The site of this grant is the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture region in Qinghai province. Qinghai, is China’s fourth largest province, but the fifth poorest and one of the least developed regions in China (1). Within Qinghai, Golok is one of the least developed and poorest areas (2). Tibetans constitute roughly 22% of Qinghai’s total population and are the largest minority in a province where minorities make up at least 43% of the total population.
Development of educational infrastructure is a particular need for the Tibetan population of China especially in Qinghai. There are high rates of adult illiteracy throughout Tibetan parts of China, perhaps as high as 74.3% as measured in 1989 (3), while the rates of adult literacy and primary school participation in Qinghai remain far below these national averages (4). Two reasons for this situation according to a 2005 report were poverty and insufficient vocational training (5). For those students able to receive a primary school education it was difficult for them to obtain further education due to the use of exclusionary exams that require knowledge of Mandarin Chinese to enroll in the next level of schooling. As a result of these policies and the poor level of educational infrastructure in general only some 2 percent of Tibetans in China attend high school and just one half of 1 percent graduate from college. There is also a lack of institutions of higher learning for Tibetans, and this excludes them from integration into the social and economic mainstream (6).
Another reason for Qinghai’s poverty and the need for developing education is due to environmental causes: namely, the desertification of Qinghai’s grassland and the response of the Chinese government since 1986 to settle permanently the nomadic population of Tibetans, who are often the scapegoat for prior government polices of unsustainable farming practices and environmental mismanagement (7). Settling the nomads, which is an ongoing process, will bring as yet unknown changes in traditional life patterns while raising further economic problems for them as their traditional livelihoods are permanently disrupted. According to the Xinhua news agency, in Qinghai some 60,000 nomads were to be moved by the end of 2007 with an additional 40,000 to be moved by 2010 (8).
Given these problems, clearly there is a need for developing secondary and post secondary education for Tibetans in China — particularly in Qinghai – for them to study in their own language to learn skills and new trades and preserve their local culture. The Mayul Gesar Foundation’s vocational school and the curriculum in arts training we have planned for it will serve these needs.
References
1. “By 1999, 39 of Qinghai’s 46 county-level jurisdictions had become officially classified as “poverty stricken” at national or provincial level.” David S. G. Goodman, “Qinghai and the Emergence of the West: Nationalities, Communal Interaction and National Integration,” China Quarterly (2004), pp. 379-99.
2. Bianca Horlemann, “Modernization Efforts in Golok: A Chronicle, 1970-2000,” in Amdo Tibetans in Transition: Society and Culture in the Post-Mao Era, ed. Toni Huber (Boston: Brill, 2002), p. 244.
3. Bonnie Johnson and Nalini Chhetrii, “Exclusionary Policies and Practices in Chinese Minority Education: The Case of Tibetan Education,” Current Issues in Comparative Education 2.2 (2002), p. 149
4. David S. G. Goodman, “Qinghai and the Emergence of the West: Nationalities, Communal Interaction and National Integration,” China Quarterly (2004), pp. 392-93.
5. Anja Lahtinen, China´s Western Development Strategy and Its Impact on Qinghai Province, Helsinki: Ministry of Trade and Industry Financed Studies, 2005, p. 55.
6. Johnson and Chhetrii 2002, pp. 143, 150.
7. Susette Cooke, “Qinghai: Settling the Nomads,” Institute for International Studies Occasional Papers (2007), pp. 1-5.
8. Both nomads and agriculturalists in Qinghai are facing problems of “soil erosion, desertification and the reduction of water resources, as well as severe declines in average livestock sizes” due to agricultural mismanagement and global climate change (Goodman 2004, p. 391). These problems further threaten traditional patterns of livelihood.
