Two million Tibetans rehoused or relocated since 2006, says rights group
The number of people affected accounted for “more than two-thirds of the entire population” of the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), a Human Rights Watch report said.
More than two million Tibetans in China have been forced to change homes or relocate in a government-sponsored programme that is damaging their traditional culture and rural lifestyle, a human rights monitoring group said.
“The scale and speed at which the Tibetan rural population is being remodelled by mass rehousing and relocation policies are unprecedented in the post-Mao era,” Sophie Richardson, China director for Human Rights Watch (HRW), said in a release accompanying the report.
“Tibetans have no say in the design of policies that are radically altering their way of life, and – in an already highly repressive context – no ways to challenge them,” she added.
Citing Chinese official figures, the report said that two million people “were moved into new houses or rebuilt their own houses between 2006 and last year”.
The number of people affected accounted for “more than two-thirds of the entire population” of the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), it said.
Additionally, “hundreds of thousands of nomadic herders” in Tibetan regions outside the TAR, such as in Qinghai province – which lies in the eastern portion of the massive Tibetan plateau – were “relocated or resettled”, said the report, released Thursday.