The Crisis and Closure of an Independent Tibetan School: The 30-Year Journey of Jigme Gyaltsen Ethnic Vocational School
一所独立藏语民族学校的停办危机——吉美坚赞民族职业学校的30年
This article is the second half of the original article, the first half is here. The author has authorized us to post this in our Chinese Youth Stand For Tibet Substack. The original manuscript was published in Chinese on Mangmang: 一所独立藏语民族学校的坚守与落幕——吉美坚赞民族职业学校的30年
06. Adaptable Resistance
In my observation, the teachers at the school are well-versed in the survival strategy of non-confrontation.
In regions long subjected to multiple censorships and tight regulation, particularly in areas concerning ethnic affairs and religious activities, everyone at the school seemed to have accepted the reality of living under heavy-handed rule. As a result, they did not harbor hostility toward political propaganda; instead, they were even willing to embrace it in exchange for a degree of freedom in obscured, unnoticed corners of life.
For instance, during my time at the school, the front of every classroom prominently displayed the Chinese national flag and portraits of central overnment leaders, from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping. No one would actually discuss these leaders, but the presence of their images served as a protective layer for the school. Many things within the school followed this kind of logic: avoid unnecessary opposition when it is not needed, and comply as much as possible when compliance is feasible.
Most of the teachers I interacted with were good in Chinese. Some of them weren’t opposed to saying they were Chinese. They even believed they could be Chinese, Tibetan, Communist Party members, and Buddhists at the same time. Sometimes, when I talked about the crisis in Tibetan-language education with these teachers, they confidently argued: “We are part of the 56 ethnic groups. We are Chinese. The Tibetan language we speak is also Chinese. Since China is a multi-ethnic country, why shouldn’t we be allowed to use our mother language?”
In the years before I arrived at the school, under various pressures, the official Education Bureau assigned several system-affiliated teachers to the school. The school even established a Communist Party branch( will use party to refer communist party below), appointed an executive vice principal in charge of administration, and recruited several Party members. I asked one of these Party-member teachers if joining the Party meant they could no longer Chanting scriptures and prayers to buddhas and bodhisattvas. He dismissively replied, “I can practice Buddhism at home, and I’m a Party member in the office. When I don’t chant scriptures, my family does it for me.”
Traditional Tibetan schools typically do not have centralized offices where all the teachers gather to work. Instead, each teacher grades assignments and meets with students for office time in their own dormitory living rooms. When the Golog Prefecture Education Bureau came to inspect the school, they deemed this is unprofessional. In response, the principal specifically set up a large room, labeled desks with teachers’ names, and had a few teachers sit there reading and drinking tea to create the illusion of a proper teachers’ office to pass the inspection.
In the years leading up to the school’s closure, it faced numerous obstacles from various quarters. For example, the Education Bureau began to prevent the school from recruiting students from outside the Qinghai province. Historically, the school had long admitted students from Tibet across regions and provinces. The Bureau argued that this cross-regional recruitment violated relevant regulations and stopped issuing student registration for those from outside the Qinghai province. However, some students don’t care and still studying at Ragya School despite not being granted official registration. Those students didn’t come to Ragya for the sake of a diploma but to learn traditional knowledge and ethnic culture.
The school cafeteria received government meal subsidies. In the period before its closure, the school started accepting subsidies and funding from the Education Bureau. There was no other choice—if these compromises could help maintain the school’s independent operation and allow Tibetan language and ethnic culture to be passed on, they were worth it. My Tibetan friends made all these compromises and sacrifices in an effort to delay the school’s closure and to ensure that a few more classes of students could be educated on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.
07 The Threat of Closure
The pressure to shut down the school had always loomed. “The government doesn’t want private schools teaching Tibetan language and ethnic culture anymore. All schools have to become state public,” I often heard teachers at Ragya School say during my time there.
