One effective incentive to get the nomads to settle down is to threaten their family members with fines or removal of subsidies unless they move into town.
I visited some of those made-ex-nihilo villages and talked to the people there. One immediately obvious thing is there are Chinese national flags flying on almost every single household and big posters of Xi in the households. I asked about those and the residents explained they get fined if they don't fly the flag or hang Xi's photo. They were definitely not acting out of patriotism. The scenes reminded me of a wartime occupation.
Military recruitment posters were also plastered everywhere, as it is a form of employment in a region with relatively few alternatives.
This is the first time I've heard of migration ratios as bureaucratic targets, but it's not surprising at all as it is typical for the government to set clear KPIs for their policies.
I am partially sympathetic to the idea that this can be a way for people to lead better lives - in the modern, economic sense - instead of subsistence nomading.
At the same time, China has, over the past several years, also demonstrated a trend of new behavior and a clear break away from a previous trend of liberalization that started with Deng. This push in Tibet should be seen in light of what is going on in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, the South China Sea, the East China Sea, Inner Mongolia, and at the Indian border.
My impression is that, aside from people who've studied abroad, Chinese youth today are more conservative and nationalistic than their elders. They've been fed only on a diet of domestic media with external news censored and have grown up only seeing their standards of living rapidly improving with China taking a more central role on the world stage.
The older generations, who suffered through the Cultural Revolution and then saw it end, and those who grew up during Deng's period are more likely to be liberal and sympathetic to the West. Even Jiang Zemin spoke English and liked Western opera.
But I think if you ask people of about any demographic, they will tell you Xi has changed the trajectory that China was previously on. The end of 10-year term limits demonstrated an objective shift towards one-man rule instead of an oligarchy where power was more diffused between elite factions.
China would love a propaganda coup involving Tibetans in their military like America's Navajo code talkers in WW2.
It's disgusting and a stunning violation of human rights.
They offer you 'stable pay' and a 'chance to learn some useful skills' and a 'pension' if you accept and fines or jailtime for your whole family if you refuse.
Basically, it's work in a factory as an "employee" or work in a factory as an inmate.
People really have no other option than to accept.
Chinese history however is riddled with empires who eventually overreached their attempts to control everything and failed. All it takes is to mess up the economy so bad that most people suddenly are poorer, and some internal/external entity offers a better deal. A billion starving people can overcome any obstacle if necessary. Thus enslaving people to create wealth for you is another hedge to failure if you are a government.
These things are always conveniently missing or deliberately misreported for manufactured consent. TL;DR: there's no clear evidence of coercion, also no evidence of no coercion, but China bad so ergo it's coercive. Western media: it's forced labour despite forced labour not being mentioned at all. But that's expected with another Zenz media push:
https://jamestown.org/program/jamestown-early-warning-brief-...
Conclusion: In both Xinjiang and Tibet, state-mandated poverty alleviation consists of a top-down scheme that extends the government’s social control deep into family units. The state’s preferred method to increase the disposable incomes of rural surplus laborers in these restive minority regions is through vocational training and labor transfer. Both regions have by now implemented a comprehensive scheme that relies heavily on centralized administrative mechanisms; quota fulfilment; job matching prior to training; and a militarized training process that involves thought transformation, patriotic and legal education, and Chinese language teaching.
Important differences remain between Beijing’s approaches in Xinjiang and Tibet. Presently, there is no evidence that the TAR’s scheme is linked to extrajudicial internment, and aspects of its labor transfer mechanisms are potentially less coercive. However, in a system where the transition between securitization and poverty alleviation is seamless, there is no telling where coercion stops and where genuinely voluntary local agency begins. While some Tibetans may voluntarily participate in some or all aspects of the scheme, and while their incomes may indeed increase as a result, the systemic presence of clear indicators of coercion and indoctrination, coupled with profound and potentially permanent change in modes of livelihood, is highly problematic. In the context of Beijing’s increasingly assimilatory ethnic minority policy, it is likely that these policies will promote a long-term loss of linguistic, cultural and spiritual heritage.
It also reminds me that the US still has internment schools, where poor Native American children "voluntarily" live in Catholic foster homes and attend US public school.
> One policy document, posted on the website of the Nagqu City government in Tibet’s east in December 2018, reveals early goals for the plan and sheds light on the approach. It describes how officials visited villages to collect data on 57,800 laborers. Their aim was to tackle “can’t do, don’t want to do and don’t dare to do” attitudes toward work, the document says. It calls for unspecified measures to “effectively eliminate ‘lazy people.’”
I don't remember the bit in history class where Roosevelt discussed forceful re-education.
https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/21/china-detaining-millions-...
> Reuters corroborated Zenz’s findings and found additional policy documents, company reports, procurement filings and state media reports that describe the program.
Many redditors have revealed Zenz's background. Please see the second half of the comments (top ones are the typical "China Bad" ones)
https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/ixjuq2/china_for...
What's interesting is that there is censorship in r/worldnews.
After many people exposed Adrian Zenz's background and history, this post with 4k+ comments and nearly 50k upvotes got removed from r/worldnews front page and replaced by a new one with <200 comments and 1k upvotes which nobody got a chance to mention Adrian Zenz yet.
The new one:
https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/ixhd7x/china_sha...
One thing that is missing from this article is how they are doing this? How are they coercing people? Are they literally dragging them out of their homes? Threatening them? Or are they just offering them opportunities that are actually preferable to their current conditions, and the people are accepting them?