Chinese-state media says that the government plans to start relocating thousands of rural Tibetans away from their traditional homelands this month
The Chinese government has announced plans to forcibly relocate more than one hundred thousand Tibetans from their homes on the Tibetan Plateau in the next eight years.
According to Chinese-state propaganda, the process will start with 17,555 Tibetans being removed from their homes in Nagqu City, an area of more than 1,000 towns and villages in the North-East of Tibet, in the next month. They will be moved 250km to Lhoka (governed as Shannan) in the Southern part of Tibet that is governed as the Tibet Autonomous Region.
While Chinese-state propaganda says the reason for the move is to get the people away from “harsh weather and relatively backward production and living conditions”, the real consequences would be the end of the traditional Tibetan way of life. Farmers and nomads have made a sustainable way of life high on the Tibetan plateau for centuries and those being relocated are often not given an opportunity to stay or even given full information about what will happen to them as they are forced into a completely alien way of life.
The Chinese government also says that the relocations are taking place to protect the environment despite there being little scientific evidence that the relocations will have any positive environmental impact.
Free Tibet calls on world leaders to condemn these forced relocations and call on China to stop all efforts to eradicate Tibetan culture.
China is trying to destroy the traditional way of life for Tibetan nomads. Nomads are being forced out of their ancestral lands, which they have farmed for centuries, and relocated to urban settlements. Their entire way of life is uprooted, and they receive little support from the Chinese government. As their way of life is…
Tibetan Buddhism has never faced a greater threat…