In Tibet, as early as 2018, local governments began suppressing ethnic education, gradually shutting down private schools that taught in Tibetan and forcing students to attend government-run schools. Starting in the summer of 2021, local authorities in Qinghai closed a wave of private schools and formally arrested at least one teacher and two students to crack down on Tibetan opposition to educational policies erasing ethnic culture.1
In 2020, the Chinese government introduced Mandarin instruction in Inner Mongolia, eliminating nearly all Mongolian-language schools. Around the same time, schools teaching Korean and Uyghur languages also closed one after another. Recently, social media has been flooded with posts mourning the "last lesson" commemorating the end of ethnic minority language education in college entrance exams (Gaokao).
For three decades, Ragya School persisted in using Tibetan as the medium of instruction, relying on independently developed curricula to preserve ethnic culture. In the past, even public schools in Tibet taught other subjects in Tibetan. However, in present public schools in Tibet, the government enforces a standardized curriculum taught entirely in Mandarin. Tibetan is relegated to being taught as a second language, like English.
Rumors about Ragya School’s impending closure had circulated for years—and they were more than just rumors. In fact, the girls’ school had been forced to transfer to government management years ago. I heard that if the principal do not hand over one of girl school or boy school to the government, the government would shut down both of them. Helplessly, the principal handed over the Grassland Girls’ School to the Prefecture education bureau, turning it into a government managed private school. This compromise allowed the boys’ school to continue survive for a few more years—until its recent closure.
Some Tibetans chose more covert methods of resistance. They taught Tibetan in remote elementary school educational outpost, short-term holiday programs, or even within the public school system. However, the government’s reach extended into every aspect of education. In remote Tibetan villages, the “school consolidation” campaign led to the forced closure of many village schools and educational outpost.2 Children were left with no choice but to travel long distances to attend school, making the government’s push for boarding schools seem inevitable.
Recent research estimates that about 1 million Tibetan children aged 4 to 18 have been forcibly separated from their families to live in boarding schools, returning home only once a week. These schools enforce assimilation through compulsory Mandarin instruction.3
During winter and summer breaks, many parents sent their children to monasteries or tutoring classes to study Tibetan. However, these small-scale, community-organized Tibetan language tutoring programs also faced government crackdowns. In 2021, the government began banning students from attending informal Tibetan tutoring classes during school holidays.
In January 2024, Tsering, a sophomore at Tibet University, died in Lhasa. Reports suggest she had been teaching Tibetan to children during her school breaks. Some speculate that her death followed police questioning related to her efforts to organize Tibetan language classes.4
Others chose to resist within the existing education system. In 2024, a senior teacher at a public school in Maierma, Ngaba County, named Dhondup, had his teaching license revoked and was dismissed. His crime? Encouraging students to learn about Tibetan culture and use the Tibetan language.5 The school stated that his teaching methods did not align with national education policies. This boarding school, like many others, had transitioned to Mandarin instruction for all subjects after 2018, as part of the government’s policy shift.
At Ragya School, nearly all the teachers and students’s mother tongue are not Mandarin, and everyone emphasized their commitment to preserving traditional ethnic culture. This might sound like an abstract notion. I often asked myself and others: what exactly is traditional ethnic culture? Some believed it to be Buddhism, Tibetan literature, the Tibetan language, folklore, and history. In my view, the cultural emphasis at Ragya School went beyond just the knowledge of Tibetan history and culture. It was more about embodying the qualities of a traditional Tibetan intellectual: logical and flexible thinking, cultural confidence rooted in Tibetan subjectivity, and a broad outlook.
In traditional Tibetan society, monasteries bore the responsibility of education. Dingzhen, who didn’t know a single Chinese character but could read Tibetan, learned it as a child at a nearby monastery. Herding children could attend short-term Tibetan language program at monasteries. and don’t have to shave their heads and ordain as monks. In the past, even students enrolled in regular schools often studied Tibetan at monasteries. Monasteries were hubs for intellectuals and cultural elites in Tibetan society. Typically, the smartest children in Tibetan families were sent to monasteries to become monks, preserving cultural traditions while praying for their families and accumulating merit.
