At a symposium in Beijing on the fringes of the 50th session of the UN Human Rights Council, Chinese experts reported on progress in education in ethnic minority areas. The Tibet Autonomous Region is a particularly good example of how higher quality education can help raise living standards.
Students have classes at an elementary school in Taxkorgan Tajik Autonomous County in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. (Photo taken on Feb. 26, Xinhua)
In order to comprehensively protect people’s rights to education and to support local development, a special culture and education policy for the 56 ethnic groups in China has been introduced, experts said at a recent symposium in Beijing. The “International Symposium on Education Development and Rights Protection in Ethnic Minority Areas in China” was held on Saturday and co-organized by the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and the Chinese Society for Human Rights Studies organized. The symposium took place on the sidelines of the 50th session of the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council.
The participating experts said that ethnic minority areas such as the Tibet Autonomous Region have made rapid progress thanks to the central government’s strong support and promotion of local socio-economic development, education and culture. Alongside this progress, local culture and languages have also been protected.
In Tibet, 16 magazines, 12 newspapers and more than 7,600 books with about 44 million copies have been published in Tibetan by December, said Wang Yanzhong, director of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of CASS.
From 2012 to 2021, the central government invested around 215 billion yuan (about 30.75 billion euros) in the education sector in Tibet. A 15-year public education system has been available to the people there since 2012, which means that children from kindergarten to high school can be taught free of charge. This type of development is even ahead of other regions in China, and the Tibetan student financial aid system now covers all levels of education, Wang said.
The level of education and the length of schooling for the people in Tibet have also improved greatly as a result. For example, the number of people with college degrees per 100,000 people in the region has doubled from 5,507 per 100,000 in 2010 to 11,019 per 100,000 in 2020.
The average school years for those who have only recently entered the workforce is 13.1 years, closer to the national average. As a result, Tibet now has better qualified human resources for its own development, he stressed.
He also touched on the importance of boarding schools, which would play a key role in securing the right to education – particularly for children from poor rural areas. Students and families in these areas could voluntarily take advantage of boarding schools in larger cities. Such facilities enable children living in remote areas to access a better standard of education.
All compulsory education is offered free of charge at these schools, said Chang An, a professor at Northwest University of Political Science and Law. He added that many young people would return to their hometowns after graduating, both to pass on cultural heritage and to promote local development on the other. For this reason, these boarding schools would not harm the establishment and development of “grassroots” communities in areas where ethnic minorities live, he made clear.
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