Human Rights Watch: China uses preschools to assimilate Tibetan children

A security guard at a Tibetan preschool. Photo: Human Rights Watch.

On 4 May 2026, Human Rights Watch (HRW) published the report “Start with the Youngest Children”: China’s Use of Preschools to “Integrate” Tibetans”. The 72-page document describes how Beijing has turned preschools into an instrument for severing Tibetan children — some as young as three — from their mother tongue, culture and religion. According to HRW, the policy represents a “near-final step” in a decades-long process of systematically displacing Tibetan as a medium of instruction.

The 2021 Harmonization Plan

At the heart of the policy lies the Children’s Speech Harmonization Plan, issued by China’s Ministry of Education in July 2021. The plan requires every preschool in the country — including those in ethnic minority areas — to use Standard Mandarin exclusively for childcare, upbringing and instruction. In November 2024, the new Preschool Education Law enshrined Chinese as the “basic language” of early childhood education. The Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, in force since 2026, even threatens legal sanctions against anyone who obstructs citizens from learning or using Standard Chinese.

A language that disappears within weeks

HRW documents that Tibetan children often stop speaking Tibetan within weeks of enrolling in a Chinese-medium preschool. One mother is quoted about her five-year-old daughter: nine months after starting preschool, the child insisted that “she can only speak Chinese, that she comes from Xining… that she is Chinese and not Tibetan.” Another parent wrote on social media: “After just one month in kindergarten my child basically no longer speaks Tibetan… I’m really heartbroken.”

The figures bear this out. Preschool enrolment in the Tibet Autonomous Region exceeded 91 percent in 2024. Primary schools increasingly require proof of preschool attendance for admission, leaving parents little real choice. A 2018 study found that 76 percent of Tibetan students surveyed could no longer write their own name in Tibetan.

Indoctrination from kindergarten onwards

The Chinese-medium regime goes hand in hand with political and cultural indoctrination. Tibetan preschoolers celebrate Han Chinese holidays such as the Dragon Boat Festival as their “traditional culture,” recite Chinese classics and dress up as Red Army soldiers to act out military scenarios. At the same time, Tibetan Buddhist elements, religious festivals and local cultural expressions have been explicitly removed from the curriculum. In August 2025, prefecture-wide recitation competitions in Chinese classics were held for kindergarten children.

In addition, preschoolers are subjected to formal Chinese-language tests — in 2024, 3,478 children were tested in Ngari prefecture alone. No equivalent testing exists for Tibetan. Through “small hands holding big hands” campaigns, parents are pushed to speak Chinese at home; some schools request videos of children speaking Mandarin with their parents.

A cultural rupture within one generation

Even Chinese academics warn of the consequences. Ma Rong, one of the architects of the integration policy, acknowledged as early as 2019 that Chinese-medium teaching would “inevitably have an impact on the mother-tongue learning and traditional culture inheritance.” The Tibetan researcher Bama Amo warned that fully Chinese-medium education leads to “cultural rupture”: children who lose their mother tongue without sufficiently mastering Chinese, and who can function neither in Chinese society nor in their own community.

HRW concludes that the policy violates children’s rights to language, culture, education and family life — rights enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and in China’s own constitution. The organisation calls on Beijing to end its policy of forced assimilation and to allow Tibetan children to grow up and be educated in their own language. HRW also urges foreign governments to hold China publicly accountable for these violations.

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The full Human Rights Watch report — including all testimonies, legal analysis and recommendations — is available on the HRW website.

Read the full report at Human Rights Watch →