China Sharply Expands Mass Labour Programme In Tibet

China is pushing growing numbers of Tibetan rural labourers off the land and into recently built military-style training centres where they are turned into factory workers, mirroring a programme in the western Xinjiang region that rights groups have branded coercive labour.

Beijing has set quotas for the mass transfer of rural labourers within Tibet and to other parts of China, according to over a hundred state media reports, policy documents from government bureaus in Tibet and procurement requests released between 2016-2020 and reviewed by Reuters.

The quota effort marks a rapid expansion of an initiative designed to provide loyal workers for Chinese industry.

A notice posted to the website of Tibet's regional government website last month said over half a million people were trained as part of the project in the first seven months of 2020 – around 15 percent of the region's population.

Of this total, almost 50,000 have been transferred into jobs within Tibet, and several thousand have been sent to other parts of China. Many end up in low paid work, including textile manufacturing, construction and agriculture.

"This is now, in my opinion, the strongest, most clear and targeted attack on traditional Tibetan livelihoods that we have seen almost since the Cultural Revolution" of 1966 to 1976, said Adrian Zenz, an independent Tibet and Xinjiang researcher, who compiled the core findings about the program.

These are detailed in a report released this week by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, DC-based institute that focuses on policy issues of strategic importance to the US.

"It's a coercive lifestyle change from nomadism and farming to wage labour."

Reuters corroborated Zenz's findings and found additional policy documents, company reports, procurement filings and state media reports that describe the programme.

In a statement to Reuters, the 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.

Moving surplus rural labour into industry is a key part of China's drive to boost the economy and reduce poverty.

But in areas like Xinjiang and Tibet, with large ethnic populations and a history of unrest, rights groups say the programmes include an outsized emphasis on ideological training.

And the government quotas and military-style management, they say, suggest the transfers have coercive elements.

China seized control of Tibet after Chinese troops entered the region in 1950, in what Beijing calls a "peaceful liberation."

Tibet has since become one of the most restricted and sensitive areas in the country.

The Tibetan programme is expanding as international pressure is growing over similar projects in Xinjiang, some of which have been linked to mass detention centers.

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." (Reuters)