Xinhua: 48,000 Tibetan Students in Lhasa Prefecture Complete Intensive Patriotic Education

According to a Xinhua report translated by FBIS, the Lhasa prefecture Chinese Communist Party Committee has overseen a recently concluded program of "concentrated" patriotic education. Classes focused on themes of patriotism toward China, Tibetan culture and religion, and the Communist theories of materialism and atheism.

Students from the fifth-grade through college-level, including 18,000 from Lhasa and 30,000 from subordinate counties, attended the propaganda sessions. Upon completion of the course, the students were expected to take an examination. According to the report, "the rate of participation in the examination and the percentage of successful examinees reached 100 percent."

The story, first reported by the Tibet Daily (Xizang Ribao), was carried by Xinhua on January 6, 2005, and posted on FBIS on January 16.