China Bringing Xinjiang-Style Forced Labor Camps to Tibet, Report Says

In what appears to replicate what’s happening in China’s Xinjiang region to Uighur Muslims, a new report from the Jamestown Foundation, corroborated by Reuters, details evidence of a vast program in a remote region of Tibet aimed at promoting Chinese national unity and patriotism, instilling “work discipline,” and eradicating what the Chinese Communist Party refers to as “backward thinking” by the Tibetan people.

According to evidence uncovered by researcher Adrian Zenz of the Jamestown Foundation, a U.S.-based think tank, China relocated more than 500,000 “rural surplus workers” in Tibet in the first seven months of 2020 into military-style facilities and “re-education centers” to train them as factory workers for areas of the country in need of manufacturing output.

China has defended the program as part of its ambitious poverty alleviation plan under President Xi Jinping, but documents examined by Zenz as part of his research reveal parallels to the detention centers where as many as 1 million Uighur Muslims in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang are being interned.