China forces 500,000 Tibetans into slave labor camps

Farmers in Tibet: In the first seven months of this year over 500,000 rural Tibetan labourers have been pushed into military-style training centres.CREDIT:AP

China is pushing hundreds of thousands of Tibetans into forced labour camps, mirroring a program in the western Xinjiang region, as the International Olympic Committee is urged to strip Beijing of the Winter Olympics.

New evidence suggests the Chinese government now has a large-scale mandatory "vocational training" program in Tibet, pushing more than 500,000 rural labourers into recently built military-style training centres in the first seven months of this year alone.

The evidence has been compiled by German anthropologist Dr Adrian Zenz, whose research was instrumental in raising the profile of the security build-up and mass detention of Uighurs in China's remote Xinjiang province.

The labour camps are accompanied by enforced indoctrination, intrusive surveillance, and harsh punishments for those who fail to meet labour transfer quotas, according to the research.

The new report by Dr Zenz, sponsored by a global coalition of MPs who have been urging governments to adopt a tougher stance on China, says Beijing has been setting quotas for the mass transfer of rural labourers within Tibet.

The labor 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.

The new evidence will place further pressure on China's human rights record, which has been criticised for its policies in Xinjiang where more than one million ethnic Uighurs have been forced into internment camps, and a crackdown on pro-democracy leaders in Hong Kong.

The founder of the alliance of MPs, Sir Iain Duncan Smith has urged the IOC to reconsider Beijing as the host of the Olympic Winter Games in 2022. MPs from New Zealand, the Netherlands and the UK have questioned whether the games can continue in China amid the growing human rights concerns and restrictions on freedom of ...

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