Comparative Education

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Learning to be Chinese: colonial-style boarding

schools on the Tibetan plateau

James Leibold & Tenzin Dorjee

To cite this article: James Leibold & Tenzin Dorjee (29 Aug 2023): Learning to be Chinese:
colonial-style boarding schools on the Tibetan plateau, Comparative Education, DOI:
10.1080/03050068.2023.2250969

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2023.2250969

Published online: 29 Aug 2023.

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COMPARATIVE EDUCATION
https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2023.2250969

Learning to be Chinese: colonial-style boarding schools on

the Tibetan plateau
a
James Leibold and Tenzin Dorjeeb
a
Department of Politics, Media and Philosophy, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia; bPolitical Science
Department, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Like other colonial state structures, the education system in China China; Tibet; Tibetan culture
aims to manufacture regime loyalty and cultural conformity and language; Colonialism;
among its 125 million minority nationalities. The Party-state’s State education; Boarding
lessons in ‘being Chinese’ begin by nullifying traditional schools
languages, cultures and lifestyles, which are deemed primitive 关键词
and uncouth, and then remould minority students in the image 中国; 西藏文化与语言; 殖
of the Han majority and its perceived superiority. In this article 民主义; 国家教育; 寄宿学
we examine the vast network of boarding schools on the Tibetan 校
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.

学做中国人：西藏高原上的殖民式寄宿学校
与其他殖民国家的构造一样，中国的教育体系旨在培植1.25亿少
数民族的政权忠诚度和文化一致性。党国的‘做中国人’教育首先
是废除被认为是原始和粗野的传统语言、文化和生活方式，而后
以人数占优的汉族及其优越感为模版来重塑少数民族学生。在这
篇文章中，我们研究了西藏高原上庞大的寄宿学校网络。高原上
四分之三的藏族儿童被置于全天候的国家照管下，很少能接触到
他们的家庭社区。寄宿学校里严格且统一的普通话课程在对服从
者承诺向上社会流动的同时也改造和同质化他们的世界观。我们
认为，这些殖民式寄宿学校正缓慢而不可逆转地抹去西藏文化的
各个方面，从根本上改变藏族身份认同。

Introduction
All state schooling systems inculcate a sense of pride, belonging and love for the nation
among their students (Gellner 2006) while reproducing existing social inequalities (Bour-
dieu 1977). In authoritarian states like the People’s Republic of China (PRC) regime
loyalty is also a key part of the curriculum. Students are repeatedly told that without the
ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ‘there would be no new China’; and thus they

CONTACT James Leibold j.leibold@latrobe.edu.au Department of Politics, Media and Philosophy, La Trobe
University, Bundoora, Vic 3083, Australia
© 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 J. LEIBOLD AND T. DORJEE

must ‘appreciate the Party, listen to the Party, and walk with the Party’ (Xinhua 2022). When
students questioned the Party’s leadership during the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising, the
CCP responded first with force – brutally cracking down on the protesters – and then indoc-
trination, launching a wide ranging ‘patriotic education campaign’ (Wang 2008; Zhao 1998).
China’s current leader Xi Jinping has doubled down on patriotic education, calling on
educators to adopt new methods and vehicles for cultivating allegiance (MOE 2020). Love
of the Party and love of the nation are synonymous, a 2019 Directive on ‘Patriotic Edu-
cation in the New Era’ asserts (Xinhua 2019a). Patriotism is a racial and cultural construct
in the PRC rather than the civic one we find in most democracies, where diversity is tol-
erated and pride in the nation does not mean uniformity. The one billion strong Han
majority is the national race in Xi’s China, positioned firmly at the centre of politics and
culture and thus leaving little room for the 125 million officially recognised ‘minority
nationalities’ (少数民族)1 to practice and preserve their rich cultural heritage as promised
in the Chinese Constitution.
As a result, state schooling ultimately takes on a third mission on the Tibetan plateau:
the disciplining of minority students in the épistémè and biopolitics of the Han centre
(Foucault 1980). Tibetan students must first unlearn the ‘backward’, ‘dirty’, and
‘uncouth’ habits associated with their low ‘bio-quality’ (suzhi, 素质)2 life on the plateau
and then master the urban, Han-defined norms of what is possible and conceivable
within mainstream Chinese society. The culture, language and knowledge system of
the dominant social group forms what Bourdieu (1977) called the habitus of state school-
ing systems, and ‘success’ for minority students has always required some degree of
sociocultural transformation (Harker 1984).
In China this necessitates proficiency in the ‘common language’ (putonghua, 普通话) of
Beijing’s elite; commend of ‘Party-speak’ (党话) and its political aphorisms; and finally the
inheritance of the ‘red gene’ (红色基因) of Han revolutionary history. Education, accord-
ing to Xi Jinping, must ‘plant the seed of love for Zhonghua (China, 中华) deep in the souls
of each and every child’ (Leibold 2019; Xinhua 2019c). Yet unlike their Han peers, the task
of swallowing this ‘seed of love’ requires the abandonment of culture and sovereignty for
Tibetan and other minority students and their resocialisation in the norms of their Han
colonial oppressors.
Boarding schools have long been a part of the education system on the sparsely popu-
lated Tibetan plateau. By concentrating educational resources in urban centres, Party
officials contend, boarding schools provide education with greater quality, consistency
and efficiency (Vickers and Xiaodong 2017; Xiong 2009), and thus bring new opportunities
for the children of Tibetan nomads and farmers. Yet this comes at a cost, with children as
young as four years of age removed from their families and home communities and
placed in state institutions that purport to operate under ‘fully-closed, semi-military-
style management’ (Tencent 2021). Some educators warn these boarding schools lack
the resources and capacity to care for the physical, cultural and emotional needs of
their students (Wang, Dong, and Mao 2017; Yang 2018; Zhao 2011). Yet for CCP
officials, Tibetan boarding schools are key sites of nation-building (MOE 2005), where
patriotism, loyalty and conformity are embedded both in the formal curriculum (Yan
and Vickers 2023) and the ‘hidden curriculum’ that permeates life outside the classroom
– subtly but constantly socialising students in Han and Party expectations in their
dormitories, canteens and playgrounds (TAI 2021; Wright 2019; Yang et al. 2021).
 COMPARATIVE EDUCATION 3

