Thank you, all of you, for allowing me to speak to you about the system of the colonial boarding schools in Tibet.
I am here to share my research findings and what I have personally witnessed about the boarding preschools. This is a completely hidden policy of the Chinese government. Based on the more than 50 boarding preschools that I have seen with my own eyes, I estimate that at least 100,000 Tibetan children from ages four to six are now living separately from their parents, families and communities.
After I received my Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, I returned to Tibet in 2015. I then started teaching at Yunnan Normal University. The following year, my brother called me because he was concerned about his two granddaughters' behaviour. I went home to see them. That was the first time I came into contact with the colonial boarding preschools.
I picked up my two grandnieces, one aged four and one aged five, from their boarding preschool on Friday evening and then carefully observed them while they were at home. I saw clearly they did not hug their grandparents, and they had almost no emotional exchanges with their own family members. They sat a little further away from all of us family members, almost like guests or strangers in their own home. They conversed with each other only in Mandarin, the Chinese language. This was after just three months in the new boarding preschool in our local township. Prior to this, they spoke no Mandarin and were raised in an entirely Tibetan-speaking environment.
I realized that my family's case was not unique. The Chinese government was implementing a mandatory preschool education policy over all of Tibet. For the following three years during the summer vacations, I did academic fieldwork on this topic. I visited boarding preschools across all of eastern Tibet, in what China now calls Qinghai, Gansu, Yunnan and Sichuan. I spoke to kids, parents, teachers and other village stakeholders, and my conclusion was the same as it was with my two grandnieces.
It is very important to understand that Tibetan parents have no real choice about whether to send their children away to boarding school. Even very young children in the rural areas of Tibet—just four to six years old—must attend a boarding preschool. Local village schools have been shut down in Tibetan villages. Private schools have been shut down. There are really no local options, and there is no Tibetan option left for parents who don't want to send their children away to those government boarding preschools.
This is all by design. The Chinese government invests vast amounts of resources and much careful thought into pulling Tibetan children out by their roots from our culture and their families. They do this by teaching almost entirely in Mandarin, the Chinese language, and by making the entire learning environment into a purely Chinese environment.
Even the pedagogical approach is very sophisticated. For example, students are shown Chinese cultural objects and then are told to close their eyes and imagine those objects. Then they are asked to draw what they imagined. Later on, they ask the kids to explain, in Chinese Mandarin, what they have drawn. This is a very intentional method to shift the children's entire psychological foundation from Tibetan to Chinese.
China is weaponizing the school system to intentionally commit genocide. I am deeply concerned for the well-being of those children, their parents and the future survival of the Tibetan identity and culture. If this colonial boarding school policy continues for more than 20 years—especially the boarding preschool policy—I fear that China will end our civilization and cause irreparable harm to our people.
Thank you very much.