China has launched an education program to bring about the “forcible assimilation of more than one million Tibetan children,” according to U.S. officials moving to punish the abuses.
“These coercive policies seek to eliminate Tibet’s distinct linguistic, cultural, and religious traditions among younger generations of Tibetans,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday.
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Blinken’s denunciation accompanied a notice of visa restrictions for Chinese officials involved in the project, although the identity and number of targeted officials went unstated. Those restrictions build on a wave of congressional and international rebukes of Beijing’s treatment of the Tibetan Buddhist community.
“We urge PRC authorities to end the coercion of Tibetan children into government-run boarding schools and to cease repressive assimilation policies, both in Tibet and throughout other parts of the PRC,” Blinken said. "We will continue to work with our allies and partners to highlight these actions and promote accountability.”
Chinese Communist forces invaded Tibet in 1950 and achieved its subjugation in 1959 following an unsuccessful Tibetan revolt that ended with the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan elites fleeing into exile. Chinese officials have prioritized education as a means to “fight separatism, protect stability and promote development” since at least 2008, culminating in recent efforts to promote Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping as the true “spiritual leader” of Tibetans, with a theory of how to live that rivals their traditional religious beliefs.
“Tibet has some bad old habits, mainly due to the negative influence of religion that emphasizes the afterlife and weakens the urge to pursue happiness in the current life,” Che Dhala, the PRC-appointed chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Region, said.
That project has been advanced by a “compulsory education” program that plays out in boarding schools where students are educated in isolation from their parents.
“China’s unconscionable separation of Tibetan children from their families cannot be left unchecked. It shows the depths of Beijing’s plan to eliminate the Tibetan way of life and turn Tibetans into loyal followers of the CCP," International Campaign for Tibet's President Tencho Gyatso said Tuesday. "As the Dalai Lama often says, Tibetan culture, based on peace and compassion, has value to offer to the entire world. This boarding school program targets the most vulnerable and impressionable minds and is aimed at converting Tibetans into Chinese, cementing the Chinese government's control over Tibet and annihilating the Tibetan culture and way of life.”
That anxiety has rippled throughout international and humanitarian circles. “We are very disturbed that in recent years the residential school system for Tibetan children appears to act as a mandatory large-scale program intended to assimilate Tibetans into majority Han culture, contrary to international human rights standards,” a team of United Nations human rights experts said in February. “Tibetan children are losing their facility with their native language and the ability to communicate easily with their parents and grandparents in the Tibetan language, which contributes to their assimilation and erosion of their identity.”
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That warning has echoed across Washington, as Republican and Democratic lawmakers have endorsed “the right of self-determination” of the Tibetan people and denied that the underlying conflict is over.
“The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) aggression towards Tibet is self-serving, with negotiations and even the very definition of Tibet on the CCP’s terms,” Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) said in February. “We must refresh U.S. policy towards Tibet, and push for negotiations that advance freedoms for the Tibetan people and peaceful resolution to the CCP’s conflict with the Dalai Lama.”