At Ragya School, about one-third of the students were monks. There were even reports of individuals lurking near the school gates to count how many monks in school. Rumors suggested that the principal was using the school as a guise for running a monastery. However, the school's curriculum resembled that of an ordinary school, focusing on academic and cultural subjects, as evident from the class schedule. The campus and teaching facilities were familiar to other schools.
It was clear that Ragya School was an innovative experiment in modern education reform, initiated by Principal Jigme Gyaltsen. To label it a monastery undermines the significance of this effort. The school’s finances were always much tighter than the nearby Ragya Monastery. During its early years, the school’s steward often borrowed food from the monastery due to financial difficulties, which sometimes left the school unable to provide adequate food for the teachers.
As the school expanded, financial challenges persisted, repeatedly pushing it into crises. The cheese factory, once a source of revenue, struggled with export issues, cutting off its contributions to the school. In response, the school sought alternative solutions. Around 2012, it established Chakgen Laoye Cultural Leisure Park, an attempt to boost the school’s finances through the restaurant business, though the impact seemed limited. Ultimately, while lay teachers received meager salaries to support their families, monk teachers relied entirely on family support, with the school only covering their meals and accommodation.
When I worked at the school, I once mentioned my plans to go abroad and write about the school. The response was cautious. They advised against it, fearing that any association with foreign connections could be used as a pretext to shut down the school. "They’ve long wanted to close our school," they said. "They’re just looking for an excuse." For years, I refrained from discussing my experiences at the school in public, even though its philosophy, unique circumstances, and precarious situation were so remarkable and precious.
Abroad, I often heard people searching for places to learn Tibetan. Occasionally, when I met Tibetans overseas, I shared that I had worked at a school in Tibet. I told them I stand with Tibet, but they seemed unsure what that meant. With thousands of schools in Tibet, they don’t understand how special where I had worked. Only a few grasped how invaluable this school was in the Tibet and how it profoundly influenced even an outsider like me.
Rumors of the school’s closure circulated months before it happened. Teachers began discussing it but kept it from the students. At the slightest hint of trouble, they would burn incense, consult oracles, and chant prayers, hoping the school would survive the ordeal. In the years after I left, the lower school (middle school) had almost no student, and word spread that future admissions would cease. It is said that, the existing students would graduate, and the high schoolers would be redirected to public vocational schools. Ragya school could still offer short-term vocational training programs, such as driving and baking courses.
In the months leading to its closure, a group arrived at the school, requesting every teacher to draft proposals for improving their disciplines to make them more standardized. This prompted a tense flurry of activity among the staff, who worked to refine their proposals, hoping to impress the inspection team and keep the school open. However, the group stayed only a few days and left, seemingly skeptical about the school’s ability to meet their expectations. Few knew what had transpired behind the scenes.
Teacher T, however, remained optimistic. They said, “Nothing is set in stone. Maybe the school will still reopen in September?” Yet, in the years following my departure, the school faced immense pressure, or I can say internal crisis. They start unable to secure quality teachers or retain students. After salaries stopped, numerous teachers resigned, and teaching quality declined. Besides government restrictions on enrollment, many students chose to drop out themselves. The school’s situation deteriorated, but everyone continued to cling desperately to a myth.
The closure of the school is undoubtedly sorrowful, but its internal crises made continued operation increasingly untenable. Perhaps it’s better to embrace change and allow the school to exist in another form—akin to a rebirth (or reincarnation). I recall when my Ragya friends asked me to provide tech support after I moved abroad. Even then, they echoed the sentiment: the school may find a different way to continue to exist.
The news of the closure finally reached Teacher L, who had taught Chinese language for four years. She only realized the school was shutting down when she saw students, draped in monks’ robes and khatas, covering their faces as they cried and walked out of the school gates. A Buddhism practitioner herself, she had remained detached, unaware of the school’s developments, and was not even in the teachers' group chat, as she couldn’t read Tibetan.
08 The Last Lesson
The final lesson at Ragya School didn’t end with anyone writing "Vive la France! " (Long live France) on the blackboard. The graduates learned about the school’s closure during their graduation ceremony. Dressed in green sashes, they listened as their teachers offered words of encouragement for their futures, bowing their heads and wiping away tears. For the first-year and second-year students, there would be no graduation ceremony at Ragya School anymore. After the graduates left, these students were gathered together and informed: “The school is closing. Today, you’re graduating too.”