In this article, we examine China’s boarding school system for Tibetan students. Nearly
a million Tibetan children (three out of every four) go to sleep and wake up inside these
institutions, where they are taught not only mathematics and science but also lessons in
being Chinese. Some are coerced into attending these schools (TAI 2021); many more are
impelled by dreams of wealth, status and social mobility inculcated through the state pro-
paganda system (Gyal 2019; Kipnis 2011; Makley 2017; Yang et al. 2021). These dreams,
they are told, can only be pursued in the sort of ‘high’ suzhi enviroment provided by
Chinese-medium boarding schools in urban settings. We argue these boarding schools
are powerful incubators of colonial transformation. By placing Tibetan youth in state
care, boarding schools facilitate the gradual erasure of Tibetan culture, language and reli-
gion; remould Tibetan subjectivities and sovereignties; and over time, seek to produce a
more docile and homogenous ‘Chinese’ self under CCP guardianship.
Our research methods are eclectic. Fieldwork in the PRC has become increasingly
difficult (Alpermann 2022; Joniak-Lüthi 2016), and neither of the authors feels safe visiting
China. Instead, we draw on interviews conducted with Tibetans in exile (former students
and teachers who still communicate with their families back home) and a close reading of
sources available on the Sinophone internet. We also draw on the work of Chinese and
foreign scholars who have previously conducted field research inside Tibetan boarding
schools and compare their findings with more recent reports on Chinese social media.
Most Tibetan boarding schools have public accounts on Weixin (WeChat) and Douyin
(TikTok) where they regularly post about their activities, providing a window (albeit
filtered) into these schools which are now virtually impossible for foreign scholars to visit.

From minority education to patriotic education

Until recently, China maintained a separate system of education for its officially recog-
nised minority nationalities, known as ‘nationalities education’ or minzu jiaoyu (民族教
育) in Chinese. In the past, the Communist Party believed the best way to solve the
‘nationalities problem’ (minzu wenti, 民族问题) was to afford non-Han minorities with
special protections and benefits to assist with their independent development and stag-
gered convergence towards socialism. This included their own educational facilities, so-
called nationalities schools (民族学校), where they could learn at their own pace in
their own languages (Leibold and Chen 2013).
In 1986, the Compulsory Education Law mandated nine years of state schooling for all
children in China starting at age six. Despite new resources aimed at boosting enrolment
rates, there was an initial mismatch between what the state schooling system offered and
what Tibetan parents, especially nomads and farmers, perceived as useful in the new
market economy (Postiglione et al. 2013). Tibetan educators advocated a more culturally
relevant curriculum, something village schools provided during the early days of reform
and opening up through the use of Tibetan language textbooks (Bass 1998, 72–113).
Preferential access to educational resources specifically tailored to minority commu-
nities, it was initially believed, would help them catch up with mainstream society. In
reality, however, implementation of these preferential policies was often patchy and edu-
cational resources limited (especially in remote communities), while political and market
factors fostered unrest and caused many Han policymakers to question the value of these
entitlements (Bass 1998; Leibold 2013; Postiglione 1999). The system created a new
4 J. LEIBOLD AND T. DORJEE

Tibetan Party elite beholden to their Han masters in Beijing but had little capacity to alter
existing inequalities. As Vickers and Zeng (2017) make clear, China’s elite-driven and
instrumental educational system privileges those with superior resources (money, con-
nections, urban residency, etc.), making it difficult for many Tibetans and other disadvan-
taged communities to compete in the market economy on their own terms (Fischer 2013).
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and violent unrest across the ethnic frontier,
public intellectuals like Ma Rong (2012) and Hu Angang (2011) argued special treatment
for minority communities not only undermined nation-building but also emboldened
separatism. Minority communities, they asserted, have come to think of themselves as
separate nations (民族) rather than citizens of China and component parts of the Zhon-
ghua race-nation (中华民族) (Leibold 2013). They called for an interventionist form of
Party-directed cultural nationalism in place of the naive faith that historical materialism
or market reforms would ultimately dissolve ethno-cultural differences and tensions
(Leibold 2019).
The Party’s approach to minority education has continued to evolve under Xi Jinping
(Bulag 2021; Leibold 2021). The guiding theme of ‘nation-building work’ (perhaps the
best translation for minzu gongzuo (民族工作), literally ‘nation-work’) is the active
‘forging’ (铸牢) of a ‘collective consciousness of the Zhonghua race-nation’ (中华民族
共同体意识).3 Ma Rong (2022) contends Chinese society placed too much emphasis on
the differences among the various minzu groups in the past and insufficient emphasis
on their common belonging to a unified community with a shared culture and language.
Colloquially, this language is called the Han language and script (汉语 and 汉字), making
it clear that the culture and language of the Han ethnic majority (92 percent of the PRC
population) are at the core of so-called Zhonghua culture and its ‘common speech’
(putonghua). Party officials are now told assertive education, language and cultural
work (with a particular focus on youth) is required to effectively forge this collective con-
sciousness, and overcome the spectre of splittism, terrorism and extremism.

