The Dharamshala-based Tibetan government-in-exile, the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), on Monday claimed that Chinese authorities had closed at least three privately run Tibetan schools in Golog (Chinese: Guoluo) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture over a period of a few weeks, according to information relayed through reliable sources in the region.
The government-in-exile said that the closures have deprived hundreds of Tibetan children of the Tibetan-medium education their own communities had established for them, deepening fears that one of the last independent channels for teaching Tibetan language and culture was being systematically dismantled. “The sources said the government is closing private schools across Tibetan areas to accelerate national assimilation, moving Tibetan children into state-run institutions where they can more easily be subjected to political “re-education. Heavy surveillance of phone and internet communications makes information from the region extremely difficult to obtain,” the CTA report published on its website said. The CTA said the closures constituted a serious violation of the Tibetan people’s rights to education, language and cultural identity. “By shutting community-built schools and pushing their pupils into Mandarin-medium state boarding schools, Beijing is expanding a system that UN human rights experts warned in 2023 already affected around one million Tibetan children, and which they described as a policy of “forced assimilation,” it said.
