The silence in rural Tibet is becoming deafening. The village squares, which once echoed with the laughter of children and the hum of recitation from local monasteries, have now turned quiet. The children are gone. They have not been taken by war or famine, but by a policy arguably more insidious: a state-sponsored dragnet sweeping them into a vast archipelago of colonial-style boarding schools.
This is the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) “long game” in Tibet. Having secured the territory through military and surveillance apparatuses, Beijing has turned its gaze to the final frontier of occupation—the mind of the next generation. By severing Tibetan youth from their families, faith, and tongue, the CCP is not merely educating children; it is engineering a deracinated underclass designed to inherit their own occupation without question.
Colonial Echoes
The scale of this social engineering project is staggering. In a February 2023 statement, United Nations human rights experts warned that around one million Tibetan children are affected by policies linked to a state-run residential schooling system. Non-governmental researchers estimate that nearly 80 percent of the region’s school-aged population is enrolled in boarding schools, resulting in widespread separation from families. Even more chilling is the inclusion of at least 100,000 preschoolers, some as young as four, as estimated by the Tibet Action Institute.
The blueprint will be chillingly familiar to any history student. It mirrors dark and haunting events from both the 19th and 20th centuries, such as the residential schools in Canada, Stolen Generations of Australia, and the Native American boarding Schools in America. The belief system guiding all three experiences is the same—”Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” The belief system has been updated to reflect the Xi Jinping era in Tibet—kill the spirit of Tibet and create an obedient subject of the Party.
Beijing repurposes these facilities for poverty alleviation, ethnic unity, and providing education for scattered populations. However, upon analysis, these statements have no validity. Local schools throughout the villages are being closed at an alarming rate. Therefore, parents have no choice but to turn their children over to state custody. The pressure to surrender their children is often accomplished through coercion, threats of withholding government grants, or allegations of supporting separatism.
A Curriculum of Erasure
Inside the walls of these “ethnic unity” schools, the curriculum is a weapon of assimilation. The Tibetan language, once the vessel of a 2,000-year-old civilization, is increasingly marginalised—often reduced to a secondary subject—while Mandarin Chinese dominates instruction.
Reports from human rights watchdogs and escapee accounts paint a dystopian picture. Children are forbidden from reciting traditional prayers. The reverence once reserved for the Dalai Lama and familial elders is redirected toward the Communist Party and President Xi. Dialects are punished, and cultural expression is pathologised as “backward.”
This is not integration; it is erasure. When a six-year-old forgets the words to speak to her grandmother, a lineage is broken. When a teenager views his own heritage through the state’s lens of suspicion, the occupation has succeeded in colonising his conscience.
The Psychological Toll
The human cost of this experiment is a generation grappling with profound psychological trauma. Dr. Gyal Lo, a Tibetan sociologist who fled China, has described these institutions as ‘boot camps’ for identity transformation.
Children are subjected to highly regimented schedules that are designed to supplant parental bonds with a strong dependence on the state. The “immersion” is total. Isolated from the emotional anchor of their families, students suffer from chronic anxiety, alienation and a sense of rootlessness. They return home for brief holidays as strangers, unable to communicate with their own parents, ashamed of their ‘primitive’ backgrounds. This manufactured intergenerational rift ensures that the transmission of culture, the resistance of memory, is severed.
The Long Game
The strategic endpoint of this policy is the creation of a pipeline of state-dependent labourers. Graduates of these schools, stripped of their cultural autonomy and fluent only in the language of the state, are funnelled into government jobs or low-level service roles. They become economically tethered to the very system that erased their identity.
This is the ultimate consolidation of control: a populace that looks Tibetan but thinks in the vernacular of the Politburo. It is a demographic bomb timed to detonate in twenty years, resulting in a Tibet that is Tibetan in name only.
The international community, particularly the United Nations, cannot afford to remain a passive observer. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) must launch an immediate, independent probe into these violations of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. We are witnessing the attempted deletion of a distinct human culture in real-time. If the world allows the children of Tibet to be remoulded into children of the state, we tacitly accept that the rights of a child end where the interests of a superpower begin. The classrooms of Tibet are today’s frontline; we must not let the lights go out.