Recasting childhood: colonial boarding schools

As early as 1985 Party officials began systematically removing Tibetan students from their
communities in order to educate them in the language, culture and values of the Han
ethnic majority in eastern and coastal cities thousands of kilometres away. These ‘interior
ethnic boarding classes’ (内地民族班) are considered an overwhelming success by Party
officials, with many graduates becoming loyal Party cadres back in their homeland. Xi
Jinping labelled their results ‘outstanding and far-reaching in their significance’
(Leibold 2018, 2); yet educators and scholars who have closely studied the wellbeing of
these boarding school students paint another picture. The bullying, malnutrition, and
mental and psychological traumas associated with the boarding experience produce
poorer developmental and academic outcomes for most students (Yang et al. 2021;
Zhang and Zhai 2009). Students also suffer linguistic and cultural loss as they work to
master putonghua and mainstream cultural norms, resulting in a hybrid, marginal and
conflicted identity (Chen 2008; Grose 2019; Zhu 2007).
The dislocated schooling system is expensive and serves a tiny segment of the Tibetan
student population. In recent years, the party-state has invested heavily in school con-
struction in the ethnic periphery, pushing nine years of compulsory state education
 COMPARATIVE EDUCATION 5

while sending skilled Han teachers and administrators to the Tibetan plateau to render
‘educational aid’ (教育援藏) for the region’s development (Yang 2019). The Rural Board-
ing School Construction Project (农村寄宿制学校建设工程) was a cornerstone of the
CCP’s Great Western Development Strategy and New Socialist Countryside programmes.
Formally launched in 2004 (for completion by 2007) the Project resulted in the construc-
tion or renovation of over 7000 boarding schools across Western China which catered to
over 2 million students (Zhang and Zhai 2009).
As a part of the Project, private village and monastic schools, which taught chiefly in
Tibetan, were closed down and students enrolled in state schools in urban and peri-
urban centres (Makley 2017, 125–135; TCHRD 2022, 9–15). There, Chinese-medium
instruction was introduced using Beijing-approved textbooks under the euphemism of
‘bilingualism’ (双语教育) (Ma 2014; Zhang and Tsung 2018). Without culturally relevant
pedagogy, adequate facilities or a community support network, these boarding schools
initially proved deeply unpopular among Tibetan students, resulting in high truancy
and drop-out rates (He 2011; Yang 2018; Zhang and Zhai 2009). Yet through its
ongoing ‘school consolidation policy’, where educational resources are centralised in
key-point schools in urban centres, Beijing continues to mandate the ‘vigorous construc-
tion’ of boarding schools (MOE 2005) and the ‘strengthening of boarding school construc-
tion in minority areas in order to boost enrolment numbers’ (State Council 2014). It is now
estimated that at least 800,000 Tibetan children, 78 percent of Tibetan students, live and
study in state boarding schools (TAI 2021), more than triple the nationwide average for
boarding school students.4
Life inside Tibetan boarding schools can be tedious and bleak, involving long hours of
rote learning, ideological rituals and harsh disciplining (Wright 2019: 201–229). From 5.00
am until 10.00 pm, in some schools, students are immersed in activities aimed at mould-
ing body and mind. In addition to academic skills, patriotism and loyalty are drummed
into students day-after-day. What the CCP calls ‘patriotic education’ seeks to instil the
‘five identifications’ (五个认同) from childhood: identification with and loyalty to the
motherland, Zhonghua race-nation, Zhonghua culture, the Chinese Communist Party,
and socialism with Chinese characteristics (MOE 2020). Through interviews and survey
work with nearly 900 Tibetan boarding school students in eastern Qinghai, Gazang Cao
(2016) found over a third experienced high levels of alienation. Severing contact with
their local communities and kin structures results in social detachment, poor mental
health and psychological trauma.
The lives of boarding students are micromanaged and opportunities to leave campus
are limited. Recent Ministry of Education (MOE 2021c) regulations ban the use of mobile
phones on campus, regulate sleeping times, and outlaw unauthorised reading material or
activities that could expose students to ‘harmful ideas’. Some schools are over 400 kilo-
metres from students’ homes, with the average distance being 60 kilometres (Yang
2018), meaning parental visits are limited to special occasions. With neither parental
nor community support, most students struggle to adapt to their new environment.
One of China’s leading experts on the Tibetan education system, He Nengkun (2011),
reported that two-third of Tibetan students dislike boarding school life and 70 percent
fail to adapt to its strict rules and closed management system.
Other studies of boarding schools in remote minority communities found similar pro-
blems. Nearly half of the students Zhao Zhenzhou (2011) surveyed in Qinghai and
6 J. LEIBOLD AND T. DORJEE

