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

Abstract

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.