Nearly a million Tibetan children live in state-run residential schools on the Tibetan plateau. Chinese authorities subject these children to a highly politicized curriculum designed to strip them of their mother tongue, sever their ties to their religion and culture, and methodically replace their Tibetan identity with a Chinese one. Children as young as four have been separated from their parents and enrolled in boarding kindergartens under a recruitment strategy based largely on coercion.
I am not doubting that residential schools in China are bad, but as a Canadian we have a duty as a part of our efforts at reconciliation to correct people who downplay the horrors of residential schools in Canada (and the US). There are mass graves across the country from willfully negligent living conditions leading to large scale death from preventable illness. The physical and material conditions were inhumane. One of the chief medical officers in Canada was so horrified, he wrote a book in 1922 called The Story of a National Crime where he described the malnourishment, lack of basic healthcare, and squalid living conditions. (Think about that next time someone says “disease killed indigenous people in North America, not genocide”.) To say nothing of the beatings and rape.
It was for a long time illegal for an indigenous person to raise their own children. Can you imagine if you weren’t allowed to raise your own child because of your race? The goal was cultural and linguistic genocide, but once that culture was destroyed, the people coming out of the system were never going to be assimilated and treated equal to whites. The goal of the “education”, as recorded in government documents, was to raise a permanent servant class.
you’re trying to turn this on Canada for no reason. This is about China, not North America
It’s a common CCP tactic to always talk about other peoples history rather then own up to their own terrible history
This isn’t whatboutism. Canada is not currently running residential schools and China is. That makes China much worse on this topic.
But I also think this is a perfectly apt time to bring up the comparison. These residential schools sound exactly like the British colonial residential school system, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if China was copying that. What makes Canada great is precisely that we can talk about these dark times in our history, and admit that they were shitty. Do you think Chinese Internet users are able to do that?
It’s not “whataboutism”, it’s called “deflection” and it’s something you’re trying to do right now. China is a terrible country. There’s no discussion to be had here
Yikes that’s just straight up racist.