TAIPEI, Taiwan — China is accelerating the forced urbanization of Tibetan villagers and herders, Human Rights Watch said, in an extensive report that adds to state government and independent reports of efforts to assimilate rural Tibetans through control over their language and traditional Buddhist culture.
The international rights organization cited a trove of Chinese internal reports contradicting official pronouncements that all Tibetans who have been forced to move, with their past homes destroyed on departure, did so voluntary.
The relocations fit a pattern of often-violent demands that ethnic minorities adopt the state language of Mandarin and pledge their fealty to the ruling Communist Party in western and northern territories that include millions of people from Tibetan, Xinjiang Uyghur, Mongolian and other minority groups.
China claims Tibet has been part of its territory for centuries, although it only established firm control over the Himalayan region after the Communist Party swept to power during a civil war in 1949.
''These coercive tactics can be traced to pressure placed on local officials by higher-level authorities who routinely characterize the relocation program as a non-negotiable, politically critical policy coming straight from the national capital, Beijing, or from Lhasa, the regional capital," HRW said in the report. ''This leaves local officials no flexibility in implementation at the local level and requires them to obtain 100 percent agreement from affected villagers to relocate.''
The report said official statistics suggest that by the end of 2025, more than 930,000 rural Tibetans will have been relocated to urban centers where they are deprived of their traditional sources of income and have difficulty finding work. Lhasa and other large towns have drawn large numbers of migrants from China's dominant Han ethnic group who dominant politics and the economy.
More than 3 million of the more than 4.5 million Tibetans in rural areas have been forced to build homes and give up their traditional nomadic lifestyles based on yak herding and agriculture, the report said. Along with the official Tibetan Autonomous Region, Tibetans make up communities in the neighboring provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan and Qinghai.
''These relocations of rural communities erode or cause major damage to Tibetan culture and ways of life, not least because most relocation programs in Tibet move former farmers and pastoralists to areas where they cannot practice their former livelihood and have no choice but to seek work as wage laborers in off-farm industries,'' HRW said.
