Adrian Zenz

Current studies on Tibetan education in China have predominantly focused on primary and secondary education. Research on Tibetan tertiary education has been sparse by comparison. However, there have been important developments in Tibetan higher education during the past two decades that warrant closer examination. The present study seeks to provide a brief descriptive and primarily quantitative overview of the growth and diversification of Tibetan-medium tertiary degree programs across most major Tibetan regions in China during the past decade. Despite various positive developments, Tibetan higher education continues to face an uncertain future.

In the context of the ending of China's socialist job assignment system for graduates from vocational and tertiary institutions, the question of graduate employment has been a major issue – especially in minority regions. With the rapid growth of tertiary-level Tibetan-medium educational programmes and related graduate numbers first pointed out in Zenz (2013), the question of adequate employment opportunities is driving a wedge between the more conservative and the more pragmatic sections of the Tibetan community. The relative lack of secure and well-remunerated private enterprise jobs in much of China's West reinforces the strong dependence on state-related employment. This chapter examines recent increases in the number of graduates from tertiary Tibetan-medium degree programmes and compares them with corresponding figures for: a) graduate numbers for all degrees, and b) advertised government positions that require either Tibetan-medium degrees or Tibetan language skills. Public employment advertisements that stipulate Tibetan-medium degrees are an essential source of employment for Tibetan-medium graduates, because recruitment outcomes show that they are otherwise rarely able to successfully compete with Chinese-medium educated Tibetans or Han when seeking government jobs. However, the data from recent years reveals a severe discrepancy between Tibetan-medium graduate numbers and related advertised jobs. The rapid growth of Tibetan-medium education provision was driven by the creation of new Tibetan-medium degree programmes. This was designed to improve the employment prospects of graduates from Tibetan-medium tertiary education. However, public recruitment practices have failed to draw on this new diversity.

In 'Tibetanness' Under Threat?, Adrian Zenz pioneers an analysis of significant recent developments in Qinghai's Tibetan education system. Presently, Tibetan students can receive native language education from primary to tertiary levels, while university minority departments offer Tibetan-medium majors from computer science to secretarial studies.

However, positive developments are threatened by the dire career prospects of Tibetan-medium graduates. Tibetans view marketisation as the greatest threat to ethnocultural survival, with their young generation being lured into a Chinese education by superior employment prospects. But Zenz questions the easy equation of Tibetan education as 'unselfish' ethnic preservation versus the Chinese route as egocentric careerism, arguing that the creative educational strategies of Tibetans in the Chinese education system are important for exploring and expressing new forms of 'Tibetanness' in modern China.

REVIEW:
'not many works carry the potential of injecting fresh perspectives into the polarized understandings of development in Tibet as either domination/subjugation or liberation/progress. Adrian Zenz offers this potential in his book (...). With a focus on the ever-sensitive subject of education, the book strikes a nuanced balance between the agency–structure dualism of Han Chinese dominance versus Tibetan-led initiatives that subvert or counter this dominance. In particular, it offers a rare insight into the dynamics of minority education that will unsettle the dominant view that Tibetan-medium education has been eroded since the “golden years” of Tibetanization in the 1980s.(...) Overall, the value of his work is immense for our understanding of contemporary Tibet, minority nationality policy in China, and the anthropology of education more generally.'
Andrew M. Fischer, The China Quarterly, 219 (2014)

After recruiting a hundred or more thousand police forces, installing massive surveillance systems, and interning vast numbers of predominantly Turkic minority population members, many have been wondering about Beijing’s next step in its so-called “war on Terror” in Xinjiang. Since the second half of 2018, limited but apparently growing numbers of detainees have been released into different forms of forced labor. In this report it is argued based on government documents that the state’s long-term stability maintenance strategy in Xinjiang is predicated upon a perverse and extremely intrusive combination of forced or at least involuntary training and labor, intergenerational separation and social control over family units. Much of this is being implemented under the heading and guise of “poverty alleviation”. ---- Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 12 --- Access at https://www.jpolrisk.com/beyond-the-camps-beijings-long-term-scheme-of-coercive-labor-poverty-alleviation-and-social-control-in-xinjiang/

More than any other government document pertaining to Beijing’s extralegal campaign of mass internment in Xinjiang, the Karakax List lays bare the ideological and administrative micromechanics of a system of targeted cultural genocide that arguably rivals any similar attempt in the history of humanity. Driven by a deeply religio-phobic worldview, Beijing has embarked on a project that, ideologically, isn’t far from a medieval witch-hunt, yet is being executed with administrative perfectionism and iron discipline. Being distrustful of the true intentions of its minority citizens, the state has established a system of governance that fully substitutes trust with control. That, however, is also set to become its greatest long-term liability. Xinjiang’s mechanisms of governance are both labor-intensive and predicated upon highly unequal power structures that often run along and increase ethnic fault lines. The long-term ramifications of this arrangement for social stability and ethnic relations are impossible to predict.

Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 8, No. 2
https://www.jpolrisk.com/karakax/

A sweeping crackdown starting in late 2016 transformed Xinjiang into a draconian police state. While state control over reproduction has long been a common part of the birth control regime in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the situation in Xinjiang has become especially severe following a policy of mass internment initiated in early 2017 by officials of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

In 2019, a growing number of witnesses testified to the fact that Xinjiang authorities were administering unknown drugs and injections to women in detention, forcibly implanting intrauterine contraceptive devices (IUDs) prior to internment, coercing women to accept surgical sterilization, and using internment as punishment for birth control violations.

For the first time, the veracity and scale of these anecdotal accounts can be confirmed through a systematic analysis of government documents. Key findings include:

Natural population growth in Xinjiang’s minority regions declined dramatically since 2017. Growth rates fell by 84 percent in the two largest Uyghur prefectures between 2015 and 2018, and declined further in several minority regions in 2019. For 2020, one Uyghur region set a near-zero birth rate target of 1.05 per mille.

