ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on fieldwork in a Tibetan administrative region to explore how minority children’s efforts to attain social mobility through education were complicated by the Chinese state agenda of integrating them into the Han nation-state. This complication can be understood as a tension between their desires for full social citizenship in the form of rights to employment, education and opportunity, and the requirement that they also adopt Han cultural citizenship – that they acquire the knowledge and language for “belonging” to mainstream society. As my field study shows, by focusing on integration and equipping students to become part of the Han-dominated mainstream, Chinese state educational policies devalued Tibetan culture and language. This situation prevented Tibetan students from acquiring the kinds of cultural capital that would enable them to “progress”, and caused many to become academic underachievers. Meanwhile, successful Tibetan students were also disadvantaged by schools’ devaluation of their minority cultural citizenship: as has been observed of minority students more generally, they could have done “significantly better and enjoy[ed] their education much more were the barriers to their success eliminated or reduced” (Gibson 1988:167).
