1 hr
James Leibold and Tendor Dorjee on ‘colonial-style boarding schools’ for Tibetans Asian Education Podcast
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- Education
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 Zho
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 Zho
1 hr