Guangxi boarding schools reported feelings of loneliness, terror and anxiety. Other
findings include widespread bullying, poor nutrition, inadequate staffing and insufficient
resources (Chen et al. 2018; Lin 2020; Wu et al. 2016; Yang 2008). Boarding school students
become unmoored, experiencing a sense of despondency that Zhao (2011) argues can
violate their basic human rights. In her fieldwork at a Tibetan boarding school in Pome
county (Ch: Bome) in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), Luo Caiwang (2018)
found plenty of deviant behaviour among students–smoking, drinking, gambling and
fighting–that she argues is a common coping mechanism for dealing with the loneliness
and depression.
Despite these shortcomings, Party officials continue to extol and expand the boarding
school system across the Tibetan plateau while cracking down on private schooling
outside the state sector (TCHRD 2022). Chinese officials have repeatedly called for the
rapid expansion of ‘standardised boarding schools’ (标准化寄宿制学校) to bring the chil-
dren of pastoral nomadic families and remote farming communities into uniform state
care, ensuring, in the words of Xi Jinping, that every school-age child can ‘study, live
and grow up in a school’ (People’s Daily 2018). Most counties across the Tibetan plateau
now claim complete or near complete provision of compulsory education (Xinhua 2014).
Stuart Wright demonstrates how school consolidation and boarding schools are dra-
matically altering the worldview and expectations of Tibetan students and their
parents. The compulsion to ‘catch up’ disciplines Tibetan subjectivities in ways that ulti-
mately conform to Party-state and Han norms. Boarding schools, Wright found while con-
ducting field research in Amdo during 2012–2013, are increasingly securitised. There are
overt forms of monitoring through security cameras and military-style drills but also more
surreptitious routines, which are common not only in boarding schools across the PRC but
also elsewhere in the world. Yet, the perceived insecurity of the Tibetan plateau – as wild,
backward and dangerous – intensifies the need for security and lifts the bar for confor-
mity, loyalty and cultural alignment. In the process, Tibetan identity alters: cultural, lin-
guistic and religious traditions erode, and with time can actually be expunged without
inter-generational transmission, so that Tibetan youth come to increasingly resemble
their Han peers with only a few tokenistic manifestations of ‘Tibetanness’ remaining.
Despite the negative impacts on student identity and wellbeing, many Tibetan parents
continue to see value in the boarding school system. They have come to internalise state
propaganda about the ‘gift’ of development – a precious pathway to good fortune – and
the need to abandon the ‘backward’ (Tib. རྗེས་ལུས་ rjes-lus) and ‘dirty’ (Tib. བཙོག་པ་ btsog-pa)
habits and mindset of past generations (Makley 2017; Wright 2019; Yeh 2013). Rather
than being passive victims, they make rational decisions in the hope of upward social
mobility and a secure government job while ‘self-sacrificing’ their own traditions for Xi
Jinping’s dream of a single Zhonghua consciousness (Bulag 2023). Decades of market
reforms and colonial transformation have conditioned Tibetans to desire new forms of
Han modernity while internalising the perceived ‘backwardness’ of their former lifestyle
(Gyal 2019; Yangt et al. 2021).
These educational desires, however, are also pursued within a coercive and hegemonic
environment where consent is manufactured and alternatives lifestyles and forms of
learning are actively foreclosed (Nyima and Yeh 2023). Party officials enforce boarding
school enrolment through a combination of punishment, intimidation, and the elimin-
ation of pre-existing alternatives (TAI 2021). Punishment may include collection of fines
 COMPARATIVE EDUCATION 7

from families refusing to enrol their children and detention of those who protest the
policy. Intimidation includes threats of violence or other sanctions against families that
resist mandatory boarding. A recent Tibet Action Institute report (2021) documents inci-
dents of local authorities browbeating Tibetan parents. In one village, police officers
accompanied Party official who issued a verbal ultimatum to Tibetan parents, warning
them that they would be ‘squeezed one by one’ if they continued ‘to choose not to
acknowledge this policy’ and refused to enrol their children (TAI Report 2021, 42): ‘In
other townships, the community is being squeezed [pressured] to send their children
to the schools, but we don’t have to do that here’, said the authorities to the villagers.
‘Today is the last day we will come. If we have to come back tomorrow, it won’t be
good’. These are forms of ‘everyday repression’ that Lynette Ong (2022) argues the
Party-state employs to ‘gain compliance and mute dissent’.
Besides intimidation and punishment, Tibetan families often face a more subtle form
of ‘coerced compliance’: the threat of being denied education in the future. Parents
unwilling to send their pre-school children to boarding schools are told their children
will be barred from attending primary and elementary school in the future (TAI
Report, 2021, 41). Many of the authors’ conversations with exiled Tibetan sources
confirm the frequency and effectiveness of this threat. Tibetan parents want their
children to be educated, yet ideally on their own terms and in their own mother
tongue. In the absence of alternatives, aspiration for a better future lures them into
the ‘symbolic domination’ of the state school system (Bourdieu 1977), where structures
of everyday violence reproduce and perpetuate existing hierarchies of inequality,
dependence and re-engineering.
Tibetans have staged protests in the past against mandatory boarding, but they invari-
ably lose the battle once the state mobilises its repressive apparatuses. In September
2020, Radio Free Asia reported Tibetan children in several towns in Rebkong (Ch:
Tongren) county were ‘being forced against their parents’ wishes into boarding schools
in areas far away’ (RFA 2020). Tibetan parents protested, provoking a police crackdown,
and they were finally ‘forced to send their children away to the Chinese government-
designated boarding schools’ (RFA 2020). Similar protests against Putonghua-medium
education in Inner Mongolia were snuffed out by the Party’s vast security apparatuses
with brutal efficiency (Leibold 2021), rendering resistance increasingly futile and
dangerous.

Language erasure: shift to Putonghua-medium education

Study after study illustrates the benefits of mother-tongue education, especially at an
early age, for effective learning and sociocultural development (Lapayese 2019;
UNESCO 2007). Both the Chinese Constitution and the Law on Regional National Auton-
omy guarantees minority communities ‘the freedom to use and develop their own spoken
and written languages’ (Roche 2021). During the 1990s, autonomous regions at various
administrative levels enacted local regulations supporting Tibetan-medium education.
The Tsolho (Ch: Hainan) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (1990) in Amdo, for example,
enacted its ‘Regulations on Tibetan Language Work’, with Article 3 stating: ‘Tibetan is
the primary written and spoken language used by the [Tibetan] nationality to exercise
autonomy in the prefecture’.5 At the time, Tibetan-medium education was the norm –
8 J. LEIBOLD AND T. DORJEE

