Tibetan language under the gun
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China to restrict Tibetan language in region’s college entrance exam
Exclusion of core subject exam stokes fears Beijing is furthering campaign to ‘Sinicise’ region
John Reed, Financial Times (8/6/25)
Cantonese, Uyghur, Mongolian — they're all threatened. And you can be sure that if China invades and occupies Taiwan, Taiwanese (and all of the aboriginal languages of the island) will be under duress. What is being done to Cantonese, Uyghur, and Mongolian is the way the CCP deals with the majority languages of its various cultural regions, which together constitute approximately half of China's total land area. Tibet alone occupies roughly 13% of the total land area of the PRC (Xinjiang is 1/6th [16.6% of the whole of China]. Since seven of Asia's major rivers (the Yangtze, Yellow, Mekong, Salween, Irrawaddy, Brahmaputra, and Indus) originate in Bod, and "The Roof of the World" possesses many other valuable natural and strategic resources, what happens to the native tongue of its inhabitants is no mean matter.
China plans to exclude Tibetan as a core subject from the national college entrance exam for the majority of students in the autonomous region, a senior official has said, raising concerns over the future of the language. Gama Cedain, chair of the Tibet Autonomous Region, told a press briefing this week that the change was part of reforms to the national examination and would improve Tibetans’ career prospects. “Tibet, like other provinces and regions” would have “unified exam subjects”, he said, such as Chinese and mathematics, and foreign languages including English, Russian, Japanese, French, German and Spanish.
Judging from Gama Cedain's outlook, little attention is being paid to the literary and scriptural / religious heritage of Tibet.
…Tibetan will no longer be a core subject in the exam. “This helps students of all ethnic groups to enjoy fairer access to high-quality education, enhances minority students’ ability to learn and improves their overall scientific and cultural literacy,” he said of the changes. The exclusion will fuel accusations from the US and Tibetans abroad that China is expanding a “Sinicisation” campaign in order to bring religious authorities in the region under the control of the Communist party and suppressing aspects of its culture — allegations fiercely denied by Beijing.
Gama Cedain did not give a timeline for the implementation of the change, saying only that Tibet began education reforms in 2024. But officials in six Tibetan prefectures said it would come into effect next year. Officials affiliated with the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamshala, India, who have been closely following the changes, accused China of seeking to repress the use of Tibetan language in the region. “Once you no longer have the Tibetan language in your entry exam, it no longer is a legal means of communication or useful to seek a profession or get a job,” said Dawa Tsering, director of Tibet Policy Institute in Dharamshala, which is affiliated with the Tibetan government-in-exile. Every year, high school seniors across China take the grueling, multi-day college entrance exam, known as the gaokao. Aside from Chinese, math and foreign languages, students choose from a range of subjects, including politics, history, geography, physics, chemistry and biology, all of which are conducted in Mandarin.
Despite Tibet's magnificent libraries and the impressive learning that is carried out in them, they seem to count as nothing in the calculations of the CCP planners.
Selected readings
The following are but a small sampling of the LL posts on restricting the use of mother tongues in the PRC.
- "Uyghur, Cantonese, and other valuable languages of China" (2/20/16)
- "Free Tibet!/?" (8/9/22)
- "Linguistic diversity in Greater Tibet" (5/3/14)
- "Mongolian language genocide" (9/14/23)
- "Language and politics in Hong Kong: National Security and the promotion of topolect" (8/28/23) — with a lengthy bibliography
- "Tightening the noose on Mongolian in Southern Mongolia" (8/30/20)
- "Language and politics in an Inner Mongolian post office" (7/22/18)
- "The Last Lesson — in Mongolian" (1/11/18)
- "Uyghur language outlawed in schools of the Uyghur Autonomous Region" (8/1/17)
- "Tibetan language instruction in Greater Tibet" (3/11/16)
- "Cantonese under renewed threat" (12/31/18)
ajay said,
August 12, 2025 @ 11:04 am
Tibet alone occupies roughly 13% of the total land area of the PRC (Xinjiang is 1/6th [16.6% of the whole of China].
It is not always clearly understood that China, in its current borders, is basically the Chinese Empire of circa 1800; an empire more than half of whose land area was conquered by military force over the previous 150 years. China when the Qing dynasty took over in 1644 was less than half its current size. By 1800 it was emphatically not a decaying state full of luxury, decadence and oriental beastliness, however much it may have suited various people later on to say it was: it was a successful, centralised and growing territorial empire, the largest by population in the history of the world.
But, like many other aggressively expanding empires, it was desperately in need of silver to pay the armies that were conquering its new colonies and holding its new subjects in check – far more than it could mine internally. If tea and silk and other exports flowed out and silver flowed in, the empire could continue to conquer. If imports started to flow in, that meant silver would flow out – and that meant disaster. Unpaid soldiers in China, as elsewhere, would rapidly become bandits; successful bandits would rapidly become dynastic rebellions.
"Europe produces nothing we need", the Qianlong Emperor told a British ambassador hoping to negotiate a trade deal in 1798. He was lying, of course. What he meant was "Europe produces nothing that we dare import".
Victor Mair said,
August 12, 2025 @ 11:19 am
On the Manchu expansion westward, see Peter Perdue's magisterial China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Harvard University Press / Belknap Press, 2010).
KIRINPUTRA said,
August 13, 2025 @ 8:11 am
(The Chinese occupation of Formosa began in 1945. Taioanese, Hakka & the Austronesian languages of Formosa ARE under duress — much more so than Cantonese or Teochew.
Till c. 2010, Chinese Nationalist rule was more linguistically fatal than Chinese Communist rule….
The People's Republic has no monopoly on Chinese nationalism. That Anglophonie increasingly imagines it does is a testament to the resources & skillz of the "progressive" Chinese nationalist.)
AntC said,
August 14, 2025 @ 3:08 am
@KIRINPUTRA, I've been visiting Taiwan regularly since ~2015. I'm posting this from Taichung.
Of course RoC is 'nationalist' in defending itself against PRC — particularly under the martial law era. Some news for you: Taiwan has been democratizing since the 1990s. I see Hakka cultural centres, I hear Hokkien spoken widely on the streets, Prof Mair has posted several reports of my travels on the East Coast rail system where the Austronesian languages are promoted.
In short, you are somewhere between woefully out of date and downright wrong.