In his most recent Washington Post column Josh Rogin is outraged about China’s using the same techniques it has employed against its Uyghur population against Tibetans:
Beijing has forced more than half a million rural Tibetans into these military-style training and indoctrination facilities in just the past six months, Sangay said. Upon their release, thousands of rural laborers are sent to perform factory work or menial jobs in other parts of China, all under the guise of “poverty alleviation,†according to a September report by the Jamestown Foundation. Corroborating documents obtained by Reuters showed that Chinese Communist Party officials were given strict quotas for how many Tibetans to round up.
While Beijing has long operated gulags for political prisoners and dissidents in Tibet, these new facilities represent a huge expansion of China’s years-long program to involuntarily mass relocate rural Tibetans, which Human Rights Watch in 2013 called “unprecedented in the post-Mao era.†The goal of these camps is threefold, according to Sangay: Beijing wants to appropriate Tibetan land to commercialize its natural resources; the CCP uses the camps to forcibly assimilate Tibetans by snuffing out their culture, language and religion; and the third goal, using Tibetans as cheap forced labor, serves the first two.
“ ‘Poverty alleviation’ for us means cultural assimilation,†Sangay said. “In that sense, they want to take away our faith and erase the history of Tibet.â€
I’m more outraged that, knowing all of this, we tolerate trade with China in the interest of cheap consumer goods and profits for companies from Walmart to Apple. They pile atrocity on atrocity. It’s one thing for the Europeans who feign concern about human rights while pursuing their own national interests and complain when we do the same. But the notion that we can be a “force for good” while keeping business as usual with China is that much worse.
And none of this is new. The Chinese have occupied Tibet for 70 years.
Still see the occasional Free Tibet bumper sticker and that seems to about all we are willing/able to do.
It is a small country in which we have little interest. If its a choice between sneakers that cost 25 cents less or Tibet people are going with the sneakers.
Steve
“It is a small country in which we have little interest. If its a choice between sneakers that cost 25 cents less or Tibet people are going with the sneakers.”
Yes, that’s the unfortunate reality. We still don’t even give visas to effing Afghan translators who spilled blood and helped our own troops, but 25 cents at volume is real money to the lobbyists and useful idiot Libertarians who vomit about “free trade.” I say that as once who is predisposed to Libertarianism.
I think that for libertarianism or progressivism or conservatism or all three to inform your political views is one thing but when any of them become you political view is something else entirely.
Might be motivational to envision the re-education plans they’re drawing up for us.