with putonghua taught as a standalone subject in what was termed ‘model 1 bilingual
education’ (Bass 1998, 229–246; Ma 2014, 99; Zhang and Tsung 2018, 293).
Over the last two decades, the medium of instruction in ‘bilingual’ schools has gradu-
ally shifted towards putonghua, as a new wave of ‘linguistic imperialism’ swept across the
educational sector (He 2014; Zhang and Tsung 2018). This shift reflects both market
demands – as putonghua is associated with social mobility – and government nudging
and coercion. The medium of instruction in the TAR was fully altered in 2019, when edu-
cators quietly shifted to putonghua-medium education at the primary school level and
introduced re-written textbooks in Chinese (HRW 2020). Other autonomous regions fol-
lowed suit but at varying paces. The shift sparked a series of popular protests, most
notably in Amdo in 2010 and Inner Mongolia in 2020 (Leibold 2021; Roche 2021). Protes-
tors pointed to local regulations in arguing their languages were the autonomous regions’
‘lingua franca’ and ‘an important tool for exercising autonomy’.
The Party’s response included not only force and intimidation but also lawfare. Local
officials were instructed to re-write existing regulations to consolidate the ‘dominant pos-
ition’ of putonghua (Leibold 2021). As legal justification, it invoked a January 2021 ruling
from the Legislative Affairs Committee of the National People’s Congress Standing Com-
mittee, which declared autonomous regulations requiring nationality schools use their
own written and spoken languages was inconsistent with Article 19 of the Constitution:
‘The state shall promote the universal use of putonghua nationwide’ (Wei 2021). The
State Council (2020) set 2035, the deadline for achieving socialist modernisation, as the
target date for achieving universal and comprehensive fluency in putonghua and allo-
cated additional resources for this purpose in frontier regions like Tibet.
Schools have also been instructed to embed Xi Jinping Thought throughout the curri-
culum. The new standardised curriculum, according to a directive from the State Curricu-
lum Committee (2021), must instil in students the belief that ‘the Chinese Communist
Party is the backbone of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation’ and make them
‘willing to listen to the Party and follow the Party from childhood’ (从小立志听党话、
跟党走). The first page of the primary-level Xi Jinping Thought Reader states: ‘We are
all Chinese; we all deeply love our motherland, as Grandpa Xi Jinping says, ‘Love for
one’s motherland is the deepest and most enduring sentiment in the world; the source
for achieving individual virtue and the foundation for rendering meritorious service’‘
(MOE 2021b, 1).
There are now efforts underway to extend patriotic education in putonghua to pre-
school children. In 2011, TAR officials started enrolling children as young as four in pre-
schools, with so-called ‘bilingualism’ initially used as a smokescreen for the gradual
introducing of putonghua instruction and Han cultural norms. Party officials are now
more explicit in their efforts to universalise putonghua preschooling across the plateau
(HRW 2020, 41ff). In 2019, Xi insisted political and ideological training must begin at
infancy so as to ‘guide students in correctly doing up life’s first button’ (Xinhua 2019b).
The 2021 school year began with a Ministry of Education (2021a) edict mandating puton-
ghua as the sole medium of instruction for all preschools in rural and minority regions.
Some Tibetan preschoolers are boarding five days a week and only permitted to see
their parents on the weekend. The Tibetan educator Dr Gyal Lo visited 50 of these board-
ing preschools in Qinghai, Sichuan and Gansu before fleeing China in 2021 (TAI 2022). Sun
and Li (2013) argue the boarding preschool they studied in a remote ethnic minority
 COMPARATIVE EDUCATION 9

region of Yunnan resembled a carceral panopticon, where emotionally detached and

poorly trained staff subjected their tiny charges to ‘a precise time schedule, strict
spatial control, heavy learning tasks, and an indifferent teacher–child relationship’ from
the moment they arrive on Sunday evening until their dismissal on Friday afternoon,
and contend this harsh and overbearing environment is deeply detrimental to the phys-
ical and mental wellbeing of these children.6
In Tibetan preschools, children are subjected to a systematic programme of
language learning and political and cultural indoctrination: a sort of identity replace-
ment therapy aimed at making children re-imagine themselves as Chinese rather
than Tibetan. Take but one example the Lhasa Experimental Kindergarten (拉萨市实
验幼儿园), where discipline, patriotism and putonghua are core elements of the curri-
culum and art, singing, dancing, sports and food are used to raise the ‘bio-quality’ of
pupils (LEK 2019b). As National Day approached in 2018, the school organised mili-
tary-style training for their students as part of an ‘I’m a small soldier’ themed event
(LEK 2018). The following year, students made dumplings to celebrate Chinese New
Year (LEK 2019a).
In celebration of the Party’s 100th anniversary in 2021, children at the Number 3 Kin-
dergarten in Lhasa’s Chengguan District (2021) dressed up in PLA uniforms and were
filmed reciting red stories in putonghua. The school claimed on its official Weixin
account that these activities ‘pierced their innocence, aroused their national pride and
let the red gene of the revolution pass from one generation to the next’. Tibetan is still
taught as a subject and remains visible on these campuses, but it is afforded little curri-
cular time and space as the emphasis shifts to putonghua instruction.

