Thank you. I'd like to thank the distinguished members of the committee for this opportunity.
Among all of the tools of colonial dispossession wielded by European settlers against indigenous populations in North America, residential schools stand out for the scope, scale and persistence of their impact. Under the guise of providing education, these boarding establishments removed indigenous children from their homes, erased their cultures and languages and left a lasting legacy of multi-generational trauma that haunts indigenous communities to this day.
This 19th-century colonial practice is being quietly resurrected on the Tibetan plateau by the Chinese government.
Two years ago, after hearing about children being forced into state-run boarding schools in parts of eastern Tibet, my colleagues at Tibet Action Institute began investigating the matter. After months of research, they arrived at the disturbing conclusion that approximately 800,000 children, which is 78% of all Tibetan students aged six to 18, are living in residential boarding schools. That's 800,000 children. This staggering statistic does not include the more than 100,000 Tibetan children aged four to six who are believed to be in boarding preschools.
In these boarding institutions, children are put through a highly politicized curriculum designed to sever their ties to their religion and culture, strip them of their mother tongue and methodically replace their Tibetan identity with a Chinese one. The residential school system sits at the centre of China's new solution to the Tibetan problem.
Whereas previous administrations under Hu Jintao, Jiang Zemin and Deng Xiaoping balanced political repression with a degree of ethnic accommodation towards Tibetans, Xi Jinping's China has opted for an all-out eliminationist approach. This new approach is grounded in the ultra-nationalist notion that the only route to political stability is cultural uniformity and ethnic homogeneity.
In the past, Beijing believed that the best way to solve the nationalities problem was to afford non-Han minorities a range of special protections and cultural accommodations. However, following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Chinese public intellectuals like Ma Rong and Hu Angang argued that special treatment for minority communities somehow undermined Chinese nation building. They called for a highly interventionist form of party-directed cultural nationalism. What Beijing now seeks to eliminate is not just separatist ideology but the separate identity of Tibetans. Dissent never went unpunished under Beijing, but now even difference is criminalized.
Among all the features of Tibetan identity, language is what most effectively unites Tibetans across the plateau. The Tibetan language forms the bedrock of one of the great civilizations of Asia, with a written history dating back over a millennium and an oral literature that goes back even further. It is also home to the largest body of canonical Buddhist literature in the world. Of all the markers of a distinct identity, language is the central pride of the Tibetan people.
For Xi Jinping's China, this is precisely why the Tibetan language must be eradicated. What better tool for that task than the residential school system? In all schools across the plateau, Tibetan has been replaced by Mandarin Chinese as the medium of instruction. Beijing has deceptively labelled this new policy “bilingual education”, but there is nothing bilingual about the system. Tibetan has been demoted to second-language or third-language status in its own native homeland. This is literally a highway to mother-tongue erosion. To make it worse, China has shuttered scores of local and private schools, pre-emptively destroying all village-level alternatives to the consolidated boarding schools.
Ironically, two months ago, when UN experts in Geneva grilled the Chinese delegation, Chinese officials defended the mandatory boarding policy by claiming that there were no schooling alternatives in rural Tibet. Guess what. They themselves had destroyed all the local alternatives that existed. At the same event, when asked about the use of Mandarin as the medium of instruction in Tibet, Chinese officials said that the Tibetan language doesn't have the right words for teaching math and science. This is a blatantly racist and fictitious argument.
All languages, when they meet new subjects for the first time, face challenges that can be overcome. The Chinese language itself faced the same problems in the recent past, and it managed pretty well, borrowing thousands of terminologies from Japanese and Russian. Tibetan has by and large also solved some of these problems.
Meanwhile, the boarding system is causing a major upheaval in the social, psychological, cultural and linguistic structures of Tibetan life. We are already seeing the early results of this colonial policy. Tibetan children below a certain age are fast becoming native Mandarin speakers, which means they can no longer converse meaningfully with their parents and cannot even communicate with their grandparents. In Tibet, as in many traditional societies, grandparents play a seminal role in shaping children's overall psychological development and orienting their cultural world view. If children inherit genes from their parents, it can be said they inherit culture from their grandparents.
This colonial system is clearly designed to stem the transmission of culture from one generation to the next. Thankfully, the world is beginning to take action and take note. Two months ago, the UN sent a strong communication to Beijing on the issue. Yesterday, the German government officially called for an end to this system.
My recommendation to the Canadian government is to publicly condemn this consolidated boarding institution and to call on the Chinese government to halt this system and allow the reopening of village-level local and private schools. Finally, I request that the Canadian government sanction Chinese leaders and officials responsible for this heinous policy, including the intellectual architects responsible for developing and implementing this system.
Thank you.