30th April: Authorities in China’s Qinghai region have released a Tibetan schoolteacher who had been imprisoned since last year when her Tibetan school was shut down for teaching classes in their own language. Rinchen Kyi, 42, was freed on August 24 at around 8:00 p.m. local time and escorted to her family home in Darlag (in Chinese, Dali) county in Qinghai, as reported by RFA.
RFA quoted from its source, saying, “Two cars carrying security personnel arrived that evening at the door of Rinchen Kyi’s family home, A few neighbors came out to see what was happening and saw Rinchen Kyi get out of one of the cars and immediately enter her house, Police prevented people from getting too close to her, so no one was able to learn where she had been held all this time.”
Kyi was a 2nd and 3rd-grade teacher at the Golog Sengdruk Taktse School in Darlag when it closed on July 8, 2021, during a region-wide crackdown on schools offering Tibetan language instruction, according to individuals who spoke to RFA earlier. On Aug. 1, authorities brought her to a hospital for treatment of an alleged mental ailment, and she was later accused of encouraging separatism and jailed at her house, with no word given to her family about her whereabouts or health status. Separatism is an allegation regularly leveled by Chinese authorities against Tibetans who advocate for the survival of Tibet’s language and culture in the face of Chinese Han dominance.
The move is being pushed under the guise of ensuring uniformity in the use of textbooks and instructional materials, but parents of the affected children and other local Tibetans have expressed concern about the imposed restrictions, claiming that separating young Tibetans from their culture and language will have serious long-term consequences.
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