Learning to Be Tibetan: The Construction of Ethnic Identity at Minzu University of China

Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Chinese Community Party (CCP) has launched a nation-wide ethnic identification project to recognize ethnic minorities, which are widely considered as “peripheral,” “barbarian,” “inferior,” “backward,” and “distrusted.” State schooling is expected to play a significant political role in civilizing and integrating these ethnic minorities. As an important part of Chinese state schooling, fifteen tertiary minority institutions ha...