Audio Commentary: China - Tibetan Herders Forcibly Relocated

 
(Audio Commentary in Tibetan)  
 
I am Sophie Richardson, the deputy director of the Asia division at Human Rights Watch. The report that we are releasing today is about the Chinese government’s forcible relocation of Tibetan herders to more urban areas.

Related Material "No One Has the Liberty to Refuse:" Tibetan Herders Forcibly Relocated in Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan and the Tibet Autonomous Region Report, June 10, 2007 China: Tibetan Herders’ Livelihood in Jeopardy Press Release, June 10, 2007 Audio Commentary in Tibetan Audio Clip, June 10, 2007 Free Email Newsletter

One of the most serious problems with these relocations is that people are not really given an opportunity to object to being resettled and they are being denied their right to compensation. This is an idea that is popular in some Chinese political and economic circles, that the way to development is essentially the creation of more urban economies, meaning that if people live in more geographically concentrated areas and have jobs like keeping shops or running small businesses or working for local government offices that the kind of economy that creates is more conducive to long-term development.  
 
And the problem for Tibetan herders of course is that they’ve spent all of their lives being herders and they have no experience of urban settings or urban work. And the reality is that once they’re resettled in these areas they are unable to secure anything other than temporary or menial labor, probably because many of them don’t speak Chinese or they lack the capital to start small businesses, and so although one of the purported reasons for these policies has to do with economic development, many of the people we’ve talked to have, in fact, found themselves to be financially much worse off because they have been resettled.  
 
The potential impact is quite serious. The Chinese government has said that it is resettling people both for the purpose of promoting economic development and for environmental protections. These are not completely unreasonable objectives. This is a part of the country that is very poor. China is suffering from a number of different environmental problems.  
 
The question is really whether these policies actually address those problems, and also whether there isn’t another agenda at work here that, in effect, is concentrating Tibetans into more legible and more controllable geographical areas, removing them from traditional forces of income and making them essentially more dependent on the central government in a way that will make it difficult for them to maintain a distinct identity.  
 
So while at first glance these look like economic or environmental policies, in fact, we think that there are serious potential consequences due for Tibetans’ unique way of living. And these are the right to livelihood, the right to language, freedom of religion, freedom of expression—these are all rights guaranteed by Chinese domestic and international law.  
 
What we call on the Chinese government to do is essentially impose a moratorium on resettlements until there can be an effective mechanism put in place to review the resettlement policy and the negative impact on the rights of herders.  

 

 

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