For centuries, language has shaped Tibetans’ worldview, religion, traditions and every part of their daily lives. Starting this year, Tibetan is to be reduced to an elective subject in China’s national university entrance exams. Instead of a language requirement all Tibetan students must fulfill, it has become optional, like biology and geography. In politics, elective subjects appear synonymous with reform, or a path to new opportunities. In reality, it is like surreptitiously removing the last lamp from a home.
The Chinese authorities in Tibet said that such changes advance unity, improve career prospects, provide fairer education and enable students to be successful. Such statements might sound coherent in Mandarin, but only because they are copied from the educational system in Beijing and pasted onto the one in Lhasa.
The claims hinge on the premise that language is a tool, not an identity. They do not take into account that for a Tibetan child, Tibetan is more than a means of communication; it is an order of their world, a voice of their ancestors, a tune of their religion and a breath of the suppressed.
Language is an extension of culture. If education departments can unilaterally decide to remove Tibetan from national exams and make it an elective subject, that would not only upend the school system, but the conditions under which an entire community survives.
When Tibetan is no longer a prerequisite for higher education, schools would gradually cut Tibetan classes, parents would neglect teaching Tibetan and students would treat it as a useless subject. These are the first signs of the death of a language, not by forcibly erasing it, but by streamlining its marginalization so that it atrophies because it is no longer practical.
While the authorities insist that this is not abolition, the vitality of a language has never been about its existence, but about its necessity. The moment Tibetan is excluded as a core subject, its importance is diminished.
In turn, an unimportant language would vanish in public spaces, bit by bit, until bulletins in school hallways no longer include messages in Tibetan, as no one cares.
Even more alarmingly, these policies are presented with flowery slogans such as “more language options” and “modern education reform.” Unified exam subjects might sound like a testament to the system’s equality, but it is stripping the legal basis of these differences in the name of unity.
The entrance exam system is not fair competition; it is preset with preferences and punishments, as elective languages do not affect the weighted score of languages in the core subjects, and so students are inclined to ditch Tibetan, a language that does not give them an advantage in education.
Academic pressure would force parents to make “rational decisions.” Tibetan would be consigned to the dark corners of afterschool lessons, and in the long term, it would resemble a souvenir, something you possess, but which serves no useful purpose.
The Chinese government has long boasted about its efforts to protect ethnic languages and cultures. Its long list of achievements includes the number of Tibetan teachers, universities with Tibetan language departments and the policies that increase the number of Tibetan lessons. While true, the figures cannot speak on their own. The fate of a language is not determined by the number of mentions in a policy paper, but by its availability in daily life and our thinking.
Most importantly, the narrative surrounding these language policies are entirely dictated from the top down. Do Tibetans enjoy meaningful participation in deciding the fate of the Tibetan language? Are they able to propose different language policies without being labeled a separatist?
Claims that all ethnic groups enjoy fair access to education ignore the deep-rooted asymmetrical power balance. In China, Mandarin is the language of the country, of institutions, of power; Tibetan is not. A test paper purporting to share the same starting line perpetrates the imbalance of power on the tracks.
Language policies are never neutral; they are a tool to encode power and culture. In effect, the decision to switch Tibetan from a core subject to an elective subject restricts Tibetan’s political influence; it lowers the language’s status and diminishes Tibet’s national character, as language is a praxis of our identity, a way for an ethnic group to express themselves.
When a native language is no longer associated with success and social mobility, when children are taught to dream of their future in other people’s languages, as time goes on, the ethnic group would forget how it used to speak, to remember and to cry.
The new examination plans do not just deplatform the Tibetan language; they remove a way of conceiving the world. What we see in news briefings is not educational fairness, but a ploy to desert a language in a “civilized” manner. China is discreetly reducing the language of an ethnic group to an optional box to be ticked, under the name of a reformed system, the guise of rationality, and the excuse of universality of Mandarin, mathematics and English.
Our mother tongue should never be a mere option. It is not something we learn; it is the milieu in which we are born.
Liu Che-ting is a writer.
Translated by Cayce Pan
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