The Chinese government is mandating the use of Mandarin in kindergartens in an effort to force Tibetans to assimilate, Human Rights Watch said in a report released on Monday.
According to the report, a 2021 Ministry of Education directive — the Children’s Speech Harmonization plan — mandates the use of standard Mandarin Chinese for all instruction prior to the first grade in ethnic minority areas. The policy targets a childhood development stage that is critical for language acquisition and the formation of personal identity, Human Rights Watch said in a press release.
“The Chinese government, by targeting kindergarteners, is accelerating its campaign to deprive Tibetan children of their mother tongue and their culture and identity,” said Maya Wang, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “This policy is not about education quality, but about forcibly assimilating Tibetans at an early age into a Han-centric national identity.”
The report is based on an analysis of Chinese laws and policy documents, in addition to interviews with Tibetans and scholars who have direct knowledge of recent conditions in Tibetan areas.
Human Rights Watch, a leading international watchdog, found that many Tibetan children emerge from preschool unable or unwilling to speak Tibetan, even with family members. It is a trend that has been playing out for years across ethnic minority regions in China, where the government has gradually tightened its grip over language use in schools.
In a recent interview with Domino Theory, anthropologist Gerald Roche, who spent years researching language suppression in Tibetan areas, said that restricting language in places where children are separate from their parents has been a central part of the Chinese government’s strategy.
“The Chinese state is creating those conditions deliberately,” Roche said. “They’ve got the kindergartens where the kids are all together being exposed to dominant languages. They’ve got the boarding school system where kids are away from their families. So they’re really putting a wedge between children and their families and the language that connects them.”
According to Human Rights Watch, the 2021 Harmonization plan was the culmination of a decades-long policy strategy aimed at reducing mother-tongue education for minorities in China.
“All ethnic groups must teach children to develop a sense of belonging to the Chinese nation, so they do not only identify with their own ethnicity, but first and foremost recognize themselves as part of the Chinese nation,” Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a speech in September 2014.
While exclusively Mandarin instructions had already been implemented in primary and secondary schools, kindergartens were long the last setting where Tibetan could still be used as a main language of instruction.
The report says that in 2021, as part of its Harmonization plan — which some outlets have translated as the “Children Speak in Unison” plan — China’s Education Ministry ordered kindergartens in minority areas to use Mandarin for all teaching and care activities. At the same time, official references to “bilingual education” disappeared from policy documents.
In March 2026, the Chinese government approved a new ethnic unity law that introduces new penalties for anyone deemed to “obstruct” the learning and use of Mandarin Chinese.
While kindergarten education is not compulsory in China, Human Rights Watch found that Tibetan primary schools have increasingly been requiring proof of kindergarten attendance for enrollment, in effect requiring Tibetan parents to send their children to Chinese-language school.
“Language loss on the scale taking place in Tibet is not accidental — it is Chinese government policy,” Wang said. “Unless China’s practices change, an entire generation of Tibetan children will grow up cut off from their own language, culture and heritage.”
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