An orphanage that sheltered 300 children, an award-winning school for nomad girls and a crowdfunded village school have all been closed in the space of a few weeks.

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Chinese authorities have shut down at least three privately run Tibetan schools in Golog Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture since late August 2026, according to sources in the region cited by the Central Tibetan Administration’s Department of Information and International Relations (DIIR). All three were in Machen (Maqin) County. Together they taught well over a thousand Tibetan children in their own language. Those children are now being moved into state-run, Mandarin-medium institutions.

Sources say the closures are part of a deliberate drive to bring Tibetan children into government schools, where assimilation and political “re-education” are easier to enforce. Because phone and internet communications in the region are tightly monitored, news of each closure has taken weeks to reach the outside world.

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On 2 September, authorities closed the Golog Tadrak Orphan School in Tabo Village. Founded in 2005 with support from the late Dr. Tawu Lobsang Palden and his wife, who lived in Germany, the school was both a home and a classroom for more than 300 children who had lost their parents or come from broken families. For these children, the school was their family, and Tibetan was the language of that family.

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Days earlier, on 27 August, the Ra-Gya Jigme Gyaltsen Grassland Girls’ School (also known as Gangjong Tsathang Girls’ School) was forced to close. Established on 15 October 2005, it served around 800 girls from nomadic herding families across all three traditional Tibetan regions, Ü-Tsang, Kham and Amdo, with about 100 teachers and staff.

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At the end of August, the Jasak village school in Ra-Gya Town was closed after officials verbally told staff that teaching in Tibetan was unacceptable. They were instructed to teach only in the “national common language”, meaning Mandarin Chinese. Villagers had founded the school themselves and kept it alive through crowdfunding so their children would grow up literate in Tibetan. Its roughly 300 students were sent to government boarding schools.

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Not isolated incidents

These closures continue a pattern that has been building in Golog for years:

• July 2021: Sengdruk Taktse School closed, followed by orders shutting seven more private schools in Darlag, Machen, Gade and Chikdril counties.
• 2024: Ra-Gya Gangjong Sherig Norbu Lobling School closed.
• 24 June 2026: Hungkar Dorje Vocational High School, which had taught Tibetan language and culture since 2008, permanently shut.
• August–September 2026: Tadrak Orphan School, Ra-Gya Girls’ School and Jasak village school closed.

Each closure removes another independent space where Tibetan children can learn in their mother tongue.

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In 2023, UN human rights experts warned that China’s colonial-style boarding school system already held around one million Tibetan children and described it as a policy of “forced assimilation.” The Golog closures push more children into that system.

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[Edit typo.]