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TIN News Update /31 December, 1996/ no of pages: 4 ISSN 1355-3313

Tibetan students at the University of Tibet came close to staging a demonstration earlier this month after the authorities announced that a history course will be taught in Chinese instead of Tibetan.

The announcement followed a decision by local authorities to close a highly successful project in three secondary schools where Tibetan children were being taught in their own language instead of through Chinese.

A long-standing requirement that all students pass an entrance examination in Tibetan is also said to have been dropped this year, and the widely respected committee in charge of implementing policies favouring the use of Tibetan Language has been downgraded to county level.

The Tibet University was partly founded in order to develop Tibetan-medium teaching, and the decision is seen by some as part of a gradual erosion by the current Chinese leadership of earlier commitments to enhancing Tibetan culture and to using Tibetan language.

The university authorities say that a course on the history of Tibet must be taught in Chinese language, even though many of the teachers and students are Tibetan. The decision is highly controversial because the course is in the Tibetan Language Department of the University, not in the Politics-History Department, where all courses are already taught mainly in Chinese.

Scores of Tibetan students and staff are reported to have gathered on the University's campus in south-eastern Lhasa on 3rd or 4th December to show support for a group of up to 30 students who had formally complained about the history course decision. The petitioners were directly affected by the proposed change in the teaching language, a University official confirmed to the SCMP. Most come from rural areas and are not fluent in Chinese.

The students were expected to march to local administrative offices in Lhasa to deliver a petition, according to one report, but university officials persuaded them to remain on the campus by promising to deal with the issue internally.

"There were ten to 20 students complaining about too many lessons being in Chinese and that the policy on teaching some history in Tibetan had changed to Chinese," confirmed an official, a Mr Liu, who did not give his full name. "The students did mention Chinese history and said that they don't have the materials both in Tibetan and Chinese," he told the Post.

University officials held a meeting with the students after the protest and promised to increase the use of Tibetan in the University, but indicated that it could take a decade to achieve this.

"The result of the meeting is that we will try to use Tibetan. Eighty per cent of students at the University are Tibetan, so it is important to provide teaching materials for them in Tibetan," he said. "It will be a long, hard process because most of our teaching materials are in Chinese. Perhaps it will take eight to ten years, but we will do our best to take the students' opinions into account," he added.

TIBETAN LANGUAGE PROJECT IN SCHOOLS CLOSED -

The Chinese authorities in Tibet gave similar undertakings on Tibetan language use in the mid-1980s, but many have not been fully implemented or are falling into disuse.

Four experimental Tibetan-medium secondary school classes, initiated by the late Panchen Lama in 1989 in three secondary schools in central Tibet, have now been dissolved or are admitting no new students. All other Tibetan children in secondary schools study in Chinese, except in some 40 special schools in Qinghai province, part of which known as Amdo by Tibetans.

The pilot project in the Tibet Autonomous Region, which included teaching physics, chemistry and mathematics in Tibetan language, was extremely popular and in 1995 its first graduates scored exceptionally high scores in their final examinations - 79.8% passed, compared to 39% of other Tibetan secondary school students, all of whom had studied in Chinese, according to a report by Tibet's Education Committee published in the winter 1995 edition of the journal "Tibet Education".

In Lhokha Middle School No.2 in southern Tibet, one of the four experimental Tibetan-medium classes, 36 out of 37 students passed their final exams.

The 103 students who were the first graduates from the pilot project even appear to have been better at Chinese than Tibetans who have studied in Chinese - 66% of the Tibetan-medium students received pass marks for their Chinese language examination, compared to 61% of other Tibetan students, who study in Chinese.

Tibetan students studying in Chinese have scored well below national averages and had been regarded as low achievers, receiving extra marks as compensation, as part of China's policy of positive discrimination towards minorities.

"The Party committee on different levels, the Government and the education department, must continuously support and respect the work of experimental teaching in Tibetan Language," said the Education Committee in its 1995 report, which called for the project to be implemented in rural areas.

The pilot project was extended for one year but when the next batch of over 300 students in the project went to take their examinations in July 1996 they were given papers which were in Chinese, not Tibetan. Most failed - only two out of 50 students from the experimental class at Lhasa Middle School No.2 passed - and parents have had to find places and funding for them to resit their final year in another school, this time in Chinese.

