Publications

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Racial Discrimination in Tibet (2000)

Discrimination in Education

Problems of the Chinese Medium

The Chinese Law on Regional National Autonomy stipulates that schools where the majority of the students are of 'minority' nationalities should "use textbooks in their own languages and use these languages as the media of instruction". Those Tibetan children who receive their primary education in the Tibetan language are lucky in the sense of advancing their knowledge of their own culture, yet they face immediate problems in all secondary and higher institutions, which use Chinese as their medium of instruction regardless of Chinese law. They experience great difficulty following lessons and sitting exams in a language which for other students is their mother tongue, and this creates significant problems in the later attainment of a job.

One girl from Lhasa described her difficulties at school after escaping to India late 1999. "From class three, mathematics was taught in Chinese. I didn't understand anything the Chinese teacher said, and so could only sit idle in the class and wait for the lesson to end. I used to fail all of my maths tests, but my teacher didn't care that I couldn't understand Chinese - she said it was because I was stupid."

A 19 year-old girl from Amdo experienced similar problems at her school. "I couldn't understand Chinese well enough to learn another subject through it, so I had to keep asking the teacher for help again and again. Many of the Tibetans in the class were like me, and when we didn't understand the teacher and the other Chinese students would laugh and call us 'stupid Tibetans' and 'dirty Tibetans'. Pretty soon, we gave up asking for help, and just sat there, waiting to fail. It was useless."

Yangzom Dolma, a 17 year-old girl from Gyalthang County in Dechen "TAP" arrived in Nepal in April 1998. "I studied at primary and secondary school in Dechen for a total of 10 years, and completed my studies in July 1997. The secondary school I attended was a Mirig Lobdra or 'Ethnic Groups School' where teaching was supposed to cater for all the nationalities attending. There were 2000 students in the school consisting of around eight different ethnic groups, of which Tibetans were the largest group. Yet no Tibetan was taught in any class at any level - everything was in Chinese. We were even told that if we spoke Tibetan outside class we would fall behind with our studies and be punished. If we asked a question in Tibetan the teacher would purposefully ignore us - even the few Tibetan teachers among the staff spoke and taught Chinese all the time. Naturally, we had many problems in class, but the Chinese students would just laugh and call us the 'dirty minority'. It was horrible."

As a result of their language difficulties, Tibetan students are often placed together into 'lower stream' classes and assigned inferior and less qualified teachers. Apart from exacerbating the problem, this also has a serious effect on the confidence of the child, and further contributes to the high failure rate of Tibetans in examinations. A study published in the journal 'Xizang Yanjiu' (Tibet Studies) in 1996 confirmed that

"National minority students, when they enter secondary school, do not have anywhere near the required levels of Chinese to cope with classes in other subjects" Students suffer real hardship while studying and teachers teach until they are exhausted. This results not only in reduced marks in school work and a reduction in teaching quality, but it also affects students' physical and mental health and all round development."

The cumulative result of all this has been to further intensify the Han supremacy mentality and the discriminatory prejudice that views Tibetans as a vastly inferior race. As one Tibetan parent put it,

"In the end, in a natural way there is a comparison between the Tibetans and the Chinese pupils; a Chinese pupil will wonder why a Tibetan in the same year has less knowledge than he as, so he will easily conclude that the Tibetans are backward and stupid. The seed is also planted for Tibetan children to consider themselves as stupid."

Linguistic conflict spreads right the way through each tier of education in Tibet. In early December 1996, 30 students at the Tibet University in Lhasa formally complained about the fact that the Tibetan history course, which is part of the Tibetan language department, was being taught in Chinese. Authorities were unreceptive to their protests however, asserting that university courses needed to identify more closely with China's changing economic status. As Deputy Party Secretary Tenzin put it, "older specialities in higher education are not suited to modern social needs." Since then, Tibet University has officially stopped the enrolment of students for Tibetan studies departments.

It all seems a far cry from 1987, when the government passed a number of positive "Provisions on the Study, Use and Development of the Tibetan Language". The provisions promised to set up Tibetan-medium junior secondary schools in the "TAR" by 1993, and to have "most" university courses available in Tibetan by the year 2000. However, the amount of effort and funding supplied to back up these proposals was consistently poor, and in 1997 the "TAR" Communist Party decided to reverse this "impractical" decision and to instead introduce Chinese language study from the first year of schooling. The announcement also "coincided" with the disbanding of the "TAR" Guiding Committee on Spoken and Written Tibetan, which had been set up to oversee the implementation of the 1987 provisions.

While this attempt at bilingual education may give Tibetan children slightly better standing in terms of competing with their Chinese counterparts, it continues to quicken the ever-diminishing status of Tibetan language and culture inside Tibet. By 1996, only 34% of schools for Tibetans in Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Gansu Province provided education in Tibetan, and the percentage looks to drop even further. It is unlikely that a move towards bilingualism will actually survive or significantly alter the dominance of Chinese in the wider society, and already the Committee on the Rights of the Child have expressed concern that "[i]nsufficient efforts have been made to develop a bilingual education system."