The paywall-protected Wall Street Journal published a front page article on June 30, 2025 titled "China Uses Kids To Gut Tibetan Ways". It describes how the Chinese government has, through its educational system, tried, with mixed results to initiate Tibetan children into Chinese language and culture.
Tibet is an autonomous region of China, whatever that means, and during the past twenty years its students have been the focus of efforts to make them part of the Chinese communist system. This includes boarding schools, instruction by Mandarin-speaking teachers, of children at a very early age.
One Tibetan lamented that the children returned to their homes to visit "with a different way of thinking".
"They are brainwashed by Chinese thoughts and propaganda," he said.
One could edit out the words "China" and "Chinese" in this article and replace them with "United States" and the story would still ring true. This is exactly what the US has done and continues to do with the indigenous population of the continental US, Alaska, Hawaii and other slivers of its empire. Unlike the US example, the Chinese don't appear to have made a serious effort to exterminate the Tibetans. From the beginning, the American Puritan political regime worked to literally kill as many native Americans as possible. The children of those pushed off their homes to inhospitable backwaters of the continent were sent to boarding schools to assimilate them into the Yankee consumer capitalist culture. Where schools were established on the miserable reservations English was the language of instruction. Boarding schools enrolled children of many different tribes and languages, English was the only common language of instruction.
In what may have been a temporary benefit, in bush Alaska no public schools were provided for natives or whites until the Molly Hooch court case required them.
The Wall Street Journal should be embarrassed by this article which ignores an identical and even worse situation in its own backyard.
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