China is destroying Tibetan identity, language & culture: UN

A report by human rights experts of the United Nations on the eve of International Language Day on February 21 unmasked the real nature of oppression on Tibetans practised by the Communist Party of China (CCP) in the form of forced assimilation of Tibetan identity into the dominant Han Chinese identity, the Tibetan Press reported. The report by UN human rights experts, released in Geneva on February 6, 2023, talks about a million Tibetan children who have been separated from their families by the Chinese authorities and placed in government-run boarding schools. “We are alarmed by what appears to be a policy of forced assimilation of the Tibetan identity into the dominant Han-Chinese majority through a series of oppressive actions against Tibetan educational religious, and linguistic institutions,” the experts say in their report. The Chinese rulers in Tibet are using the residential schooling system as a ploy to assimilate Tibetan people culturally, religiously and linguistically with the Han identity. “We are very disturbed that in recent years the residential school system for Tibetan children appears to act as a mandatory large-scale programme intended to assimilate Tibetans into majority Han culture, contrary to international human rights standards,” the experts have said in a statement. In these residential schools, the educational content and the environment are built around the majority Han culture, with contexts in textbooks reflecting almost solely the experiences Han students face in the course of their lives. Tibetan children are forced to complete a “compulsory education curriculum in Mandarin Chinese (Putonghua, standard Chinese) without access to learning relevant Tibetan traditions and culture.