China’s Legal Warfare Closes a Beloved Tibetan School

Despite taking part in a momentous rite of passage, tears streaked the faces of the 110 students who graduated from Gangjong Sherig Norbu Lobling School, located on the Tibetan Plateau in Golog prefecture, Qinghai province, this July. For months, authorities had prodded to find violations, pursuing various legal avenues to shutter the school. Until this summer, they were unsuccessful.

Eventually, despite legal battles that ended in acquittal, the regional administration ordered the school’s closure. In a speech before his students, Gen Jigme Gyaltsen indicated the school was closing because it was not in compliance with the Qinghai Provincial Party Committee’s vague standards of vocational schools. Additional details were not disclosed. The 110 students that graduated in July will be the last the institution ever accredits.

The internationally acclaimed Tibetan school was first founded in 1994 inside the Golog Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. Since then, its rich curriculum in Tibetan cultural and linguistic studies has drawn youth from across Tibet, Mongolia, and Inner Mongolia. The school’s emphasis on the preservation of specialized Tibetan language studies, medicine, and Buddhist philosophy has garnered both private and public extraterritorial support, such as from Finland and the Netherlands. The school’s rigorous curriculum was supplemented with computer science, engineering, medicine, filmmaking, and physical education.

During his testimony at the Tibet Policy Institute’s July roundtable on the closure, Shede Dawa of Tibet Watch, a research network based in the United Kingdom, gestured to a projected image of Gangjong Sherig Norbu Lobling, tucked into shaded mountain foothills and rich with pine saplings. He noted the lengths these trees had grown since his years as a student there, where he was encouraged by his instructors to celebrate the arduous process of reconnecting with his own heritage in a region some scholars refer to as an “open air prison.”

The room of roundtable participants felt the reverberations this upbringing has had in the careful sincerity of Dawa, a steady advocate for peers facing systematic academic repression. He gazed out over the scholars in front of him, locking eyes with the camera lens before insisting, in the words of the school’s founder, that the preservation of the Tibetan language and script is a crucial means for the survival of the Tibetan people. People survive through stories, which are in turn cradled by linguistic exchange.

Dr. Lobsang Yangtso, program and Environment Desk coordinator for the International Tibet Network, expressed her admiration for the courage of alumni like Shede Dawa, who might now face retaliation for speaking up against the school’s closure. “There are many others like him,” she said.

In recent years, human rights monitoring networks have observed the gradual swapping out of Tibetan textbooks for those in the Chinese language. A cultural assimilation policy, which was formulated in 2010, decreed that all schools in Tibet must legally use Chinese as the primary language, beginning at the kindergarten level.

Dawa Tsering, director of the Tibet Policy Institute and longtime policymaker with the Tibetan government-in-exile, contextualized the school community’s ordeals: “Presently, the Chinese government is closing monasteries and Tibetan schools… These measures are part of a broader strategy to eradicate the Tibetan language and culture.”

Tibetan activists claim, in fact, that private schools are particularly targeted in “patriotic education campaigns,” as it is more challenging for the prefecture to monitor language instruction. Eight of the remaining 16 private Tibetan schools have been ordered to close by regional administrators, while those remaining are peppered by allegations and administrative pressure.

The legal warfare started small: scrutinization of a logo used by the Pure Native Language Association, a student organization that found its home in student leaders attending the school. In 2018, as reported by Dharamshala-based Tibet Times, these student leaders were sued and taken to court for using the images of a jewel and snow lion – would-be symbols of refuge, of a unified spiritual and secular life.

Allegations that the logo was meant to emulate emblems in the Tibetan national flag, which has been illegal in Tibet since the 1960s, offered fabricated evidence for an inquisition into the school. For the Tibetan community-in-exile, the flag represents a very simple notion: freedom from oppression, freedom of choice. To the Communist Party, the Tibetan flag is a sign of separatism – Tibetans have faced arrest and even torture in prison for simply keeping the flag’s image on their mobile phones.

