China is forcing Tibet’s native population into military-style labor camps, a new report shows.
Over half a million ethnic Tibetans were “trained” as part of Beijing’s forced labor program between January and July 2020 — almost 15 percent of the region’s population, the report released on Tuesday by the D.C.-based Jamestown Foundation revealed.
In these camps, Tibetans of all ages are subjected to “militarized training regimen” conducted by the “People’s Armed Police drill sergeants,” the report said. The “camps are accompanied by enforced indoctrination, intrusive surveillance, and harsh punishments for those who fail to meet labor transfer quotas,” Australian newspaper the Sydney Morning Herald reported citing the report.
Since Communist China annexed the Buddhist kingdom of Tibet in 1950, it has carried out a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing and religious suppression. Beijing is running a similar movement in the neighboring Muslim-majority Xinjiang province. The regime cynically describes these forced labor camps as centers for “re-education” and “free vocational training.”
Reuters reported the finding on Tibet’s mass labor camps:
China is pushing growing numbers of Tibetan rural laborers off the land and into recently built military-style training centers where they are turned into factory workers, mirroring a program in the western Xinjiang region that rights groups have branded coercive labor.Beijing has set quotas for the mass transfer of rural laborers 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% 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, D.C.-based institute that focuses on policy issues of strategic importance to the U.S.
Last month, President Donald Trump’s administration condemned the Chinese treatment of the Muslim Uyghurs and other minorities.
China is carrying out “horrific acts against women, including forced abortion, forced sterilization and other coercive birth control methods, state-sponsored forced labor, sexual violence including through rape in detention, compulsory home-stays by Han officials and forced marriages,” National Security Council spokesman John Ullyot said.
The drive towards mass internment and forced labor under China’s current leader Xi Jinping is reminiscent of Mao Zedong’s “re-education through labor” campaign that killed tens of millions of Chinese.
The persecution is not limited to Uyghur Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists. The Xi Jinping-led Communist Party is targeting China’s 60 million-strong Christian population. Party officials have been coercing Chinese Christians into renouncing their faith and embracing Xi’s doctrine.
The New York Post in January described the ongoing Communist onslaught on China’s Christians: “Catholic churches torn down or denuded of their crosses and statues. Images of the Madonna and Child replaced with pictures of “People’s Leader” Xi Jinping. (…) The Ten Commandments painted over with quotes from Xi.”
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