Global News

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/37702524

Distressed Tibetan children as young as four sent to Chinese state-run boarding schools for indoctrination have been beaten for praying and wearing Buddhist blessing cords, forced to sleep on sheepskins and taught only in Mandarin, a new report has found.

Researchers and activists say the boarding schools have been used by authorities to suppress the local culture and language of people in China's Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) and Tibetan areas in nearby provinces.

Details of the violence and coercive indoctrination have emerged in a new report from the US-based Tibet Action Institute (TAI) titled When They Came To Take Our Children.

Two Tibetans interviewed told the TAI that children were reprimanded for practising their religion.

"Students are restricted from wearing any sungdue [Buddhist blessing cords] around their necks and wrists and chanting Tibetan prayers," the report quotes them saying.

"If the students are found chanting prayers and wearing any blessing cords, they are beaten by the teacher."

A former student, who has left Tibet, told the TAI if school authorities inspected dormitories and "found that we had not kept it clean, we were beaten as a punishment".

Along with the allegations of beatings, the report says Tibetan children are indoctrinated to praise the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and taught only in Mandarin.

"It's an effort to move Tibetan children away from family and community … expanding its control over what they're learning and thinking," Freya Putt, the author of the report and TAI's Director of Strategy, says.

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