The pilot project has since been ended without prospect of renewal, officially because of lack of funds and lack of qualified teachers, although some 500 teachers have been trained to teach in Tibetan language classes since 1993. Instead, the authorities are setting up a new project which will provide bilingual Tibetan and Chinese education in primary schools from Year 1, to increase children's fluency in Chinese. Almost all Tibetan primary schools teach in Tibetan medium.

The ending of the pilot project appears to reflect a division in the Party leadership in Tibet, where three years ago the deputy secretary in charge of education, Tenzin, had expressed strong support for the project. It provided "conclusive evidence that nothing could replace the effect of using Tibetan language to raise the educational quality and improve the cultural level of the nationality", Tenzin told a March 1993 meeting of the Leading Committee on Tibetan Language in the Tibet Autonomous Region, which supervises language policy. "Therefore it is apparent that we should bring the function of the Tibetan language communication into full use more than ever," he said.

Quoting Lenin, Mao and Deng, he argued that Tibetan language was essential for economic development. "To enhance reform, opening up, and economic construction more than ever we must raise up the standard of the nationality's own cultural knowledge by speeding up our steps in carrying out the work in colloquial Tibetan and the written language," he told the committee, whose work he said should be expanded and enforced. He also argued that language development was necessary in order to defeat criticisms by the pro-independence movement.

In spring 1996, three years after Tenzin's speech, the Leading Committee on Tibetan Language, which had been a regional level organ, was reduced to county level, two stages lower in status according to the Chinese system. A number of senior Tibetan academics were retired from the main committee, supposedly because of old age, although some reports suggest they resigned in protest at the changes in language policy.

-UNIVERSITY FOUNDED AS "CENTRE OF TIBET CULTURE" -

The dispute over whether Tibetan history should be taught in the University in Chinese or Tibetan goes back to the original objectives of the University, which was founded in 1985.

Officially it was set up to train people - including Chinese cadres - who would advance Tibet's economic development. But at that time great stress was also laid on Tibetan cultural aspirations: "Higher education in Tibet should be oriented to maintaining and developing Tibetan culture and, in particular, teaching should be conducted in Tibetan," said the November 1988 edition of Beijing Review, listing the reasons for the founding of the University three years earlier.

These plan to open a University in Tibet and these objectives had been laid down by the Panchen Lama, said the Beijing Review in the 1988 article, referring to the Tibetan leader who championed the revival of Tibetan culture in the decade before his death in 1989, and whose succession led to a major dispute a year ago.

All except one of the university's 17 courses are now believed to be taught mainly in Chinese, and although scholars have prepared textbooks in Tibetan for primary and secondary schools, work on tertiary level textbooks has met with funding and bureaucratic difficulties. Tibetan Medicine is studied in Tibetan, but is no longer part of the University.

The previous head of the University distinguished between immediate economic aims and long-term cultural objective. "The University's priority is training people to meet Tibet's development need," said Tsewang Gyurme, a Tibetan who was president of the University until 1994, echoing frequent party justifications for the institution. "Our ultimate goal is the establishment of the centre of Tibetan culture in China, geared towards training top class research workers in Tibetan culture around the world," he added.

Tsewang Gyurme was succeeded as head of the university in 1996 by a Chinese official who reportedly does not speak Tibetan. The powerful head of Tibet's Education Commission since 1989 and a vice-President of the university, Yang Chaoji, is also Chinese.

In September 1995 when deputy secretary Tenzin attended the celebration of what was described as the 20th Anniversary of the establishment of the University, he made no mention of Tibetan language policies and referred to ideological achievements and development needs. "The University of Tibet has trained a new group of qualified revolutionary constructors", he said, according to the Tibet Daily.

Despite Tsewang Gyurme's aspirations, the university at present only does research in two areas and only one of its seven departments includes Tibetan studies.

The art department, which was earlier publicised as offering studies in Tibetan art, includes an option in Tibetan "thangka" painting, with 2 staff and usually about 5 students, but does not offer any course studying the history or theory of Tibetan art.

"The Tibet University is the only institution teaching Tibetan art in Tibet or China, and it teaches mainly technique," said Gongkar Gyatso, a Tibetan artist who taught Chinese art at the University from 1985 till he left for India in 1992. "Up till the time I left there was nowhere in China or Tibet to study the history of Tibetan art or any other art forms beside painting."

