Continuing our series on ‘The Politics of Education on China’s Periphery’, featuring authors of articles in the related special issue of Comparative Education, in this episode Edward Vickers interviews James Leibold and Tendor Dorjee, co-authors of an article on boarding schools for Tibetan students in contemporary China.
We begin by discussing the origins on the boarding school program for Tibetans, which originated in the 1980s and was at first aimed at a relatively narrow elite. From the beginning, alumni of these ‘inland’ schools reported experiencing significant cultural and linguistic loss, and confusion in terms of their own identities. But for some, at least in these early years, this schooling became a route to relatively high-status and lucrative employment.
In their special issue article, James and Tendor argue that the past decade or so has seen an intensification of efforts to use education to enforce the assimilation of minority nationalities in China. In discussing the origins and implications of this shift, we note that it has happened in the context of a wider ramping up of the standardisation of education across China, in an attempt to universalise a homogenous, totalising model of urban (male) Han modernity. It is important to remember that this has been directed not only at non-Han ‘minorities’, but also at rural Chinese (both Han and non-Han) in general. But with respect to non-Han communities, especially those in western regions such as Tibet and Xinjiang, this programme of cultural homogenisation assumes a particular edge.
We note that, until the early 2000s, there were alternate educational options available at least to some Tibetans - of travelling to exiled Tibetan communities in India to study in boarding institutions there, or attendance in private or monastic schools inside of Tibet. But since 2006, that route to India has been closed off, just as the enrolment of Tibetans into Chinese boarding schools has been expanded and non-state schools were shuttered across the Tibetan plateau.
That shift has coincided with a gradual shift from the relative cultural openness of the 1980s and 1990s in China towards the brutally assimilatory emphasis of current policy, allied to an expanding and ever more sophisticated apparatus of monitoring and surveillance. As James explains, the CCP has always sought to use education as a tool of ideological and political control, but in the eyes of the leadership, several key events have appeared to raise the stakes, including: the Student Movement of 1989; the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991; the Tibet and Xinjiang unrest of 2008 and 2009; and the advent of Xi Jinping’s ‘New Era’ after 2012. Although the CCP has always maintained assimilation as the ultimate goal of its ethnic policy, the perceived urgency of that goal, and the strategies seen as necessary to its fulfilment, have significantly altered over the past two decades as the CCP adopted a more interventionalist approach to state-society governance.
As we discuss, part of this shift is attributable to a declining faith in the power of economic growth to drive assimilation, by persuading ‘minorities’ of the benefits to be gained by ever-closer union with the Han. That loss of faith in (neoliberal) economics has coincided with the declining allure of the West as an economic (and possibly political) model, since the global financial crisis of 2008-9. This is the context in which the regime has shifted to a far more forceful approach to assimilation through education.
A concept central to this assimilatory programme is the Zhonghua minzu. In their article, James and Tendor write of how the concept of the 'Zhonghua minzu', or the Chinese 'race-nation' as they gloss it, has been interpreted in increasingly homogenous and totalising terms as it has assumed greater prominence in CCP propaganda in recent years. Increasingly under Xi Jinping, the ‘nation-race’ encompassed by the Zhonghua minzu has come to be defined in singular rather than plural terms. James observes how officials and scholars in China (e.g. Prof. Ma Rong of Peking University) have proposed the use of the term zuqun (‘ethnicity’) in place of minzu (‘nationality’) to refer to ‘minorities’. For this reason, some scholars writing about China’s ‘minorities’ consciously use the term ‘nationalities’ as a form of resistance to the CCP’s assimilatory drive.
Alongside this terminological and ideological shift, even tokenistic and perfunctory references to cultural diversity have been fading from the school curriculum. This has been happening in a gradual and subtle way, so that most Han Chinese do not appreciate the shift. But as James and Tendor show in their article, the implications for the curricular status of ‘minority’ languages and cultures have been drastic and far-reaching. 'Bilingual education’, for example, is still - notionally, at least - official policy for the schooling of China's 'minorities'. But in practice bilingual education has become effectively monolingual and monocultural for ‘minority’ students. And boarding schools offer an especially powerful tool for ‘cultural erasure’, since they provide an environment allowing for almost total control of every aspect of students’ lives.
In the title of their article, Tendor and James describe boarding schools for Tibetans as 'colonial-style' institutions. The branding of Chinese policy towards minorities as 'colonial' remains controversial for many, but for James and Tendor the colonial agenda animating educational policies and institutions directed at Tibetans seems clear. There is the drive by a metropolitan centre to assert control over a distant and culturally distinct periphery, accompanied by an explicit civilising mission. Although many scholars today are analysing Chinese minorities policy through an explicitly ‘colonial’ lens, this is a relatively recent development, for reasons that James discusses. And it has not yet significantly penetrated the field of Educational Studies.
Readings:
James Leibold and Tendor Dorjee. 2023. ‘Learning to be Chinese: colonial-style boarding schools on the Tibetan plateau’, Comparative Education, 60 (1), DOI: 10.1080/03050068.2023.2250969
James Leibold and Chen Yangbin (eds). 2014. Minority Education in China: Balancing Unity and Diversity in an Era of Critical Pluralism. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