Cultural disciplining: performing Zhonghua-ness

In the past, party leaders like Hu Jintao emphasised ‘respect for differences and tolerance
of diversity in the spirit of harmony’ (‘尊重差异、包容多样’的和谐精神); today, the mood
in Beijing has altered. For Xi Jinping, culture is the ‘soul’ and ‘root artery’ of the race-
nation, and the foundation on which its ‘collective consciousness’ must be forged
(Xinhua 2019c). Culture in China is no longer a composite arabesque of the fifty-six nation-
alities, but rather a singular, increasingly homogenous Zhonghua culture (中华文化). Xi
has clarified the relationship between what he considers the tributary cultures of minority
communities like the Tibetans and the dominant Han culture. Zhonghua culture is ‘the
backbone’ (主干) and ethnic cultures are ‘the branches and leaves’ (枝叶). ‘Only when
the roots are deep and the trunk is thick’, Xi is quoted as saying, ‘can the branches and
leaves flourish’ (Xinhua 2021).
Ma Rong (2022) recently called on China to cast aside ‘cultural relativism’ (文化相对
论), embracing instead a social Darwinian mindset with deep roots in modern China. In
pursuit of social progress, he argues, some cultural forms naturally alter or even die out.
Whilst it might be worth preserving these cultural forms (in a museum or archive, pre-
sumably) as a kind of cultural memory, one cannot retain everything nor ignore the dis-
tinction between what is ‘virtuous’ (良) and ‘execrable’ (莠). China, he concludes, must
not ‘promote a conservative or close-minded approach by sticking with ignorant and
backward lifestyles and outdated customs in the name of protecting cultural diversity’.
As Xi Jinping himself pointed out in 2018, China must ‘discard the dross and select
10 J. LEIBOLD AND T. DORJEE

the essence; weed out the chaff and bring forth new roots’ when it comes to minority
cultures (Yu 2018).
Schools are at the forefront of culture work, where so-called ‘creative transformation’
moulds the thoughts and bodies of students and ensures the ‘outstanding traditional
culture of Zhonghua’ are transmitted to a new generation (Chen 2023; State Council
2017; Wang 2021). As Wu et al. (2016) highlights, the state schooling system in China is
based on a Confucian model of exemplarity, ritual, and examination, illustrated by class
captains and the young pioneers, ceremonies like oath taking and flag raising, and hier-
archical ranking through regular assessment. These practices discipline students’ subjec-
tivities in ways that seek to stamp out individuality and independent thought. Yet unlike
their Han peers, Tibetan students must also master the Han model of purported
superiority.
Inside Tibetan boarding schools, Zhonghua culture is narrated, performed and embo-
died through daily rituals and symbols. Visually, CCP slogans in Chinese characters have
replaced inspirational aphorisms in the Tibetan script; images of the Panchen Lama and
other Tibetan leaders have been replaced with Chinese cultural objects and portraits of
Han political leaders, with the likeness of Xi Jinping or the PRC flag now placed at the
front of most classrooms. This ‘image engineering’ is designed to subtly transform think-
ing through a ‘spectacle’ of modernity, redness, and Zhonghua-ness (Yeh 2013, 246–251)
(Figure 1).
Yet, as a recent article in the PRC’s leading minority education journal points out (Bai
2022), efforts at forging a collective consciousness are inherently vague, and thus require
‘carriers’ (载体) to assist with its ‘entry into the curriculum, the classroom, and the mind’.
For many Tibetan schools, these carriers come in the form of Han art, music, food and
clothing. It is claimed that physical items and actions – things that can be ‘seen and
touched’ – help transform abstract ideas about Zhonghua-ness into lived reality, and
assist in ‘anchoring’ (锚定) and ‘reifying’ (物化) this shared consciousness through a
process of ‘cultural fusion and assimilation’ (Chen et al. 2020).
On the official Weixin accounts of Tibetan boarding schools, students are pictured
doing Chinese calligraphy and paper-cutting, playing the Erhu and other traditional instru-
ments, making pork dumplings, mooncakes, and rice-balls, and performing Han operas or

Figure 1. Classrooms in a Tibetan school in Thangkor, Sichuan in 2018. The image on the left was
taken before, and the one on the right taken after, schools were ordered to remove all Tibetan
photos and images from classrooms. Images courtesy of Dr. Gyal Lo.
 COMPARATIVE EDUCATION 11

revolutionary dances. Tibetan culture is absent from daily life, bar a handful of special
occasions when traditional costumes can be worn and songs can be sung. In its place,
Han cultural objects, stories and heroes become the foci of the curriculum and identity
construction. A recent survey of 56 elementary boarding schools in Qinghai and Gansu
found 67 percent of minority students felt they were losing their native cultures and
languages through a process of intentional cultural marginalisation (Lin et al. 2020, 90).
The Number 2 Middle School in Lhokha (Ch. Shanan) City (西藏山南市第二高级中学)
provides clear evidence of this process of cultural erasure (Weixin 2021). Ninety-eight
percent of its students are Tibetan boarders, mostly from remote rural and nomadic
areas. The school has been paired with Anhui province, which provides administrative
support, Han teachers and teaching materials. Besides teaching in putonghua, the tea-
chers from Anhui are tasked with helping Tibetan teachers and students experience
Zhonghua culture. This includes the making and eating of zongzi (rice dumplings) to
celebrate the Dragon Boat Festival and mooncakes during the Mid-Autumn Festival.
Students are led in performing song and dance routines from Anhui’s traditional Huang-
mei opera, and student associations promote Chinese calligraphy, paper-cutting and
taichi (shadow-boxing). Through these activities, ‘students can learn more about the
outstanding traditional culture of the Zhonghua nation’, it is claimed. To celebrate
the 70th anniversary of the founding of the PRC, students and teachers formed the char-
acters ‘Love my Zhonghua’ (爱我中华) on the sports oval and sang the patriotic song
‘My Motherland and Me’. These sorts of activities embody what Xi Jinping calls
‘tactile, emotive and effective’ (有形、有感、有效) mechanisms for forging a collective
consciousness (Hu 2022).

