EXCLUSIVE: 5 teenage Tibetan monks attempt to take own lives

Read RFA’s coverage of this topic in Tibetan.

Five young Tibetan former monks who were forced to leave their monastery by Chinese officials and attend a local government-run boarding school attempted to kill themselves in early September, saying they found it “unbearable” to stay in the school’s “prison-like conditions,” people with knowledge of the situation told Radio Free Asia.

They were stopped by six Tibetans in Sichuan province’s Zungchu (in Chinese, Songpan) county, according to two local residents and a video clip of the incident recorded by one of the local residents and obtained by Radio Free Asia.

“We find it unbearable to stay in the school, which is like a prison,” exclaims one boy in the video.

“They don’t give us good food and beat us,” said another.

In the clip, the unidentified person filming the video can be heard saying that the monks — wearing school uniforms and ages 13 and 14 — had tried to jump into a river in Zungchu county in the province’s Ngaba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture. 

The boys themselves don’t refer to suicide in the video, but the person filming it recounts what they told him. 

“These young monks were trying to jump into the river over there and take their own lives,” the person filming the boys said in the video, though his face isn’t shown. 

A second Tibetan adult who encountered the boys confirmed the account.

The five boys were among “many young monks” forced to leave the 14th-century Muge Monastery in August after Chinese authorities issued a directive requiring those under 18 to leave their monasteries and attend government-run boarding schools, one of the sources said.

Cutting cultural roots

The incident shows the human impact of China’s growing restrictions on Tibetans’ Buddhist and cultural traditions. 

For generations, Tibetan boys as young as 5 or 6 have attended monasteries for education and religious training, where they use the Tibetan language. 

But since 2018, China has forced Tibetan boys to leave the monasteries, often against their will, and attend government-run boarding schools where the instruction is in Mandarin as part of Beijing’s “Sinicization” policy. 

Chinese authorities have said that young monks are too immature to think for themselves and should go to school to learn to serve society instead.

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Young monks from two other monasteries in Zungchu county — the Serpo and Drakra monasteries — were also forced to leave in August, sources said. 

The exact number of young monks forced to leave the Buddhist monasteries could not be ascertained by RFA, but the same sources told RFA that “many” had been forced out.

In April, a 17-year-old Tibetan Buddhist monk in Qinghai province, who had also been forced to leave his monastery three years ago and join a local school, died by suicide after school authorities dropped an earlier exception they had made for him.

They said the monk could no longer wear his religious robe in the school and would have to wear regular clothing while attending class. 

Prison-like conditions

In the video, the young former monks can be seen crying and saying that they found it “unbearable” to stay at the school. They said they had been discriminated against, beaten and deprived of “good food.”

The boys can be heard saying they were treated differently from other students, and that the conditions in the school were akin to that of a “prison.” 

The monks also complained that they were denied the regular educational curriculum taught to the rest of the students and subjected to strict political education, the sources said. 

In the video, one of the young monks can be seen crying and saying it was difficult to bear the mistreatment, citing an example that when unwell they were not even given water to take with their medicine. 

From 2012 through 2014, Chinese authorities deployed police there and imposed strict supervision and political re-education because of protests by the monks. Later, new monks were not allowed to enter the monastery.  

In 2014, Chinese authorities built a large police station and detention center near Muge Monastery despite efforts by monastic leaders to block work on the project. 

Since then, monks from the monastery must seek approval from the police station for all their activities and personal travel.

Edited by Tenzin Pema for RFA Tibetan, and by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.