Tibet forced into labour camps under China’s ‘draconian scheme’

Half a million Tibetans have been forced into brutal labour camps under a shocking and brutal plan by Beijing to reform “backward thinking”.

A new report has revealed half a million Tibetan farmers have been pushed into factory work. Picture: Tibet’s Chamdo/The Jamestown Foundation

An explosive new report has revealed China has pushed hundreds of thousands of Tibetan farmers into a mass labour program, sparking fresh fears of human rights abuses.

Renowned US-based researcher Adrian Zenz, an expert in the troubled region, released the report this week after analysing official government documents.

His report, which was published on the Jamestown Foundation website, claims more than half a million “rural surplus labourers” had been funnelled into factories in the first seven months of 2020 after undergoing “military-style” vocational training.

It is part of a government push to reform “backward thinking” and “dilute the negative influence of religion” according to government documents mentioned in the report, with China dictating the state must “stop raising up lazy people”.

Tibetan rural workers are also pushed to give up their land and livestock to the government and instead take up jobs with regular salaries.

Dr Zenz alleged it was likely some were being funnelled into the “draconian scheme” against their will.

“There are clear elements of coercion during recruitment, training and job matching, as well as a centralised and strongly state-administered and supervised transfer process,” Dr Zenz wrote.

BREAKING: ***TIBET*** gets Xinjiang's militarized vocational training and coercive labor transfer scheme. State trained 1/2 million Tibetans by mid-2020 & set up a scheme to make them transfer their herds & land to state-controlled collectives. My report:https://t.co/hxudJH7NXZ pic.twitter.com/tn5NydorPI

— Adrian Zenz (@adrianzenz) September 22, 2020

“While some documents assert that the scheme is predicated on voluntary participation, the overall evidence indicates the systemic presence of numerous coercive elements,” he said.

“In a system where the transition between securitisation and poverty alleviation is seamless, there is no telling where coercion stops and where genuinely voluntary local agency begins.”

Dr Zenz compared the program to China’s policies in the Xinjiang region, where more than one million members of the minority Uighur community have been pushed into vocational training centres.

“As with the Uighurs in Xinjiang, overcoming Tibetans’ resistance to labour transfer is an integral part of the entire mechanism,” the report states.

“Documents state that the ‘strict military-style management’ of the vocational training process causes the ‘masses to comply with discipline’, ‘continuously strengthens their patriotic awareness’ and reforms their ‘backward thinking’.

“This may also involve the presence of local cadres to ‘make the training discipline stricter’.”

The allegations come hot on the heels of a growing push to strip China of the right to host the Beijing Winter Olympic Games in 2022 over allegations of human rights abuses.

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There is a push to strip China’s right to host the Olympics. Picture: The Yomiuri Shimbun via AP Images

China has increasingly been under fire for its human rights record following outcry over the Uighur situation as well as its brutal clampdown on Hong Kong pro-democracy leaders.

There have also been ongoing trade and technological tensions between the US and China as well as a breakdown in relations with Australia, after Australia called for an international inquiry into the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.

Just this week, a war of words erupted between US President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jingping at the UN General Assembly over the COVID-19 pandemic, prompting fears of a new “cold war”.