When the suspicions proved inconclusive, the Communist Party sought a different approach to scale back the institution’s influence. The Central Tibetan Administration’s sources noted the series of legal aggressions faced by Gangjong Sherig Norbu Lobling. The provincial government of Qinghai conducted a “search and interrogation” to determine whether they had grounds to punish the school for hosting monks or nuns under the age of 18, which is banned under Chinese law. If found out, multiple sources report authorities forcing these students to leave their monasteries and receive a “patriotic education.”

Hundreds of graduates of Gangjong Sherig Norbu Lobling have gone on to work as researchers, government leaders, teachers, and entrepreneurs. The school, since its inception, has been a fount for Tibetan leadership – one that has now been shut down. In addition to the leaders the school has brought up, founder Gen Jigme Gyaltsen, himself having left nomadic life to found Gangjong Sherig Norbu Lobling, received the title of “Zhonghua Charity Worker” at the National People’s Political Consultative Conference. He was awarded by the state, a named recipient of the “National People’s Education Award,” and yet could not avoid the fire of corruption allegations on the pretext of his joint role as chairman of the Qinghai Tibetan Chamber of Commerce and Tibet Nomadic Management Office. On June 28, Gyaltsen published an article attesting that court proceedings had cleared him of all legal charges formally brought against him.

Editor-in-Chief of the Tibet Times Pema Tso observed that though the school had faced increasing challenges to its operation since the protests erupted across Tibet in 2008, the school’s community had been “relieved” by a provincial court decision that allowed its operation to continue.

In spite of years spent patiently responding to the inquisition, the rule of law was nonetheless subverted in the state’s final spear. The notice came on July 14. In an official announcement, Gyaltsen indicated the school was closing because it was not in compliance with the Qinghai Provincial Party Committee’s standards of vocational schools. He provided no details on what provisions, exactly, the school had violated.

Its forced closure, announced to the community during its last graduation ceremony, generated uncertainty for the fate of future scholars. Access to the campus remains restricted, and the professors who had for so many years volunteered their time also face an uncertain future.

At least one Tibetan individual, the sister of a former student at the school, has been arrested by the Nagchu County police for allegedly disseminating “misinformation” regarding the school’s shutdown. Her whereabouts have since remained unknown.

Under international law, China is obligated to permit young Tibetans to pursue education in their preferred language. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), which China ratified in 1992, states that “a child belonging to a … minority … shall not be denied the right … to use his or her own language.” The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights contains similar terms, although China has not expressly ratified its terms.

While children are generally considered to be people under 18, of which there were none at Gangjong Sherig Norbu Lobling, the former students face increasingly sparse options to engage in higher learning in their native tongue. The whittling of opportunities to engage in the Tibetan language extends from kindergarten to the university level.

Tibet Watch documents that the Dzoge County government recently ordered the disrobing of 300 young monks studying at the Taktsang Lhamo Kirti Monastery – requiring the group to become lay students at government-run schools. An undisclosed source of Tibet Watch reported that Dzonge County authorities expect to close the monastic school this month.

Ironically, China has been shutting down Tibetan schools while claiming that a lack of education opportunities necessitates sending Tibetan children to study at faraway boarding schools. Xi Jinping himself visited such a boarding school in Qinghai’s provincial capital in June. The school Xi visited included “800 Tibetan students from the same area of Golog” where Gangjong Sherig Norbu Lobling was located.

Lhadon Tethong, founder and director of Tibet Action Institute, expressed his sentiments on this political hypocrisy: “Claiming that Tibetan children must live in boarding schools due to Tibet’s remote geography, while simultaneously closing down an acclaimed school serving children in one of the most remote regions, exposes China’s primary justification for its coercive boarding system in Tibet as a lie.”

The Tibetan community-in-exile is heeding the supplication of colleagues in the Tibetan Autonomous Region. On July 29, 100 academics – whose names are redacted in the published version for their safety – submitted an official petition to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, urging that the high-level office increase pressure on the Chinese government to comply with international education standards outlined in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

When asked how Tibetans would like to see states express their solidarity for Tibetan youth being barred from their own linguistic roots, Tibet Policy Institute Deputy Director Tempa Gyaltsen Zamlha expressed a simple yet clear request: “Raise the issue.”