At past graduation ceremonies, students would walk out of the school with khatas in hand, tying them to the school gate as a gesture of gratitude and blessings for their alma mater. This time, however, the students wept uncontrollably, using their khatas and monks' robes to wipe their tears. Words failed to convey the emotions in their hearts. They tied the khatas to the school gate, expressing their highest respect and deepest reluctance to part.
In a video, I saw a monk teacher standing on the stage where I once watched them hold weekly assemblies and punish students. Below him, the students, draped in green sashes, knelt before him, bowing and sobbing uncontrollably. On WeChat, beneath the video of the students crying, the comments were all in Chinese, filled with regret, pleas, sorrow, and long strings of crying emojis. There wasn’t a single comment in Tibetan. Any comment in Tibetan simply couldn’t be posted.
Now, they no longer have the right to express their grief in their mother tongue.
County officials began enforcing stability measures among locals, warning locals not to share news about the school’s closure or videos of students crying. Aside from a few scattered videos on WeChat, platforms like Xiaohongshu and Weibo stopped displaying content related to Ragya School. Monks who shared public articles were summoned to the police station and interrogated: Why did you share it? Are you dissatisfied with government policies? Some were even coerced into signing pledges with red finger prints, promising not to make statements that contradicted national policy.
The principal’s notice stated that after the school’s closure, both students and teachers could transfer to a public vocational high school. However, very few actually willing to go to this school local in the capital of Golog Prefecture. The reason was simple: the students came from Tibetan regions across five provinces, traveling all the way to Ragya to study Tibetan language and traditional culture. If they have to go to a public school, there was no reason to go as far as Golog.
Reactions varied. An Aja I know, who lives in Ragya, told me she couldn’t sleep at night. "Ragya has nothing but this school," she said. "Without the school, we have nothing." Her sister came from another county to visit her, and they spent sleepless nights talking about the school. "Our Tibetan people’s soul is gone," she said. Her son told me, "All of Ragya is weeping. All of Golog is weeping. All of Tibet is weeping."
An uncle living in Xining remarked bitterly, "Ten years ago, we Tibetans would have revolted. Now, what can we do? We can’t even cry loudly, fearing others will hear us. It’s unbearable."
A teacher posted a statement written in Tibetan on WeChat public platform, but it was soon deleted:
I am providing this general response to everyone.
Hello, since last night, I’ve been inundated with calls and messages from everywhere. Taking so many calls, you can’t hold but break down into tears. I’ve been asked about what happened at the school, and so on. Many people said the faculty in school couldn’t sleep last night.
The fact is, the Jigme Gyaltsen Nationalities Vocational School we established in Golog has been ordered to shut down, as per a directive from the Qinghai Provincial Committee.
On July 12, our Principal Jigme Gyaltsen explained the situation to all the teachers, and all the faculty and students were shocked. Tears streamed down the faces of students everywhere in campus. He said, “We have always been paying close attention to the overall direction of the country, and this decision aligns with national policy. In the future, we will continue to move forward along this same path. Students should keep striving to learn and never lose sight of their life goals.” He also offered plenty of advice on how to seize every opportunity in life.
Today, we bid farewell to all the students. Faces are drenched in tears. Watching students cry is an unbearable pain. Everything is a result of cause and effect; it is irreversible. Beyond holding firm to the universal rules, I have nothing more to say.
In short, this is the situation. Please refrain from asking us further questions about this matter. These days, I truly don’t feel like saying much more. Further details will be announced later.
Many people went to see the principal. Upon meeting him, they would burst into tears, unable to utter a word. Many others called him; as soon as the call connected, they cried silently on the other end. The principal would not hang up, allowing them to cry until they done. He sighed and said, “What else you can do if you keep crying?”
