(Not) Returning Tibet: Aid Politics, Citizenship Education and Identity Construction among Inland Tibet Class Graduates

• In Event: Citizenship and democratic education in conflict and post-conflict contexts

Proposal

My ethnographic inquiry on identity construction of Han and Tibetan students in state-run Chinese boarding schools starts with two life stories. Droma (pseudonym), a Tibetan girl who has been my key informant since 2011, left her village in a remote area of Tibet Autonomous Region (thereafter Tibet) at a very young age of 12, completed seven-year secondary education at a first-tier school in a coastal city, obtained Bachelor’s Degree in a key-point university in Beijing, and later returned to work as a public servant (gongwuyuan, 公务员) in Tibet. Bai Xue, a Han (the majority ethnic group in China) girl whom I first got to know in 2010 and was recruited as informant in 2017, spent most of her childhood in Chengdu with grandparents because her parents were working in Lhasa (capital city of Tibet), reunited with her parents at age 11 in Lhasa and finished her sixth grade there, left Tibet for secondary education in an inland city Zhengzhou (capital city of Henan Province), went to Shanghai for tertiary education, and later returned to work in a company in Chengdu. Both students, though with sharply different migratory trajectories, were graduates of the “Inland Tibet Class”, a nationwide dislocated boarding school program which was generally considered to be part of the state’s long-term civilizing strategy to build national unity and train professional talent for Tibet’s development (Yang, 2017a). Their stories made me wonder why each responded differently to the state goals, with Droma returned to Tibet fulfilling the state expectation of being a patriotic ethnic cadre, while Bai Xue stayed in inland China. I was also wondering whether it was just individual choice or there was a distinction between the Tibetan and Han group.
Known as “neidi xizang ban” (内地西藏班) in Chinese, the Inland Tibet Class program was first established in 1985. Over the past 30 plus years, many incremental changes have been made, including: (1) recruiting not only Tibetan students, but also other indigenous ethnic minorities in Tibet, such as Menba and Lhoba; (2) recruiting Han students of Tibet household registration whose either parent had worked in Tibet for a certain period of time (usually more than eight years) since 1995. These students are called “children of cadres who worked in Tibet” jinzang ganbu zidi (进藏干部子弟); (3) stipulating that the percentage of yearly recruited students from rural and nomadic family background should be no less than 70%. By now, the Inland Tibet Class has trained more than 100,000 students (Yang, 2017a), and the majority of them have returned to work in state-owned institutions as public servants, teachers and bankers in Tibet, serving the state goals of aspiring national integration and providing intellectual aid for Tibet. Being satisfied with its achievement, President Xi Jinping declared in 2015: “The Inland Tibet Class program has made outstanding achievements and is of significant importance [for the nation]. [We] should move toward perfection of the policy, summarize [past experiences] and make a long-term plan [for it].”
Inspired by Droma’s and Bai Xue’s stories, I started to follow up life stories of Han students trained in the Inland Tibet Class program since late June 2017 and compared theirs with those of 40 Tibetans in the same program I interviewed between 2010 and 2016. I started to ask: why, with similar Inland Tibet Class schooling experience, Tibetan students overwhelmingly choose to return to work in Tibet upon university graduation whereas many Han students choose a different track by locating jobs outside of Tibet, even though their parent(s) has (have) firmed their foot in Tibet for whole life?
This puzzle led me to raise three specific questions:
(1) How does the pedagogical state establish and mobilize the loyalty of its minority and majority citizens in the Inland Tibet Class program?
(2) How do Tibetans as the minority and Han graduates as the majority respond and react to the state’s monopoly of ideology?
(3) Why do they respond and react in such ways?
By addressing these questions, I seek to compare the aid politics and citizenship education directed to Tibetan and Han students, exploring how differences inherent in the aid politics and citizenship education in Inland Tibet Class schooling has influenced the constructions of ethnic and national identities of these graduates, and therefore contributing to their choice of returning or not returning to work in Tibet upon university graduation.

Author

• Miaoyan Yang, Xiamen University