Case study: Trikha County Nationalities Boarding School

Trikha county (Ch. Guide, 贵德县) in the Tsolho Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture is geo-
graphically the closest county to Qinghai province’s capital, Xining (Tib. Siling), now
less than two hours away by freeway and more urbanised than other parts of the prefec-
ture. Most of its roughly 100,000 residents are non-Han minorities with Tibetans being the
largest group. Its county-seat Heyin township (Tib. Chushib) attracts many migrant
workers and students from remote parts of the prefecture (Baidu 2022a) and has been
a site of political resistance in the past, with thousands of Tibetan students marching in
October 2010 to protest the provincial government’s introduction of putonghua-
medium education (Henry 2016; Roche 2021).
The Trikha County Nationalities Boarding School (TNBS, 贵德县民族寄宿制学校) was
established in 2009 through the merger of 18 schools and the disestablishment of 44
other local schools as a part of the school consolidation policy. The school, the largest
nationality school in Qinghai province, has nearly 3,500 students and teachers (Baidu
2022b; Cao 2016). TNSB likely offered a Tibetan-medium education in the beginning, as
was the norm among nationality schools at the time (Bass 1998, 234; Zenz 2014, 107–
111). According to a 2012 interview with its headmaster, ninety-eight percent of its stu-
dents are Tibetans from rural areas and many travel great distances to attend the
school. They study seven days a week and live alongside their teachers under a ‘closed’
(封闭式) system of management, meaning students can only leave campus during bi-
monthly holidays (Tang 2012; Wright 2019, 165).
12 J. LEIBOLD AND T. DORJEE

Gazang Cao (2016) conducted field research and surveys at TNSB in 2013. She found
over a third of students exhibited high levels of social alienation (powerlessness, loneli-
ness, isolation, etc.). The school used to permit one parental visit per week but reduced
this to once every two weeks, in addition to confiscating mobile phones, thus cutting
off regular contact between students and parents. The pull of the market economy
means many Tibetan parents have resigned themselves to handing over responsibility
for their children to the state despite the cultural, social and psychological costs. Due
to the seasonal and migratory nature of work, Tibetan parents are rarely in their home
villages, meaning students are often eager to return to school for companionship (Cao
2016).
At the time of Cao’s visit, the school offered a putonghua-medium education using
national teaching materials with the exception of a single Tibetan language class. The
focus was on mastering the national curriculum in order to prepare for the senior high
school entrance exam in putonghua. Under Tibetan headmaster and party-secretary
Sonam Dorje (Tib. བསོད་ནམས་རྡོ་རྗེ་; Ch.索南多杰), the school offered a lot of culturally relevant
extracurricular activities and associations, including groups for practising Tibetan
language, poetry and comedy. These activities, Cao (2016) and Zenz (2014) argue, help
preserve Tibetan identity through a defensive process of bottom-up ‘Tibetanisation’. At
the time, headmaster Sonam was a celebrated Tibetan educator and under his leadership
the school was awarded a meritorious citation in 2010 and he received a national edu-
cational award in 2013 (People’s Daily 2013).
Yet the following year, the headmaster was sacked by the Party Committee of the
Trikha Education Bureau following a local scandal (GTAR 2014; Wright 2019, 90–91).
The Tsolho Autonomous Government received an anonymous online complaint on 31
December 2014, alleging the school was spreading ‘feudal superstitions’ (封建迷信) by
inviting monks to address the students, including the use of 250,000 RMB (US$37,000)
in school funds to pay for a lecture by a visiting Living Buddha and feast for nearly
6000 students and parents.
Following an investigation, local officials concluded the school inappropriately used
school funds while inviting the vice-principal of a vocational training school in Golog
(Ch. Guoluo) without prior authorisation. In response, the Party Committee fired Sonam
Dorje and one other administrator ‘in order to uphold the normal educational and teach-
ing order of the school, and improve stability maintenance work at the school’ (GTAR
2014). It is unclear whether his public sacking was a warning to other Tibetan schools
that were promoting Tibetan language and culture on their campuses at the time
(Zenz 2014).
In more recent years, TNSB has firmly embraced Xi Jinping’s agenda for Han cultural
nationalism. The school regularly holds special events to celebrate Han festivals like
Lunar New Year, Dragon Boat Festival, and Tomb-sweeping Day. Over a ten-day period
in September 2021, the school held a series of activities under the banner of ‘national
unity as one family; forge the collective consciousness of the Zhonghua race-nation’. Stu-
dents pledged to use putonghua on campus and when communicating with their
parents; watched Xi Jinping’s speech celebrating the CCP’s 100th anniversary; wrote
essays in Chinese about a shared national consciousness; and signed banners pledging
allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party (TNBS 2021; TNBS 2022). Finally, the creation
of a new ‘school zone’ around TNSB opens the door to more ‘inter-ethnic mingling’ and a
 COMPARATIVE EDUCATION 13

possible merger of this ostensibly ‘nationalities school’ with neighbouring ‘Han schools’ to
create the sort of ‘joint ethnic-Han schools’ (民汉合校) where Han norms can be further
embedded (Wright 2019, 268).