"Right now I am sure that Tibet University is not yet a centre for Tibetan culture. It really looks not much different from a Chinese university, except that the teaching standard is lower," said the artist, who is currently studying in the UK.

Gongkar, who taught his art classes at the University in Chinese, emphasised the practical problems which make it difficult to teach in Tibetan. "We had a couple of Chinese students so you couldn't do the whole lesson in Tibetan, and the other problem was that we have a lot of academic words in Chinese which we don't have in Tibetan. So it was necessary to teach in Chinese," he explained.

"If they really wish to teach entirely in Tibetan the government would really need to spend a lot of money, not only for the University, but throughout the education system, to translate a lot of books, dictionaries, and so on," he pointed out. The university's budget was cut by 20% in 1993, the year after Gongkar left, according to report by Tibet's Political Consultative Conference in May 1994.

In 1995, the University had 1,334 students, of whom about 70% were Tibetans, and a teaching and administration staff of 597 people.

TIBETAN THE "OFFICIAL LANGUAGE" -

Tibetan was declared as the official language of the TAR in July 1988 and eight months later the local congress passed the "Regulations on the Study, Use and Development of the Tibetan Language", stipulating that "most" lectures in tertiary institutions should "gradually" be in Tibetan. The regulations also said that Tibetans must speak in Tibetan at important meetings, that official documents and signboards should be written in Tibetan and Chinese, and that proficiency in Tibetan should be one of the qualifications for government employment.

Attacks on the promotion of Tibetan language were described as "leftist interference" by Wu Jinghua in March 1988, the former Party Secretary of Tibet who was himself a member of the Yi nationality. "We should seriously tackle the work of studying and using Tibetan so as to truly make it the dominant language in Tibet and to embody the Party's policy on ... autonomy for nationality regions," said Wu. He was sacked about one month later, reportedly for being a "right deviationist".

Popular opinion has since changed in Tibet and it is now widely felt that future employment is impossible without fluent Chinese, leading to fierce competition amongst Tibetan couples to get their children among the top 1,600 children aged 12 or 13 who are selected each year to attend secondary schools in China. "The change in Tibetans' attitude towards their children's [education] has been remarkable and positive," said Liu Boqing, a Chinese official with the Tibet Education Commission, according to Xinhua on 18th July 1996. "Tibetans now do whatever they can to send their children to inland city schools," added Xinhua, a view that is confirmed by local reports.

Last month there were unconfirmed rumours in Lhasa that the Tibetan government may gradually phase out the acceptance of Tibetan language degrees from the university as valid qualifications for government positions.

Tibetan language is now coming under added pressure because it is seen by some leaders as the proper target of both the current campaign against the pro-independence movement and the nationwide campaign for advancing "spiritual civilisation", which is dedicated to eradicating traditional beliefs.

"Since people who know the language are mostly likely to be involved in [nationalist] activity, the government thinks of language in a political sense ... they think that Tibetan language was a tool to maintain the feudal-slave system," explained the controversial Tibetan educationalist, Palden Nyima, in a paper published in March 1995 for the Northwest Teacher Training School in Lanzhou, Gansu province. The paper predicted the views which are now re-emerging among some officials.

"Also many people think that Tibetan is just a language for Buddhism. Thus, it is associated with superstition. Language and religion look like the same thing and the government does not want to promote Tibetan language," Palden Nyima wrote, in terms similar to the current "spiritual civilisation" drive.

In October 1995 Party leaders in the Tibet Autonomous Region are said to have circulated a document arguing that separatism was partly caused by schools teaching too much religion, which was in turn related to use of Tibetan language, according to an unconfirmed report.

In December 1988 about 300 students from Tibet University held a demonstration calling for more cultural and religious freedom, and for greater use of the Tibetan language in education and government. The protestors avoided pro-independence slogans and were allowed to complete their march without incident.

"Without educated people in all fields, expressing themselves in their own language, Tibetans are in danger of being assimilated. We have reached a crucial point," one leading Tibetan intellectual told the SCMP in 1992, speaking off the record. "All hope in our future, all protection of our heritage depends on this," he said.