03-10-2024, 02:44 PM
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-68492043 Tibetan educational sociologist Gyal Lo can speak Mandarin Chinese fluently - but he would rather not.
He has spent the last few years telling the world about Beijing's sweeping educational reforms in Tibetan areas, and would prefer not to use the language of people he identifies as colonial oppressors.
China has expanded the use of boarding schools - for children as young as four - and replaced Tibetan as the main language of tuition with Chinese.
Beijing says these reforms give Tibetan children the best possible preparation for their adult lives, in a country where the main language of communication is Mandarin Chinese.
But Dr Gyal Lo disagrees - he believes Beijing's real aim is to undermine the Tibetan identity, by targeting the very youngest in society.
Sadly, this seems completely in-character for the CCP
. Of course, there is a need for people to know the language of wider communication (which, in China, is Mandarin Chinese) - but that doesn't have to come at the cost of people losing their own cultural identities. But, one thing we've seen time and time again throughout history is that 'oppressed' languages are often quite resilient, as their speakers often carry on speaking them in secret... hopefully, the same will prove to be true of Tibetan.
But this is par for the course for China; one need only look north to Xinjiang for evidence of that. Or to China's systematic undermining of ethnic identity by lumping distinct cultures together - they claim to have something like 57 different minority groups but the actual number is 
Bloody CCP.