“Beijing is building a broad network of preschools across Tibetan areas, seeking to instill loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party early in life,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “China steals language and home life from Tibetan kids as young as 4”:
Across Tibet, a mountainous region rich in natural resources where many people harbor dreams of independence, China is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build schools, recognizing how social identity forms early in life. The education project includes a network of daylong preschools, where children are taught in Mandarin [which is the main dialect of Chinese], and lessons emphasize Chinese culture.
The preschool classes offer a familiar menu of games, crafts, songs and stories. Yet beyond teaching basic skills, the lessons glorify the Communist Party and Chinese identity. Campus signs read, “I am a Chinese child, I love speaking Mandarin.” Teachers stage skits telling children their clothes, shoes and well-being are gifts from the party.
From there, most Tibetan students graduate into an expanded system of primary boarding schools, spanning grades one through six, which keep them away from home for weeks or months at a time. They study almost entirely in Mandarin and live under the supervision of teachers and wardens, including Han Chinese who don’t speak Tibetan.
Chinese officials in some Tibetan areas are experimenting with funneling children into boarding schools at the start of preschool, according to government documents, social-media posts and independent researchers.
The campaign reflects the convictions of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who said the country needs to reach children as babies “so that the red gene seeps into their blood and permeates their hearts.”
Tibet was once independent, but communist China seized control of it in the 1950s. Tibet’s government in exile says that under Chinese rule, 1.2 million Tibetans died, leaving a population of 3.6 million. 156,758 Tibetans were executed, 92,731 were tortured to death, 173,221 died while in prison, 432,705 were killed in uprisings, and 342,970 starved to death, it says. The starvation deaths were due to communist agricultural policies China imposed on Tibet.
Now, conditions are less bad in Tibet than they are in Xinjiang, the vast region in northwestern China, where oppression is much harsher. There, as many as three million members of ethnic minority groups have been imprisoned in grim concentration camps. Over one million of the imprisoned people are Uyghurs, the largest minority group in China’s Xinjiang region. Torture is widespread in the concentration camps, and thousands have died in them. Uighur cemeteries have been destroyed in a campaign some have called cultural genocide.
