Welcome to ‘Xizang’: China is quietly, permanently trying to erase Tibet

While international attention has rightly focused on China’s mass internment of Uyghurs and other ethnic-minority Muslims in Xinjiang, a quieter but no less consequential campaign is unfolding on the Tibetan Plateau.

In Tibet, China is not merely policing dissent or curbing religious practice, but attempting something more permanent: the systematic erasure of a people’s culture, language and identity by targeting its children.

Over the past decade, Beijing has forcibly placed more than one million Tibetan children — almost four out of every five — into state-run, Mandarin-language boarding schools. Many are taken from their families at the age of four or five and kept away for most of the year.

These institutions are presented as instruments of development. In reality, they function as tools of forced assimilation, designed to sever children from their language, faith and cultural inheritance.

This is not simply a human-rights scandal, but a geopolitical project with far-reaching implications for Asia’s future balance of power.

The boarding-school system in Tibet is built on a neo-imperial premise: “Control the child and you control the future.” Children are taught — explicitly and implicitly — that Tibetan traditions are backward, their faith suspect, and their identity subordinate to a homogenized Chinese nation.

By displacing the family and monastery as the core institutions of socialization, the state inserts itself as the primary arbiter of values and belonging. The result is a generation growing up alienated from its roots, conditioned to view its own heritage through the lens of inferiority.

This is a classic colonial maneuver. Residential schooling has long been used by imperial powers to break indigenous societies from within. Western nations now acknowledge the devastating legacy of such systems imposed on Native peoples in North America, Australia and New........

© The Hill