Since 2016, the Chinese government has dramatically accelerated the relocation of rural villagers and herders in Tibet. The government says that these relocations—often to areas hundreds of kilometers away—are voluntary and that they will “improve people’s livelihood” and “protect the ecological environment.”
This report, drawing on over 1,000 official Chinese media articles between 2016 and 2023 as well as government publications and academic field studies, shows that China’s own media reports in many cases contradict the claims that all those relocated gave their consent.
The news articles instead indicate that participation in “whole-village relocation” programs in Tibet is in effect compulsory. The articles describe high levels of reluctance to relocate among many Tibetans from those villages. In one case, 200 households out of 262 in the village did not initially want to relocate to a new location which was nearly 1,000 kilometers away. In another village scheduled for relocation, all the residents except for a Chinese Communist Party activist initially disagreed with the plan to move the village. In all cases, the reports say these villagers eventually gave their consent to move. Human Rights Watch has not found any case where a village or any of its members scheduled for relocation has been able to avoid being moved.
The official press reports indicate the extreme forms of persuasion—that is, coercion—used by officials to pressure villagers and nomadic people or nomads to agree to whole-village relocation. These methods include repeated home visits; denigrating the intellectual capacity of the villagers to make decisions for themselves; implicit threats of punishment; banning of criticism; and threats of disciplinary action against local officials who fail to meet targets. In some cases, officials of increasing seniority visited families at their homes to gain their “consent,” visits that sometimes were repeated over several years. Some official press reports and videos obtained by Human Rights Watch show officials telling residents that essential services would be cut to their current homes if they did not move. Others showed authorities openly threatening villagers who voiced disagreements about the relocations, accusing them of “spreading rumors” and ordering officials to crack down on such actions “swiftly and resolutely”—implying administrative and criminal penalties. This report includes three case studies that show in detail the timelines, objectives, arguments, and methods used to obtain the “consent” of residents of entire villages to relocate.
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. 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.
In addition to whole-village relocations, there is also a second form of relocation in Tibet—that of individual households. This form of relocation typically involves officials selecting poorer households for relocation in areas presented as more suitable for income generation. While participants can decline to take part, Human Rights Watch found in many cases that officials provided families misleading information about the economic benefits of relocation to gain their consent. From previous projects, it should be evident to the officials that many rural people relocated would be unable to find sustainable work in their new environment.
Even surveys carried out by official scholars at relocation sites in Tibet—which tend not to criticize the government—variously concluded that many of those relocated “cannot find suitable jobs to support their families,” and “satisfaction with relocation is low.” A 2014 review of an earlier relocation program in eastern Tibet found that even after 10 years, 69 percent of relocatees were still facing financial difficulties and 49 percent wished that they could move back to their original homes on the grasslands. False expectations created by officials who knowingly provide rural Tibetans misleading or false information about the economic benefit of relocation likely contributes to the dissatisfaction.
In both whole-village and individual-household relocations, Chinese law requires those who have been relocated to demolish their former homes to deter them from returning. Our research found that officials in Tibet are often enforcing this requirement.
Official statistics suggest that between 2000 and 2025, the Chinese authorities will have relocated over 930,000 rural Tibetans (see Appendix I). Most of these relocations—over 709,000 people or 76 percent of these relocations—have taken place since 2016. Among these 709,000 people relocated, 140,000 are moved as part of the whole village relocation drives, 567,000 as part of individual household relocations
In this same period between 2000 and 2025, 3.36 million rural Tibetans have been affected by other government programs requiring them to rebuild their houses and to adopt a sedentary way of life if they are nomads, without necessarily being relocated.
Given that there are 4.55 million Tibetans living in rural areas in the People’s Republic of China, these figures suggest that most rural Tibetans have been impacted by Chinese government relocation or rehousing policies in the past two decades. Many of them have had to move or rebuild their homes more than once.
While such mass relocations of residents have been occurring elsewhere in poor rural areas in China, these drives risk causing a devastating impact on Tibetan communities. Together with current Chinese government programs to assimilate Tibetan schooling, culture, and religion into those of the “Chinese nation,” 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.
The relocation program in Tibet contravenes international human rights law standards. International law prohibits “forced evictions,” which have been defined as the removal of individuals, families, or communities against their will from their homes or land without access to appropriate forms of legal or other protection. Forced evictions include those that lack meaningful consultation or compensation, and which do not consider “all feasible alternatives” to relocation. Otherwise, lawful evictions must still be carried out in compliance with relevant international human rights law and “in accordance with general principles of reasonableness and proportionality.”
Source: Human Rights Watch