As March 10, 2026 approaches, the 67th anniversary of the 1959 Tibetan National Uprising. Tibet remains under one of the most comprehensive systems of political, cultural, and technological control in the world. What began decades ago as territorial consolidation has, according to United Nations experts and human rights organisations, evolved into a coordinated effort to dismantle Tibetan identity through education policy, surveillance, and religious intervention.
In February 2023, UN Special Rapporteurs issued a landmark warning that nearly one million Tibetan children were being separated from their families through a state-run residential schooling system. The experts said the programme “appears to be aimed at assimilating Tibetan children into the dominant Han culture,” noting that children as young as four years old were placed in boarding schools where Mandarin Chinese is the primary language of instruction, with Tibetan relegated to a secondary role.
By 2024, independent research showed that approximately 78 percent of Tibetan students were enrolled in boarding schools more than three times the national Chinese average of about 22 percent. Human Rights Watch and other monitors reported that so-called “bilingual education” increasingly functioned as Mandarin-only instruction, accelerating the decline of Tibetan-language literacy.
This trend deepened in 2025, when China confirmed changes to national education standards that removed Tibetan as a core subject in key assessment frameworks, including pathways linked to higher education. Tibetan educators and parents reported that students completing secondary education could no longer read or write their native language fluently.
Alongside education, surveillance expanded rapidly. By 2024-2025, Tibet had become one of China’s most intensively monitored regions, with dense networks of facial-recognition cameras, police checkpoints, and digital monitoring embedded in daily life. The U.S. State Department’s 2023 Human Rights Report cited “credible reports of arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance, and pervasive surveillance” targeting Tibetans for peaceful cultural or religious expression.
In late 2025, Tibetan writers and folk singers were detained on charges of “inciting separatism” after sharing poems and songs celebrating Tibetan landscapes and traditions. One such figure, writer Gendun Lhundrup, was released from prison but placed under continuous digital surveillance, barred from publishing or traveling effectively free in name only.
Religious control has remained central. The enforced disappearance of the 11th Panchen Lama, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, taken into custody in May 1995 at the age of six, entered its 31st year in 2026. UN experts reiterated in September 2025 that China’s refusal to disclose his whereabouts constitutes one of the world’s longest-running enforced disappearances. Beijing continues to promote a state-appointed Panchen Lama while tightening laws that require government approval for all Tibetan Buddhist reincarnations.
The UN experts warned in January 2026 that these measures education, labour transfers, religious interference, and surveillance form a single policy architecture designed to “forcibly re-engineer Tibetan cultural identity under the guise of development and poverty alleviation.”
China has rejected all such allegations. On January 23, 2026, the Chinese foreign ministry dismissed UN findings as “fabricated and politically motivated,” insisting that boarding schools, labour programmes, and religious regulations are lawful measures to improve livelihoods and ensure stability.
Yet concerns have extended beyond China’s borders. Governments and rights groups reported in 2025-2026 that Tibetan activists and journalists abroad faced online harassment and intimidation, while family members inside Tibet were pressured in retaliation evidence, they say, of expanding transnational repression.
Despite the pressure, Tibetan communities in exile continue to preserve language and culture through independent schools, digital archives, and cultural diplomacy, particularly in India, Europe, and North America. The Central Tibetan Administration has repeatedly called for international protection of linguistic and religious rights, warning that “cultural survival cannot be postponed.”
As Tibet enters the 67th year since the Uprising, international experts argue the issue is no longer merely autonomy or development, but cultural survival. The UN has urged China to allow unrestricted access to independent observers and to halt policies that separate children from families and sever religion from tradition.
Without intervention, the experts warned, the silence on the Tibetan Plateau risks becoming permanent, not through force of arms, but through the slow erosion of language, memory, and belief.