As a spiritual practitioner, his equanimity left us astonished. He posted on his social media:
“Impermanent things are never eternal. The world is ever-changing, following the inevitable law of impermanence. We believe in rebirth, and educating across lifetimes is what truly matters. Why not pray for education in the next life? If death is irreversible, what good does crying do? Therefore, it’s better to pray for a perfect body in the next life. Please, do not grieve; instead, take responsibility for your future.”
Anger, protest, and speaking out seem only possible when one believes they can make a difference. The Ragya people today appear devoid of the will to express their suffering. Stripped of their ability to voice anger in their mother tongue, the Tibetans are left with nothing but tears of grief.
Clouds obscure the moon, and today’s misfortune feels like an endless dark night. Even the pain of death might not compare to what has happened today. One commentator remarked that this school was seen as the pride and shining beacon of the Tibetan people—a great star of society. Without it, we won’t fully grasp how much our language and culture are fading away.
On June 18, 2024, just a month before Ragya School was shut down, Xi Jinping visited Golog Xining Ethnic School in Xining, Qinghai Province, emphasizing the need to foster a “sense of shared identity within the Chinese nation.” This is a full-time boarding public school built with aid from Shanghai. Its students are primarily children of nomadic families from Golog Prefecture. The school is located in Xining, the provincial capital of Qinghai, a nine-hour drive from Golog Prefecture.
Most students are far from their homes and parents, receiving standardized education taught entirely in Mandarin. A friend of mine has a child enrolled there. Although most of the students at this school are Tibetan, there is not a single Tibetan language class offered in its middle or high school curriculum.
After leaving Tibet and moving abroad, I finally had the chance to delve into the history of this land.
In 1958, the People’s Liberation Army entered the Amdo Tibet, Golog , shelling the main hall of Ragya Monastery, the shrines, and the palace where the Dalai Lama had stayed, destroying the Kangyur scriptures. In 1966, during the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards obliterated all religious remnants of Ragya Monastery. According to the Tibet Times, the great purge left no single thangka behind at Ragya Monastery. The Red Guards even used woodblocks to print scriptures, such as firewood, to boil tea, forcing the people of Ragya to drink the tea.
In 1985, Wang Lixiong rafted along the Yellow River alone, landing at the Ragya Bend, where he saw the majestic "Anye Chengo" sacred mountain spreading its wings and the Ragya Monastery at its foot. At that time, there was no school in Ragya. The monastery had many ruins left from the PLA shelling in 1958 and the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution. In the past, Ragya Monastery was the largest Gelug monastery in the Yellow River basin, home to thousands of monks.
In March 2009, 27-year-old monk Tashi Sangpo from Ragya Monastery was found to have pamphlets and materials related to Tibet issues in his residence. He was subsequently taken to the Ragya police station. Unable to bear the torture and questioning by military police, he escaped from the station and jumped into the Yellow River in front of the monastery to take his own life. The Ragya people never found Tashi Sangpo’s body in the Yellow River. Enraged, Tibetans surrounded the local police station. The authorities deployed armed police to suppress the incident, and eight laypeople and monks were sentenced.6 March 10th is Tibetan Uprising Day, a time when protests erupt across Tibetan areas and military and police controls are intensified. It is also when the ice and snow begin to thaw. How piercingly cold must the Yellow River water have been at that time?◼︎
Contact at author’s X: gingerduan
This is the second half of the article. I have published the frist half of the article: School’s history. I completed the English translation myself with the assistance of chatGPT. I am not a professional scholar of Tibetan culture, so if you are not satisfied with my translation, don't hesitate to contact me to help me improve it. Gachi che (Thank you!) :P
https://freetibet.org/latest/teacher-is-arrested-after-her-school-was-forcibly-closed/
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/tibet/students-08272021182339.html
https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/yataibaodao/shaoshuminzu/dz-02112015143751.html
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/02/china-un-experts-alarmed-separation-1-million-tibetan-children-families-and
https://www.voachinese.com/a/tibetan-girl-died-while-in-chinese-police-custody-20240125/7456757.html
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/tibet/teacher-expelled-04172024160617.html
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