A new survey reports that China has followed the example of Xinjiang in Tibetan areas and begun militarized systematic vocational training for Tibetans.
Xinjiang’s System of Militarized Vocational Training Comes to Tibet” (Xinjiang’s System of Militarized Vocational Training Comes to Tibet), a report by Adrian Zenz, a German expert on Xinjiang, was published Sept. 22 by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington think tank.
According to the report, in 2019 and 2020, the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) will begin a large-scale systematic “military-style training” for “surplus labor” in Tibetan areas, drawing on the Xinjiang model. In the first seven months of 2020 alone, Tibet has trained more than 500,000 “surplus laborers” from agricultural and herding areas across the region through this policy, sending them to work in other parts of the TAR and other provinces in China.
According to the report, 45 vocational training bases were established in the Chamdo region in 2016 to transform “backward thinking” and provide training in labor discipline, law, and the Chinese language. Photographs published in Chinese state media show militarized vocational training in Chamdo supervised by armed police instructors, with Tibetans wearing camouflage uniforms. In the Shannan region, semi-military-administered vocational training has also begun.
The report says that the TAR adopted the Chamdo region’s model in March 2019 to develop the “Action Plan for Training and Transferring Employment of Farmers and Herdsmen in the Tibet Autonomous Region 2019-2020,” which is mandatory throughout the region. The content of the training includes “labor discipline, Chinese language and labor ethics,” with the aim of “improving workers’ sense of discipline in implementing national laws and regulations and unit regulations. The training of “surplus laborers” will follow the “order-based” or “needs-based” method, i.e., employment will be arranged first and then targeted training will be provided. Forty percent of all training and employment will use this method, and the percentage will increase to more than 60 percent by 2024.
The report cites a local report on poverty alleviation as saying that the state should “stop raising lazy people. The local document says that “strict military management” of vocational training will strengthen Tibetans’ work discipline, increase their willingness to participate, and “dilute the negative influence of religion. The government’s new policy also encourages Tibetans to turn over their land, cattle, and sheep to state-run cooperatives and turn themselves into wage laborers, with the goal of increasing rural disposable income to achieve Xi’s goal of eradicating absolute poverty.
Citing local policy documents, the report says that the local government has set mandatory implementation targets for the new policy, and that cadres who fail to meet them will be punished with “strict rewards and punishments.
The article analyzes that the current militarized training in Tibet is very similar to the so-called vocational training of Uighurs in Xinjiang, which is aimed at “surplus labor” in the agricultural and herding areas and focuses on mobilizing a “silent” ethnic minority to change their traditional livelihood patterns through military training and militarization. The training administration fosters discipline and obedience, emphasizes “transforming” workers’ “backward thinking,” “downplaying the negative influence of religion,” and sets specific targets for implementation. The training programs in both Xinjiang and Tibet are aimed both at alleviating poverty and at strengthening the social control of local governments through centralized administrative mechanisms.
The report emphasizes that while there is no evidence of a link between vocational training and extrajudicial detention in Tibet, it is difficult to say whether Tibetans are willing to participate voluntarily, and there are already signs of systemic coercion and brainwashing, which, coupled with “profound and potentially permanent shifts” in Tibetan livelihood patterns, are cause for concern.
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