(TibetanReview.net, Aug11’21) – China has taken away a Tibetan schoolteacher in Golog Prefecture of Qinghai Province for being upset with its closing down of her privately-run school which educated the children in Tibetan language and culture, said London-based Free Tibet campaign group Aug 10.
The group said Rinchen Kyi was accused of separatism and initially taken to a hospital in the provincial capital Xining, located hundreds of kilometres away.
China recently closed down the school, which was named as the Sengdruk Taktse school, because it gave primary focus on teaching Tibetan culture, with all the subjects being taught in Tibetan language. The children, many of them orphans under the school’s boarding care, were sent to government-run schools where subjects are taught only in Mandarin Chinese.
Citing its research partner Tibet Watch, the group said that Rinchen Kyi, who lived with her husband, 13-year-old daughter, and 79-year-old mother, was so upset by the closure of the school that she had not been eating properly for several weeks and refusing medical help.
Her family was trying to seek medical help when the Chinese police took her away, accusing her of separatism, and took her to a hospital in Xining and thence to another hospital without any information to her family.
The group previously said the school was co-founded and headed by one Khandrul Jigme Kunsang Gyaltsen after securing all the required government permissions.
Earlier, on Jan 20 this year, Shen Chungyao, the Director of the Legal Affairs Committee of the National People’s Congress (the Chinese parliament), had announced that schools in minority areas were no longer allowed to teach their own languages, declaring such education to be “unconstitutional”.
