Mick Hartley

The Sunday Times on a new documentary about Tibet:

Our extensive research across a year shows that Xi’s mission is to forge a single Chinese identity, one centred around the Han Chinese majority and loyalty to the Communist Party, to unify the country and ultimately prevent unrest from ethnic minorities, such as Tibetans. Experts say it is central to ensuring that the Communist Party retains control over such a vast country.

A Han Chinese man who has resettled to a Tibetan town describes the government’s long-term objectives to Chang: “The Communist Party’s goal is to gradually assimilate them into Han Chinese, so they can’t make trouble.”

Campaigners say at the heart of Beijing’s efforts are Tibetan children who are are separated from their families and placed in boarding schools, where they are taught in Mandarin. They estimate up to a million Tibetan children — as young as four — are living in residential schools that seek to shape them into Chinese citizens.

Gyal Lo, a Tibetan sociologist and education researcher, became alarmed by the boarding schools in 2016 when they were first introduced. He has visited more than 50 of them across Tibetan regions and believes that they have two goals: “One is to instil the Communist ideology and the second is to instil the Chinese culture.”…

One mother, whose children go to a local school, tells him: “They don’t speak our language, just Chinese from kindergarten and primary school.”

She says that her children now respond to her in Chinese and cannot speak Tibetan anymore.

A million or so children removed from their families in Tibet, to be indoctrinated into Chinese culture; a million or so Uighurs in "re-education" camps in Xinjiang. Forgotten.

On ITV1 at 10.15 tonight.