The ICT reported that Human Rights Watch has issued a document in March 2020 detailing the rapid replacement of Tibetan by Chinese Mandarin in schools and educational institutions in TAR. It cited a Xinhua report of early 2015 which said that Chinese-medium instruction had already been introduced, not just into secondary schools, but also in urban primary schools in the TAR. In January 2016, an article on Tibetan schools by Global Times confirmed that “increasingly schools, especially in urban areas, are using Putonghua [standard Chinese] as the primary language of instruction, with Tibetan being used only in classes at preschool level” , implying that by 2017, all 81,000 Tibetan children in pre-schools and kindergartens in the TAR above the age of 3 would receive “bilingual education.” In January 2016, the Global Times explicitly said, “the Tibetan language (is) in a precarious situation.” The number of non-Tibetan-speaking teachers working in Tibetan schools also tripled between 1988 and 2005, and under the current program, 30,000 will be sent to Tibet and the Xinjiang region, in the northwest, by 2020. None of the non-Tibetan teachers are required to know Tibetan. According to a Chinese study in 2017, 30 percent of teachers in one Lhasa county did not know Tibetan. In addition, from at least 2016, hundreds of Tibetan teachers have been sent for further training in other provinces, and since 2017, all Tibetan teachers have been required to know Chinese. As early as 2003 the number of primary school teachers using Chinese for instruction in the TAR had increased threefold over the previous 12 years, from 1,698 in 1991 – then 20 percent of total teachers – to 4,228 or 33 percent of total teachers by 2003.
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