By Tenzin Nyidon
DHARAMSHALA, May 22: China is using extreme measures to relocate close to a million rural Tibetans by 2025, said Human Rights Watch, the New York-based rights watch dog, in a new report titled “Educate the Masses to Change Their Minds: China’s Coercive Relocation of Rural Tibetans.”
According to official statistics, over 930,000 rural Tibetans will be relocated by Chinese authorities between 2000 and 2025. Notably, more than 709,000 of these relocations (76%) have occurred since 2016, coinciding with the start of China’s 13th Five-Year Plan. This group includes 140,000 people relocated as part of whole village relocation drives and 567,000 relocated as part of individual household relocations between 2016 and 2020. Currently, Chinese authorities are moving residents from 500 villages, affecting over 140,000 people.
The 71-page report elaborates on the compulsory participation of Tibetans in these whole village relocation programs. For example, in a village in Nagchu, 200 out of 262 households initially resisted relocating nearly 1,000 kilometers away. Although the Chinese government claimed that these villagers eventually consented to move, HRW found that consent was obtained through extreme forms of persuasion and coercion, including repeated home visits, threats of punishment, and disciplinary action against local officials who failed to meet relocation targets.
Additionally, these coercive tactics include threats against villagers who voiced disagreements, accusing them of “spreading rumors” and ordering crackdowns on dissent, implying both administrative and criminal penalties. Officials require each targeted village to reach a consensus decision, preventing any individual resident from opting out and thereby applying peer pressure to ensure compliance. Authorities also misleadingly claim that these relocations will “improve people’s livelihood” and protect the ecological environment.
“The mass relocations of rural Tibetan villages are severely eroding Tibetan culture and ways of life,” said Maya Wang, acting China director at HRW. “China’s government should suspend relocations in Tibet until an independent, expert review of existing policies and practices is carried out to determine their compliance with Chinese law and standards and international law concerning relocations and forced evictions.”
HRW also issued recommendations to the Chinese authorities involved in the forced relocation programs to ensure that they follow international standards, including exploring all alternatives, providing adequate compensation, and legal remedies, cease coercive tactics to gain consent for relocations, remove deadlines for relocation agreements, punish officials who make false claims about relocation benefits, permit United Nations special rapporteurs access to Tibetan areas and amend Chinese laws to align with international standards on forced evictions.
2 Responses
Communist China is committing ethnic cleansing in occupied Tibet. The whole reason why they are uprooting Tibetans from their own ancestral home is to obliterate the Tibetans as a distinct race entirely different from the Chinese. Until now, places like Lhasa, Shigatse, Gyaltse, Chamdo and Kardze have huge Chinese colonisers to dilute the Tibetans population. Those living in these big towns are already senecized and speak Chinese and follow many Chinese custom as such as eating worms, dog meat and keeping concubines! However, the Tibetans living in the countryside have retained their Tibetan culture, language and religious devotion since they are not intermingling with Chinese colonial settlers in their everyday life. They have stood steadfast to their Tibetan values of ངོ་ཚ་འཁྲེལ ཡོད་ shame and embarrassment and integrity as propounded in the Buddhist teachings. The same can’t be said of the city dwellers who have been influenced by Chinese culture such as visiting brothels, karaoke parlours and indulging in licentious romances with Chinese women. The Chinese communists have pushed millions during the last twenty years under the banner of “go west” to demographically change the Tibetan landscape with Chinese colonisers to SWAMP THE TIBETANS and make them a insignificant fringe group totally deprived of their rights, their language, religion and culture to be gradually subsumed by the Chinese colonisers in their own country. This is the ultimate goal of the Chinese communists so they can claim ownership over Tibet by ETHNOCIDE! Tibetans must vociferously call out this sinister tactic of the CCP and do everything to prevent uprooting Tibetans from their own ancestral land. The land they have lived for centuries has immense emotional connection and psychological resonance! Europeans settlers in America, Australia, New Zealand and Canada and elsewhere have named the new colonies they carved out with the names of their land in Europe! They also brought trees, plants and flowers from Europe to be planted in their newly colonised land to make it look like their ancestral home in Europe. This goes to show the intense emotional attachment to one’s own birthplace and thus adopted names of their home country, planted trees and flowers to remind them of their homes in distant Europe. Therefore, to uproot Tibetans from their ancestral land and rob them of their emotional attachment and displace them to alien places without the slight consideration for the Tibetans shows the blatant disregard for Tibetan sensibilities and birthright of the Tibetans to live in their own birthplace by the evil CCP! The Chinese communists killed millions in the name of being “capitalist roader” but today, they are the worse capitalists! They murdered some four hundred thousand babies during the “one child policy by wrenching them out their mother’s womb and throwing them in the waste bin against the will of the mother. They sterilised millions of women including Tibetans to prevent reproduction. Today, it is forcing Chinese couples to have children against their will by giving them huge incentives because the Chinese population is dwindling at an alarming rate! This shows the unforgivable wrong-headed policies the CCP makes which brings no dividend but only disaster to the people! Their lack of foresight was clearly visible during the draconian lockdown for three long years which has ultimately ruined the lives of millions of Chinese which bursts into open defiance with the white paper revolution. But the damage was done! The Chinese economy suffered irreparably and thousands of Chinese are driven out of China to go to America through illegal migration via Ecuador to the US coast through Mexico. In 2023 alone, 40,000 Chinese economic migrants arrived in the US, the largest to date! It goes to show the communist regime is MAKING MISTAKE AFTER MISTAKE! This diabolical act of displacing Tibetans from their birthplace is another huge mistake that will disrupt the Tibetan people and make them scavengers in their own country. The communists always use high sounding sound bite such as”dynamic covet lockdown” or “environmental protection” to dupe people but in reality they are all pie in the sky! Tibetans must fight tooth and nail to stop the demographic transformation of Tibet by communist China to erase the Tibetan people from the face of the earth. The Palestinian struggle has had many ups and downs for the last seven decades. Millions perished and are being slaughtered as this goes to press. But the conscience of the world has been at last AWAKENED! Country after country are recognising an independent Palestinian State! There is NO STOPPING THE TREND! Their nemeses tried to erase them but instead they bounced back to be acknowledged as a NATION! Tibetans MUST DO THE SAME BY SACRIFICING WHAT NEEDS TO BE SACRIFICED IN ORDER TO GAIN OUR RIGHTFUL PLACE UNDER THE SUN. A day will come when our struggle will also receive similar acknowledgement from the international community! THIS IS WHAT IS MEANT BY TRUTH PREVAILS! བདེན་པ་ཉིད་རྒྱལ་གྱུར་ཅིག་ SATYAMEVA JAYATE!!!
Is that not approx 1/6th of the Tibetan population? I gather in some manner, percentage-wise, it’s better than the 100% in Diego Garcia (including dogs) and Chagos.