Tibet ; The Communist Party’s oppression of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang has defamed China’s image and complicated its relationship with many countries. As per recent reports,Beijing is extending this repression by bringing some of the same horrific tactics to Tibet.Reports reveals that Tibet’s regional government took over half a million people and trained as part of the project in the first seven months of 2020 which is around 15% of the region’s population.Around 50,000 have been transferred into jobs within Tibet, and several thousand have been sent to other parts of China.
Beijing has begun sending rural Tibetan workers into “military-style” vocational-training centers, where they receive ideological instruction and become factory laborers. China is pushing growing numbers of Tibetan rural labourers off the land and into recently built training centres where they are turned into factory workers, copying a programme in the western Xinjiang region that rights groups have branded forceful labour.It has set quotas for the mass transfer of rural labourers within Tibet and to other parts of China, according to over 100 state media reports, policy documents from government bureaus in Tibet and procurement requests released between 2016 and 2020. The quota effort marks a rapid expansion of an initiative designed to provide loyal workers for Chinese industry.
In a statement to Reuters, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs strongly denied the involvement of forced labour, and said China is a country with rule of law and that workers are voluntary and properly compensated.“What these people with ulterior motives are calling ‘forced labour’ simply does not exist. We hope the international community will distinguish right from wrong, respect facts, and not be fooled by lies,” it said.
The revelations will fuel fears that China is expanding rather than rolling back policies toward ethnic minorities that have drawn international condemnation and prompted U.S. sanctions. Government reports on efforts to ease poverty in Tibet “bluntly say that the state must ‘stop raising up lazy people”,Adrian Zenz, a leading researcher into China’s Xinjiang policies stated.
“The labor transfer policy mandates that pastoralists and farmers are to be subjected to centralized ‘military-style’ vocational training, which aims to reform ‘backward thinking’ and includes training in ‘work discipline,’ law, and the Chinese language,” Zenz said.These documents reveal that workers are often moved in groups and stay in collective accommodation.Training photos from Tibet’s Chamdo region described in the report suggested that the sessions were being supervised by the People’s Armed Police, a paramilitary force.
The Tibetan programme is expanding as international pressure is growing over similar projects in Xinjiang, some of which have been linked to mass detention centres. A United Nations report has estimated that around one million people in Xinjiang, mostly ethnic Uighurs, were detained in camps and subjected to ideological education. China initially denied the existence of the camps, but has since said they are vocational and education centres, and that all the people have “graduated”.
Rural workers who are moved into vocational training centers receive ideological education, what China calls “military-style” training — according to multiple Tibetan regional and district-level policy documents describing the program in late 2019 and 2020. The training emphasises strict discipline, and participants are required to perform military drills and dress in uniforms.
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