DHARAMSHALA: Students from several Tibetan nomad schools in Dzoegey, Ngaba region of eastern Tibet, raised slogans and strongly opposed a Chinese education official’s call for changing the medium of instruction in the Tibetan nomad schools from Tibetan to Chinese.

The protest took place on 29 October during a workshop organised by the  regional Chinese education board to increase Chinese authorities’ educational intervention in the Tibetan school system.

Over 130 students from Tibetan schools in Barkham, Chuchen, Sungchu, Ngaba, Dzoege, Khyungchu and Dzamthang in Ngaba Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (incorporated into China’s Sichuan Province) were attending the workshop.

Zhang Tianke, head of the Ngaba Education Board, in his concluding remarks of the workshop, have encouraged Tibetan students to focus more on the Chinese language to avail better opportunities in life. He have suggested changing the medium of instruction in the Tibetan nomad schools to Chinese from Tibetan.

He had explained that studying the Chinese language is key to admission in reputed universities, and discouraged students from pursuing the Tibetan language as the scope for livelihood through study of the Tibetan language is limited.

Tibetan students present at the workshop protested the Chinese official’s statement and called his suggestions as discrimination toward the Tibetan language. They raised slogans demanding equal opportunities in education through the study of Tibetan language and called for equal democratic rights of all ethnicities.

News of the protests later went viral on Chinese social media sites. A Tibetan student who took part in the protest wrote on an online site stating that, “the Chinese official’s statement is disconnected from the ground realities in Tibet and goes against the basic minority rights enshrined in the Chinese constitution.”

The Tibetan students were joined in the protest by the local Tibetan public.