Report: China Ethnically Cleansing Tibetans Through Mass Displacement

Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Tuesday released a report that accused China of forcibly relocating more than 700,000 Tibetans since 2016, herding rural residents into big cities in a bid to “re-educate” the population while erasing Tibet’s history and culture.

“The Chinese government says that the relocation of Tibetan villages is voluntary, but official media reports contradict this claim,” said Maya Wang, HRW’s acting China director. “Those reports make clear that when a whole village is targeted for relocation, it is practically impossible for the residents to refuse to move without facing serious repercussions.”

HRW previously urged China to halt its forced relocation policies, noting that they violate both international law and China’s own nominal legal standards, but the pleas fell on deaf ears.

According to the report, titled “Educate the Masses to Change Their Minds,” China has been using compulsory “whole-village relocations” to move dozens or hundreds of Tibetans at a time, over their anguished objections. 

Chinese officials insist these relocations were “voluntary” and the villagers eventually gave their consent, but HRW noted this “consent” was squeezed out of them with “extreme forms of persuasion,” including “repeated home visits; denigrating the intellectual capacity of the villagers to make decisions for themselves; implicit threats of punishment; banning of criticism; and threats of disciplinary action against local officials who fail to meet targets.”

The “home visits” involved a parade of increasingly senior Chinese officials turning up at the homes of Tibetan villagers to badger them into accepting relocation and threaten them with the termination of vital services if they refused.

Villagers who criticized the relocation plans were accused of “spreading rumors,” which, in China, is a crime that can merit lengthy jail sentences.

Local officials were likewise threatened with punishment if they failed to get 100 percent of their residents to relocate. Some Tibetans were tricked into agreeing with false promises of better jobs and more comfortable lives if they relocated. Satisfaction levels were reportedly “low” after these villagers arrived at their new homes.

As HRW pointed out, dissatisfaction is purely rhetorical for relocated Tibetans because the Chinese government has a policy of demolishing their old houses after they leave:

Together with current Chinese government programs to assimilate Tibetan schooling, culture, and religion into those of the “Chinese nation,” these relocations of rural communities erode or cause major damage to Tibetan culture and ways of life, not least because most relocation programs in Tibet move former farmers and pastoralists to areas where they cannot practice their former livelihood and have no choice but to seek work as wage laborers in off-farm industries.

Radio Free Asia (RFA) on Tuesday interviewed Tibetan farmers who faced “joblessness, economic hardship, and social exclusion” after they were forcibly relocated to urban areas.

“All our farmlands in Damxung were confiscated by the government under the guise of development projects. Having grown up in the village without any education, it is extremely difficult for us to find jobs and make a living in the city,” one of the relocated farmers said.

“The order to relocate came so suddenly, and we couldn’t disobey, [so] we had to sell our herds in a rush, leaving us with nothing. Ever since we moved to Lhasa, we have never been happy,” said another.

The farmers told RFA that they were forced to live in cramped quarters, with only a few small rooms made available to large families, and they were summarily barred from applying for many jobs because they were “not hygienic enough.”

“Self-employment is out of reach, and we can’t even get cleaning jobs in restaurants,” one farmer lamented.

Tencho Gyatso, president of the International Campaign for Tibet, noted that Tibetans physically and culturally evolved to live in their mountain homeland over thousands of years and could not easily adapt to the cities where China is forcing them to move.

“China’s coercive mass displacement of Tibetans destroys the Tibetan way of life and culture under the misleading policy labels of ‘poverty alleviation’ and ‘ecology protection,’” said Gyatso.

Another problem is that Tibet’s cities are teeming with Han Chinese transplants, dispatched by their government to take control of the semi-autonomous province’s resources and infrastructure. Tibetans who do not speak Mandarin find themselves at a severe disadvantage in these colonized cities.