Welcome to ‘Xizang’: China is quietly, permanently trying to erase Tibet

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While international attention has rightly focused on China’s mass internment of Uyghurs and other ethnic-minority Muslims in Xinjiang, a quieter but no less consequential campaign is unfolding on the Tibetan Plateau.

In Tibet, China is not merely policing dissent or curbing religious practice, but attempting something more permanent: the systematic erasure of a people’s culture, language and identity by targeting its children.

Over the past decade, Beijing has forcibly placed more than one million Tibetan children — almost four out of every five — into state-run, Mandarin-language boarding schools. Many are taken from their families at the age of four or five and kept away for most of the year.

These institutions are presented as instruments of development. In reality, they function as tools of forced assimilation, designed to sever children from their language, faith and cultural inheritance.

This is not simply a human-rights scandal, but a geopolitical project with far-reaching implications for Asia’s future balance of power.

The boarding-school system in Tibet is built on a neo-imperial premise: “Control the child and you control the future.” Children are taught — explicitly and implicitly — that Tibetan traditions are backward, their faith suspect, and their identity subordinate to a homogenized Chinese nation.

By displacing the family and monastery as the core institutions of socialization, the state inserts itself as the primary arbiter of values and belonging. The result is a generation growing up alienated from its roots, conditioned to view its own heritage through the lens of inferiority.

This is a classic colonial maneuver. Residential schooling has long been used by imperial powers to break indigenous societies from within. Western nations now acknowledge the devastating legacy of such systems imposed on Native peoples in North America, Australia and New Zealand. China, in contrast, is actively expanding this very model in the 21st century — on an industrial scale.

The silence of Western democracies in the face of this campaign is striking. Governments that routinely condemn abuses elsewhere have largely treated Tibet’s boarding schools as an internal Chinese matter and chosen to look away.

Tibet is not a peripheral region. It is the geographic and strategic heart of Asia. Often described as the “Roof of the World,” the vast Tibetan Plateau dominates the Himalayan range and overlooks South, Southeast and Central Asia.

Control over Tibet allows China to project power across the Himalayas and exert pressure on these regions, including as the upstream controller of cross-border river flows. Tibet is the source of Asia’s main river systems. In Tibet, China is currently not only constructing the largest dam ever built on earth but also rapidly extracting the region’s rich mineral resources.

Before China’s invasion and annexation in the early 1950s, Tibet was a self-governing entity. Had it remained so, it would today rank as the world’s tenth-largest country by area. Its absorption into the People’s Republic fundamentally altered Asia’s strategic geography, including its hydrological map.

The geopolitical reality is that whoever controls Tibet holds a commanding position over the Himalayan piedmont, enjoying unparalleled military, hydrological and strategic leverage. This reality explains Beijing’s tightening grip on Tibet and its determination to extinguish any distinct Tibetan consciousness that might challenge Chinese rule.

The campaign against Tibetan identity is thus inseparable from China’s broader strategic ambitions. By reducing Tibetans to a depoliticized, assimilated population, Beijing seeks to lock in perpetual control over one of the world’s most sensitive geopolitical corridors.

The assault on identity extends beyond classrooms. Beijing has also sought to erase Tibet from global consciousness by expunging its very name. It has replaced the term “Tibet” with “Xizang,” a Qing-dynasty label meaning “Western Treasure Land.”

The goal is clear: to recast Tibet not as a distinct historical entity but as an inseparable, resource-rich appendage of China.

Disturbingly, this linguistic shift is beginning to find acceptance beyond China’s borders. Some Western museums and academic institutions have started adopting “Xizang” in place of Tibet, lending inadvertent legitimacy to Beijing’s narrative. Accepting this rebranding is acquiescence in the erasure of a nation’s historical identity.

Tibetan children, meanwhile, continue to risk dangerous journeys into exile, particularly to India, in order to preserve their language, religion and culture. India, home to the world’s largest Tibetan exile community, subsidizes Tibetan-language schools. That such risks for children are necessary is an indictment of international inaction.

Western democracies cannot plausibly claim ignorance of China’s forced-assimilation goal — to eliminate a potential source of resistance in a strategically vital region. Through the forced separation of a million children, Beijing is systematically attempting to obliterate a civilization.

At a minimum, democratic governments and international institutions should abandon their posture of silent spectatorship.

First, officials directly responsible for the Tibetan boarding-school system should face targeted Western diplomatic and economic sanctions. Cultural genocide should carry consequences more tangible than the largely symbolic visa restrictions announced by the Biden administration in 2023.

Second, governments, universities, museums and international organizations must reject the enforced use of “Xizang” in place of Tibet. Preserving historical and cultural nomenclature is a small but essential act of resistance against erasure.

Third, greater material and political support is needed for Tibetan educational and cultural institutions in exile, which remain the last line of defense for this unique culture.

The fate of Tibet’s children is a bellwether for the future of Asia’s security order. To ignore their forced separation and indoctrination is to acquiesce in China’s tightening grip on Tibet — and by extension on the strategic heart of Asia.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.“

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