Government documents bluntly mandate that birth control violations are punishable by extrajudicial internment.

Documents reveal a targeted campaign of promoting “free” birth prevention surgeries and services in southern Xinjiang’s rural minority regions starting in 2019, with two counties publishing targets for sterilizing up to 34 percent of all rural females of reproductive age in 2019 alone. This project had sufficient funding for performing hundreds of thousands of tubal ligation sterilization procedures in 2019 and 2020, with at least one region receiving additional central government funding.
By 2019, Xinjiang planned to subject at least 80 percent of women of childbearing age in the rural southern four minority prefectures to intrusive birth prevention surgeries (IUDs or sterilizations). In 2018, 80 percent of all net added IUD placements in China (calculated as placements minus removals) were performed in Xinjiang (the region only makes up 1.8 percent of the nation’s population).

Between 2015 and 2018, about 860,000 ethnic Han residents left Xinjiang, while up to 2 million new residents were added to Xinjiang’s Han majority regions. These figures raise concerns that Beijing is doubling down on a policy of Han settler colonialism.

These findings provide the strongest evidence yet that Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang meet one of the genocide criteria cited in the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, namely that of Section D of Article II: “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the [targeted] group” (United Nations, December 9, 1948).

Since spring 2017, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in
China has witnessed the emergence of an unprecedented reeducation
campaign. According to media and informant reports,
untold thousands of Uyghurs and other Muslims have been and
are being detained in clandestine political re-education facilities,
with major implications for society, local economies and ethnic
relations. Considering that the Chinese state is currently denying
the very existence of these facilities, this paper investigates
publicly available evidence from official sources, including
government websites, media reports and other Chinese internet
sources. First, it briefly charts the history and present context of
political re-education. Second, it looks at the recent evolution of
re-education in Xinjiang in the context of ‘de-extremification’
work. Finally, it evaluates detailed empirical evidence pertaining
to the present re-education drive. With Xinjiang as the ‘core hub’
of the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing appears determined to
pursue a definitive solution to the Uyghur question.

Over the last year, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) Party Secretary Chen Quanguo (陈全国) has dramatically increased the police presence in Xinjiang by advertising over 90,000 new police and security-related positions. This soldier-turned-politician is little known outside of China, but within China he has gained a reputation as an ethnic policy innovator, pioneering a range of new methods for securing Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule over Uyghurs, Tibetans and other ethnic minorities in western China. (published via China Brief, Jamestown Foundation)

Based on an entirely unexplored source of data, this paper analyses the evolution of Tibetan representation and preferentiality within public employment recruitment across all Tibetan areas from 2007 to 2015. While recruitment collapsed after the end of the job placement system (fenpei) in the early to mid-2000s, there was a strong increase in public employment recruitment from 2011 onwards. Tibetans were underrepresented within this increase, although not severely, and various implicit practices of preferentiality bolstered such representation, with distinct variations across regions and time. The combination reasserted the predominant role of the state as employer of educated millennials in Tibetan areas to the extent of re-introducing employment guarantees. We refer to this as the innovation of a neo-fenpei system. This new system is most clearly observed in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) from 2011 to 2016, although it appears to have been abandoned in 2017. One effect of neo-fenpei, in contrast to its predecessor, is that it accentuates university education as a driver of differentiation within emerging urban employment. The evolution of these recruitment practices reflects the complex tensions in Tibetan areas regarding the overarching goal of security and social stability (weiwen) emphasized by the Xi–Li administration, which has maintained systems of minority preferentiality but in a manner that enhances assimilationist trends rather than minority group empowerment.

根据一组完全没有被研究过的原始数据, 本文分析了 2007 年至 2015 年之间, 整个藏族地区公职人员招聘中藏族的代表比例和优待的演变。虽然在 2000 年代早中期工作分配制度结束后, 招聘一度瓦解, 2011 年以后公职人员招聘又有强劲增长。藏人在这波增长中没有被充分代表, 但是并不严重。各种隐性的优待招聘实践还增加了这种代表比例, 在不同的地区和时间有明显的区别。这种组合重申了国家在受教育的千禧一代的就业中的主导地位, 以至于到了重新引入就业保障的地步。我们把此种创新称为新分配制度, 这种情形在西藏自治区最为明显。相对于它的前身, 新分配的一个效应就是它强调了大学教育在新兴城市就业中作为划分的驱动因素。这些招聘实践的演变显示了习李政府强调的安全和维稳的总体目标在藏族地区的复杂的张力 ——它虽然保持了少数民族优待的制度, 却在某种意义上强化了藏族的被同化而不是少数民族的自主性。

Analysis of security and police force recruitment since 2006, but especially as a response to the 2009 uprisings. China's security strategy in Xinjiang evolved over four stages and resulted in a massive spike in informal police force recruitment under Xi Jinping.

China's minority education in general – and Tibetan education in particular – is often viewed as a hegemonic tool designed to assimilate minorities, seeking to integrate them into Han culture and society, while at the same time marginalising them through discourses of cultural inferiority and backwardness. The aim of this article is to go beyond seemingly straightforward portrayals of minority education (and especially of Tibetan education) as a device for sinicisation by analysing the historically situated, complex and often contradictory dynamics of how it has facilitated the simultaneous expression and suppression of different aspects of Tibetan 'culture' and language. Through an evaluation of the development of Tibetan-medium education in Qinghai province, it is demonstrated that minorities are not just passive victims at the hand of a dominant state, but strate-gising agents who can creatively explore and expand the political and cultural space within which they operate.