Tibetan Adolescents National Identity

Nowadays, with the continuous development of the globalization, nationalidentity became a main focusing point in academic world. For a multi-nationalitycountry, national identity is one of the core elements for political stability of thecountry. How to manage the relationship between ethnicity identity and nationalidentity, and make ethnic minority have national identity on the basis of ethnicityidentity has a critical and decisive impact on political stability, border stability andnational unity.Tibetan minority teenager is a special community in the whole Tibetancommunity. Because of the unique natural and social environment, and some of thefeatures in psychological development of teenager, it is easy to let the hostileforces use those teenagers to break the national stability and national solidarity.Therefore, studying the national identity of the Tibetan teenager has a certain valuein the modern society.This study documents the general situation of national identity of Tibetanteenagers and the development tendency of different grades, and a preliminaryaccount of the relationship between the Tibetan teenagers’ ethnicity identity andnational identity is also given in this study. This study applies the National identityscale written by Chen Jing（Tibetan-Chinese bilingual） and Tibetan-Chinesebilingual scale of Tibetan adolescents written by Luo Ping as a tool, made a surveyto4185Tibetan students from Tibet Autonomous region and outside theAutonomous Region(QingHai, GanSu, SiChuan).According to the survey:(1)In general, the level of Tibetan students’ national identity is high, theaverage score is3.5. In the six dimensionality of national identity, the score fromhigh to low are: positive emotion-evaluation, interdependency beliefs, negative emotion, public collective self-esteem,self-categorisation, importance of the selfconcept.(2)The national identity of Tibetan students has a certain developmenttendency with different grades, it increased from the first grade of middle school tothe first grade of high school, and it has a declined tendency from the second gradeof middle school to the third grade of middle school, and it went to a peak in thefirst grade of high school, then it declined, after that, it went back to theincreased tendency during the second grade of high school to the first grade ofUniversity, then it declined, it went to the lowest point in the third grade ofUniversity.(3)From the development of the different period of the school, one can seethat the national identity of Tibetan students came to a highest point during highschool, and the national identity in the University is the lowest.(4)Gender, religious belief, the type of the residence place, the workingbackground of parents, the level of Chinese, the type of the school and class whichthe student is studying, the number of Chinese friend, the level of acceptance of theTibetan culture to the Chinese, these factors have a certain influence on thenational identity of the Tibetan students.(5)It has a significant difference between the Tibetan students in the TibetAutonomous Region and the Tibetan students outside the Autonomous region, thenational identity of the tibetan students in Tibet Autonomous Region is muchhigher than the tibetan students outside the Tibet Autonomous Region.(6)The national identity of Tibetan students in the Tibet Autonomous regionhas a certain increasing tendency from the first grade of middle school to the firstgrade of high school, it came to a peak in the first grade of high school, after that itdeclined, in the third grade of University, it went to the lowest point, then it wentback to an increasing tendency during the third grade of University to the forth grade of University. The national identity of the Tibetan students outside the TibetAutonomous Region has an increasing tendency during the first grade of middleschool to the second grade of middle school, it declined during the second gradeof middle school to the third grade of middle school, then it went back to theincreasing tendency from the third grade of middle school to the first grade of highschool, it went down from the first grade of high school to the second grade of highschool, it went to the lowest point in the second grade of high school, from thesecond grade of high school it went up, came to peak in the first grade ofUniversity, after that it went down.(7)The national identity has a positive relationship with the ethnicdifferentiation.(8)From the development of the different grades, the national identity ofTibetan students is higher than the ethnicity identity and the ethnic differentiation，but the national identity of Tibetan students is lower than the ethnicity identity inthe third and forth grade of University.