Thank you very much.
Thank you for this opportunity and for making this happen. I will read my remarks and time myself. It's best if I help myself keep to the time.
My father was born in a free and independent Tibet in 1934. My eldest brother was born in a Tibetan refugee camp in India. I was born on the traditional land of the Songhees and Esquimalt nations in Victoria on Vancouver Island.
As a Tibetan and a Canadian, my two worlds sadly collided a couple of years ago when my organization, Tibet Action, began researching reports that Tibetan parents were being forced, coerced, to send their children, including those as young as four and five years old, away to boarding schools. In the course of our research, we found that China had been constructing a massive colonial boarding school system in Tibet, one that threatens the very survival of the Tibetan people and the nation because they so wholly and completely have targeted the future of Tibet—our children, and even the very youngest ones.
This school system is the cornerstone of a broader effort to wipe out the current and future resistance of our fiercely proud Tibetan people by eliminating our language, our religion and our way of life. The colonial boarding school system streamlines and fast-tracks this genocidal plan by ripping Tibetan children from their roots, stealing the language from their tongues and attempting to turn them into something they are not.
I have some high-level findings from our report. At least 800,000 Tibetan children across all of historical Tibet—not just the Tibet Autonomous Region, or what China calls Tibet—representing 78% of all Tibetan schoolchildren aged six to18, are now separated from their families and are living in colonial boarding schools. This number does not include the four- and five-year-olds being made to live in boarding preschools in rural areas, because China is actively trying to hide the existence of that system.
These children are forbidden from practising religion. They are cut off from authentic Tibetan culture—beyond, of course, what the Chinese Communist Party approves of and what you'll see in the propaganda, which is people wearing Tibetan clothing and doing the Tibetan circle dance.
These kids are taught almost entirely in Chinese, with maybe one Tibetan language class, by mostly Chinese teachers, or increasingly more and more Chinese teachers, and from Chinese textbooks reflecting Chinese life, history, culture and values while completely denying Tibet’s own rich ancient history and culture—our stories.
On top of this, they are subjected to intense political indoctrination. As Sophie has said in the past, even the youngest children are getting intense political indoctrination like “Xi Jinping thought”, which says they must be loyal to the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese nation first and above all else.
Of course, Tibetan parents have no choice but to send their children to live in these schools, because the authorities have closed the local village schools along with most privately run Tibetan schools or monastery schools. That's not to mention that Tibetans, having lived 70 years under Chinese occupation and facing intense violence from the state, know that you can't resist these kinds of central government directives at the grassroots level without facing severe, severe consequences. Parents who resist or refuse are threatened with fines and other serious consequences. Of course, the children have no choice.
One person from Tibet described the situation like this: “I know of children aged four to five who don’t want to be separated from their mothers. They are forced to go to boarding schools. In some cases, the children cry for days, sticking to their mother’s laps…. Both the children and the parents are unwilling.”
This insidious policy to isolate children from their families so as to erase their Tibetan identity and replace it with a Chinese identity was developed at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party. It is a blatantly racist policy.
Just as Tibetan parents don't want to have to send their children away, Chinese people don’t want to send their children away either. Actually, a backlash against school consolidation policies in China led the State Council to rule in 2012 that all levels of school should be, in principle, non-residential, especially for young children in grades 1 to 3. That very same State Council decreed in 2015 that, in so-called minority areas, officials must strengthen boarding school construction and achieve the goal that students of all ethnic minorities will study in a school, live in a school and grow up in a school.