Conclusion
Writing over twenty years ago, Mette Halskov Hansen (1999) warned the CCP’s lessons in
being Chinese can backfire. Rather than assimilating minority nationalities, state edu-
cation tends to politicise and even strengthen these identities as students come face-
to-face with Han culture and their lack of conformity. Furthermore, the diversity of
local conditions in frontier regions like Yunnan province, where she conducted field
research in the late 1990s, render state efforts at homogenisation unwieldy, if not imposs-
ible. This view was echoed by Gerald Postiglione (2009) a decade later when he con-
ducted one of the first studies of the Tibetan boarding school system. While
acknowledging the ‘civilising mission’ of these schools and their similarity to colonial
boarding schools in Australia, Canada and the United States, Postiglione accepts the
unique civilisational context of China, where (in his words) ‘centuries of contact and
exchange’ have bridged the ‘cultural difference’ between Tibet and China. He is at
pains to highlight the agency of Tibetan students and their parents in using boarding
school education as a pathway for individual social mobility and Tibet’s economic devel-
opment. What he overlooks, however, is not only the coercive state structures and insti-
tutional racism that forcefully assimilates Tibetan children into mainstream Han society,
but also the way these schools fundamentally alter and ultimately erase aspects of
Tibetan sovereignty and identity.
China has experienced tremendous change under Xi Jinping, and the Party’s lessons in
being Chinese have intensified and deepened. Xi has dramatically strengthened the gov-
ernance and surveillance capacities of the Party while stoking the flames of Han-centric cul-
tural nationalism. Loyalty to the Party and love of the race-nation are stitched more firmly
into the fabric of daily life, and shortly, national law, with a new Patriotic Education Law to
guard against threats to ‘ideological and national security’ and ‘establish a strong main-
stream ideology that can unite everyone’ (Global Times 2023). This is particularly evident
in the education sector where students’ lives and lessons are far more regimented –
same textbooks, curriculum, rituals, party-speak, and of course ‘right answers’ – than any
time since the Cultural Revolution.
The state schooling system is now the CCP’s most powerful incubator of Han-defined
uniformity on the Tibetan plateau. By adopting a more interventionist approach to gov-
erning its ethnic periphery – from Kashgar to Hong Kong – the Party is insisting on not
only political loyalty and ideological conformity but also cultural alignment (Byler 2022;
Leibold 2021; Vickers 2021). Xi Jinping’s colonial imaginary – a strong and unified
racial/national consciousness – posits a rigid model for ‘being Chinese’, one that seeks
to cancel, if not criminalise, alternative ways of being. This erodes Tibetan culture but
also forecloses alternative possibilities for Tibetan youth as they seek to navigate their
way through an increasingly authoritarian and homogenous China. The dynamics of iden-
tity mean some forms of ‘Tibetanness’ will remain; yet its colourful costumes and carefully
choreographed performances will increasingly ring hollow.
14 J. LEIBOLD AND T. DORJEE

Notes
1. The Chinese term minzu (民族) is deeply polysemic and politically loaded. Depending on the
context, it can refer to both the collective singularity of the Zhonghua race-nation (中华民族)
as well as the distinct identities of the fifty-five officially recognised minority nationalities
(少数民族). In the past minorities like the Tibetans were called ‘nationalities’ in English, but
in recent years Party officials (and many Western scholars) began using the English term
‘ethnic minorities’, thus erasing the autonomy, sovereign potential, and self-determination
of these groups. See Bulag (2021, 2023).
2. Although often translated as ‘quality’ or ‘human quality’, the term suzhi carries distinctly
eugenicist connotations and thus is perhaps more accurately rendered as ‘bio-quality’. See
Kipnis (2006).
3. This key party-speak phrase is commonly rendered into English as ‘consolidating the sense of
community for the Chinese nation’ in state media. The term zhulao (铸牢) is very uncommon,
and signifies an active process of casting a secure and firm entity, which is more accurately
translated as ‘forging’ or ‘casting’ rather than ‘consolidating’. The seal script (說文) for the
Chinese character 铸 shows two hands holding a utensil containing molten metal liquid
and pouring it into a mould, and the seal script for the character 牢 shows a secure pen for
keeping one’s animals. As a recent article points out (Bai 2022), ‘casting’ and ‘forging’ must
have both a steady hand and a firm design template. Similarly, the idea of 共同体意识 or a
‘sense of community’ in the official gloss misses the active cognitive and ideological act of
forging a collective and unified ‘consciousness’ (意识).
4. Researchers at the Tibetan Action Institute place the percentage of Tibetan students studying
in state boarding schools at 78 percent compared to a national average of 22 percent for all
students. See TAI (2021); note 35 on page 9. See also Wright (2019, 111–114).
5. As discussed below, many of these autonomous regulations are currently being revised or
annulled. According to the 2022 Legislative Work Plan of the Tsolho People’s Government,
a revised draft of the ‘Regulation on Tibetan Language Work’ is currently being reviewed
by the Standing Committee of the People’s Government. Source: https://archive.ph/EP3Pu.
6. In their survey of preschool education in rural Yunnan province, the authors found that of the
260 township kindergartens sampled, 83 had boarding classes, accounting for 31.9% of the
total number of kindergartens surveyed.

Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier ver-
sions of this article, as well as feedback from participants of an online workshop where our first
draft was presented. We are also grateful to the co-editors of this special issue, Edward Vickers
and Sicong Chen, for their feedback and helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
Australian Research Council (ARC), Discovery Grant [DP180101651].

Notes on contributors
James Leibold is a Professor of Politics and Asian Studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne,
Australia. His research interrogates the Chinese Communist Party’s policies for subsuming,
 COMPARATIVE EDUCATION 15

governing and securitising its colonial periphery with a particular focus on Xinjiang, Tibet and Inner
Mongolia. He is the author and co-editor of four books and over thirty peer-reviewed articles and
book chapters, and a frequent contributor to the international media and popular press on these
topics. Professor Leibold was the lead Chief Investigator on an Australian Research Council
funded Discovery Project entitled Urbanising Western China: Nation-building and Social Mobilis-
ation on the Sino-Tibetan Frontier (2018–2022) and the Director of the Xinjiang Data Project
(2019–2022) at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
Tenzin Dorjee is a Ph.D. candidate in the political science department at Columbia University,
working in the international relations and comparative politics subfields. His research examines
the influence of religious beliefs on political preferences and conflict behaviour, and the links
between transnational repression and political participation. He received his B.A. in international
relations from Brown University and his M.A. in political science from Columbia University. Before
joining the Ph.D. programme, he worked at the National Endowment for Democracy, Students
for a Free Tibet, and Tibet Action Institute.

ORCID
James Leibold http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3097-7571

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