserve their identity.”
The delegation emphasized that Tibetan parents who resist sending their children to such schools face reprisals, including loss of government aid and employment opportunities, creating a coercive environment in which compliance is the only viable option.
In meetings with UN Special Rapporteurs, officials from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and Permanent Representatives at the UNHRC, the Tibetan representatives urged stronger global condemnation and immediate international action. They called on the UN to pressure Beijing to dismantle the boarding school system and respect Tibetans’ cultural and educational rights.
Their appeal reinforced longstanding international concerns that the Chinese government’s policy amounts to forced assimilation, with devastating long-term consequences for the Tibetan people. The delegation urged the UN to prioritize Tibet’s situation within global human rights discussions and uphold the rights of indigenous and minority communities to preserve their identity and way of life.
Why are Tibetans Opposed to Chinese Boarding school?
For over a decade, China has accelerated the rollout of a vast network of state-run boarding schools across the Tibetan Plateau. Marketed as a tool for improving educational access in remote areas, these schools have become a lightning rod for controversy—particularly among the global Tibetan community, rights activists, and scholars of indigenous identity. At the heart of the debate lies a fundamental question: Are these schools helping Tibetan children, or are they instruments of cultural erasure?
A Forced Separation Disguised as Opportunity
The Chinese government claims that the boarding schools provide Tibetan children—especially those in rural and nomadic communities—with better educational infrastructure and future economic opportunities. In reality, however, these schools forcibly separate children as young as four from their families and communities, placing them in environments where Mandarin Chinese is the dominant language of instruction and Communist Party ideology shapes the curriculum.
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According to a 2023 report by the Tibet Action Institute, over one million Tibetan children have been enrolled in these institutions. The scale of the policy and its deep reach into the cultural lives of Tibetan families has alarmed many. Human rights experts describe it as a systematic state-led campaign aimed at assimilating Tibetan children into the dominant Han Chinese culture, thereby weakening the future of Tibetan identity from within.
Loss of Language, Faith, and Family Bonds
In traditional Tibetan culture, education is closely intertwined with religion, language, and familial transmission of values. Historically, monastic schools, oral storytelling, and communal rituals played key roles in shaping Tibetan identity.
By uprooting children from these organic settings, the boarding schools not only erase Tibetan language instruction but also cut children off from their Buddhist upbringing and ancestral knowledge systems. Tibetan students report being punished for speaking Tibetan, discouraged from practicing Buddhist customs, and taught that their culture is backward or inferior.
Parents who resist are often coerced into compliance through threats of job loss, withdrawal of state benefits, or even political persecution. This leaves many families with no real choice but to surrender their children to a system that is alien to their way of life.
“China has for at least two decades directed children in Tibet to state-run boarding schools at ever-younger ages, trying to gut Tibetan culture and blunt generations of opposition to Communist Party rule.” pic.twitter.com/RYZGWg6Hpo
— Tanvi Madan (@tanvi_madan) June 30, 2025
A Threat to Cultural Survival
While the Chinese government maintains that the boarding school system is a developmental necessity, Tibetans and rights advocates argue that it amounts to cultural genocide—a term used by some scholars and UN experts to describe state-led actions aimed at dismantling the culture of an ethnic or indigenous group without physical violence.
The side effects are far-reaching:
- Language attrition: A sharp decline in Tibetan language fluency among the next generation.
- Religious disconnection: Children grow up without contact with monastic traditions or spiritual elders.
- Psychological trauma: Long-term separation from family during formative years leads to emotional alienation and identity crises.
- Intergenerational rupture: As children grow up more Chinese than Tibetan, the continuity of Tibet’s unique cultural fabric is put at risk.
Erasing to Assimilate?
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long pursued a policy of cultural homogenization under the banner of “national unity.” Similar policies have been implemented in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, where minority groups face intense pressures to adopt Han Chinese norms. In Tibet, this strategy is playing out most visibly through the boarding school program.
Critics argue that this is not merely about education—it is about ideological control, ethnic assimilation, and the quiet elimination of resistance through cultural dilution. By shaping Tibetan children to think, speak, and act in ways aligned with state narratives, the Chinese government hopes to engineer a generation of Tibetans who are more compliant, less rooted, and more distant from their indigenous identity.
More than one million Tibetan children have been forcibly taken away from their families and placed into Mandarin-language boarding schools. The unmistakable goal is to breed loyalty to the Communist Party by obliterating the Tibetan identity and culture. https://t.co/bxFq1oX7Ts
— Dr. Brahma Chellaney (@Chellaney) June 28, 2025
Global Response and Urgent Questions
The issue has begun to draw international attention. In 2023, UN human rights experts called on China to end the practice of cultural assimilation through the boarding school system, warning of “serious violations of minority rights.”
Still, there is no sign that China will reverse course. For Tibetans inside and outside Tibet, the fight to preserve their culture now centers around these children—the future of their people.
So the question remains: when a state builds schools not to educate, but to reprogram, is it still a public good—or a quiet weapon of erasure?
