Mick Hartley

More information on China's repression in Tibet, where Xinjiang-style camps are now in operation:

As many as half a million Tibetans have been forcibly moved into labour camps this year, mirroring a coercive scheme in neighbouring Xinjiang, a study says.

The programme has largely targeted rural workers in what researchers say is a clear attempt to indoctrinate them.

In the report published by the Jamestown Foundation in Washington, Adrian Zenz said the Chinese government adopted “military-style management” in vocational training to reform the “backward thinking” of rural Tibetans and make them work harder. […]

Like China’s 12 million Uighurs in Xinjiang, the Tibetan population of seven million has long objected to Chinese rule especially after the Dalai Lama fled the country in 1959.

Mr Zenz concluded that half a million Tibetans were trained at camps and they had been set to work in construction, cleaning, mining, cooking and driving.

Beijing has quotas for the mass transfer of rural labourers within Tibet to other parts of China, according to state media reports. China’s foreign affairs ministry told Reuters: “What these people with ulterior motives are calling forced labour does not exist. We hope the international community will not be fooled by lies.”

Moving surplus rural labour into industry is a key part of China’s drive to boost the economy. In Xinjiang and Tibet, human rights groups say that the programmes emphasise ideological training. China took control of Tibet in 1950, in what Beijing calls a “peaceful liberation”. The Tibetan programme is expanding as pressure grows over similar projects in Xinjiang, some of which have been linked to mass detention centres. China insists the camps are vocational and education centres.

China's “peaceful liberation” of Tibet was of course an invasion: a colonial enterprise, basically, that seems to have gone up a gear in its ruthlessness since President Xi took office.