China brings Xinjiang-style mass labour to Tibet

Bloomberg

China is instituting a mass labour system in Tibet similar to the one in neighboring Xinjiang, the Jamestown Foundation said, despite intensifying global scrutiny of Beijing’s policies toward ethnic minorities.
Tibet has since last year introduced policies promoting “the systematic, centralised, and large-scale training and transfer of ‘rural surplus labourers’”
to other parts of Tibet
and other regions, the Jamestown Foundation said in a report released. More than half a million labourers went through the program in the first seven months of this year, according to the report, which was authored by authored by Adrian Zenz, a leading researcher into China’s Xinjiang policies.
Beijing established quotas for the mass transfer of rural labourers to training centres, Reuters reported on Tuesday, citing state media reports, policy documents and procurement requests going back to 2016 that corroborated Zenz’s findings.
“The labour transfer policy mandates that pastoralists and farmers are to
be subjected to centralised
‘military-style’ vocational training, which aims to
reform ‘backward thinking’ and includes training in ‘work discipline,’ law, and the Chinese language,” Zenz said. 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 Chinese Foreign Ministry said to Reuters that forced labour “simply does not exist” in the country, adding that workers participated voluntarily and were properly compensated. “We hope the international community will distinguish right from wrong, respect facts, and not be fooled by lies,” the ministry said.