China forces 500,000 Tibetans into labour camps

Authored by smh.com.au and submitted by AtomicCypher
image for China forces 500,000 Tibetans into labour camps

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. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video Australian Liberal MP Andrew Hastie and Labor Senator Kimberley Kitching, co-chairs of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, said Dr Zenz's findings on the situation in Tibet were just as alarming as the treatment of Uighurs in Xinjiang.

"Just as the international community was rightly outraged by the details presented in the Xinjiang papers, and the treatment of the Uighur people, they will be just as troubled by this report on forced labour camps in the Tibet Autonomous Region," Hastie and Kitching said in a joint statement. Loading 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 the press. Former Australian soccer captain Craig Foster said on Tuesday the IOC would be directly responsible if it allowed its "mega events to be used to whitewash broad scale abuse occurring under the shadow of the stadia". "It is near impossible to see how China can stage a mega-sporting event in accordance with these basic human rights since many are antithetical to governmental principles themselves," said Foster, an adjunct professor at Torrens University.

Liberal MP Dave Sharma, who led the International Division of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, said a boycott would harden nationalist views in China, escalate a "cold-war mentality" and thwart attempts to moderate the Chinese Communist Party's actions in the region. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video Sharma, Australia's former ambassador to Israel, said China's national prestige was "on the line" and concessions on human rights, civil liberties and media freedoms could be won in the lead up to the games. "They don't want their international prestige to be diminished. It would mean that they will have to end up agreeing to a whole bunch of things that in regular times they would not agree to." Labor's foreign affairs spokeswoman Penny Wong said the Olympics would put China in the spotlight, "including scrutiny of their human rights situation" and urged the IOC to "ensure that the international media can report freely".

audio_ware on September 22nd, 2020 at 10:42 UTC »

Hey look! Another story about China committing crimes that nobody's going to do anything about!

roundearthervaxxer on September 22nd, 2020 at 10:35 UTC »

Half a million people... Tibet only has 3 million people 😔

_BarBareek_ on September 22nd, 2020 at 09:11 UTC »

And just like always the international community was outraged but too scared to do anything about it.