(TibetanReview.net, Aug08’25) – As China intensifies its Sinicization drive across the Tibetan Plateau region under President Xi Jinping’s Han-centric assimilation plan for the new era, the top Tibetan leader of the Communist Party of China-state in Tibet autonomous region (TAR) has said this week that Tibetan will no longer be a core subject in the region’s national college entrance exam for the majority of students, according to the ft.com Aug 7.
The report cited Gama Cedain, chairman of the TAR government, as saying at a press briefing in Beijing this week that the change was part of reforms to the national examination and would improve Tibetans’ career prospects.
Zhou Yongkang, the now disgraced and jailed former State Security chief and Politburo Standing Committee member, had said the same thing when he was the Party secretary of Sichuan province from 2000 to 2002 and sought to Sinicize the school curriculum in the province’s historically Tibetan areas.
“Tibet, like other provinces and regions,” would have “unified exam subjects”, Gama Cedain has said, such as Chinese and mathematics, and foreign languages including English, Russian, Japanese, French, German and Spanish. But Tibetan will no longer be a core subject in the exam.
Implying that the change is also meant for the benefit of non-Tibetan ethnic groups in the region, most of whom are Han-Chinese, Gama Cedain, who is also the TAR’s deputy party secretary, has said: “This helps students of all ethnic groups to enjoy fairer access to high-quality education, enhances minority students’ ability to learn and improves their overall scientific and cultural literacy.”
Gama Cedain has not given a timeline for the implementation of the change, saying only that TAR began education reforms in 2024. But officials in six Tibetan prefectures said it would come into effect next year, the report said.
Exile Tibetans have long accused China of seeking to destroy the Tibetan people’s cultural and national identity by destroying their linguistic and Sinicizing their religious heritage, and the issue has repeatedly been reported on by UN human rights experts.
“Once you no longer have the Tibetan language in your entry exam, it no longer is a legal means of communication or useful to seek a profession or get a job,” Dawa Tsering, director of Tibet Policy Institute in Dharamshala, affiliated with the Tibetan government-in-exile, has said.
* * *
Every year, high school seniors across the People’s Republic of China (PRC) take the gruelling, multi-day college entrance exam, known as the gaokao. Aside from Chinese, maths and foreign languages, students choose from a range of subjects including politics, history, geography, physics, chemistry and biology, all of which are conducted in Mandarin.
In some regions, ethnic minority students are permitted to take a subject test in their native language. However, from 2026, only Tibetan students applying for specialised areas of study that require the Tibetan language, such as Tibetan literature, will be able to take a Tibetan language subject test, comprising a small fraction of Tibetan students, the report cited local officials as saying.
According to Gama Cedain, “Tibetan language teaching programmes in general universities face issues such as relatively limited enrolment quotas for Tibetan language and literature and Tibetan medicine and pharmacology, narrow pathways for further education, significant limitations in subject specialties and a narrow job market.”
But this justification is questionable, given the fact – as the report says – that President Xi has escalated pressure on the PRC’s ethnic minorities in recent years to assimilate into Han-dominated society.
The changes to TAR’s exam were stated to have been conveyed verbally to teachers and students in recent months, the report cited local officials as saying.
The press conference was held on Aug 5 by the State Council Information Office in Beijing to highlight the socioeconomic development in TAR over the past 60 years.