
Within the silent reverence of a first-grade classroom, incredulous little eyes follow the poised hand of a teacher etching brush-strokes of Tibetan alphabet letters onto a dusty blackboard. Outside, the majestic peaks of surrounding mountains edge the bright cerulean sky. The untouched purity of the locale heightens as the air begins to thin at an elevation of 2,800 meters.
Here, within this altitude, Shangri-La Key Boarding School stands as a testament to the unique blend of Chinese-Tibetan bilingual education. Yet, not everyone embraces this educational model. Tibetan activists decry it a forced assimilation, a sentiment catching the keen attention of U.N. human rights experts and representatives from the U.S. among other Western governments who condemn such practices.
Over the last ten or so years, village schools scattered across Tibet have been replaced by centralized boarding schools by Chinese authorities. They now serve as educational facilities for children hailing from remote farming hinterlands, with the trend becoming irrefutably prevalent within Tibetan locales.
Activist groups suggest that close to a million Tibetan children are educated within these institutions. Despite the difficulty in verifying such numbers, these activists claim such schools are strategic ploys to submerge Tibetan identities within the overarching majority Chinese culture. Counteracting this, school officials insist on the inclusion of Tibetan cultural materials within their curriculum, arguing that these boarding schools were instigated as a solution to the challenging task of providing quality education within remote, impoverished areas.
Kang Zhaxi, the principal of Shangri-La school exclaims, “In the ethnic areas, the population is dispersed and our government has made commendable efforts to consolidate educational resources and provide an optimum teaching and learning environment for our students.” Under his Tibetan identity, he would be referred to as Kham Tashi.
The Chinese agenda, for several years, has been geared towards quenching any potential mutiny in ethnically diverse regions by incarcerating protestors and reconfiguring social structures, religions—including Tibetan Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam—to resonate with the ideals of the Communist Party.
This strategy has steepened under the leadership of Xi Jinping over the past decade. Particularly notable is China’s harsh crackdown on the Uyghur community in Xinjiang, located north of Tibet.
The tale of communist China overthrowing the Buddhist theocracy of Tibet in 1951 is well-known. Consequently, the Dalai Lama was propelled into exile in 1959 and has since been unable to return. Protests have echoed over time; yet post the large-scale demonstrations preceding the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the government squashed dissent through an elaborate scheme of reshaping Tibetan identity, development spending on infrastructural projects, and intimidation tactics.
As the sun dips beyond the horizon casting shadows on the Shangri-La Key Boarding School, the echoes of bilingualism, interspaced with children’s laughter, fills the air. The situation on the ground has yet to reflect the global outcry—China, unfazed by the criticism, shoots back with similar visa restrictions for Americans that “spread rumors to smear China or have long meddled in Tibet-related issues”. Only time will tell whether these initiatives morph into genuine cultural exchanges or continue down the thoroughfare of forced assimilation.