China sharply expands mass labor program in Tibet

I think we don't confront China because we'd have to admit that the same process of cultural annihilation is also happening to western nations through multiculturalism and mass migration.

I'm currently reading Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History and the origins are the following:

* Initially they had a huge amount of prisoners and shortage of workers in key regions. Naturally they had them work in remote areas.

* The real motivation is economic - the central planners simply loved the flexibility of slave labor - they could start pet projects quickly. They wanted to complete vanity projects that made no economic sense like the Belomorcanal. Their need for hard currency also meant that they needed raw resources for export, most of which were in faraway, underdeveloped regions.

* Repressive organs found that they were strongly incentivised to send even more people to the camps.

* There was obviously no free media - which meant that any excess was covered up or spun as success - for example Gorky acknowledged that prisoners don't have the proper skills or tools, but somehow claimed that ideology and superb management created wonders. This eventually emboldened the government to enslave even more people.

In short they created a slave economy. It wasn't by design, in so far that the leaders of the country didn't explicitly wish the return of slavery and serfdom, but there was a spiral of reinforcing incentives in the system.

Just like the USSR of the 20s and 30s China is desperate to create economic growth at all costs, will eventually run out of cheap rural labor[0], on which it used to rely for the last few decades and is not beholden to either national or international opinion. Who can stop the CPC from reintroducing slavery or serfdom? The Gulag system developed over 10 years to reach it its classical form, we may well see the first steps.

Economist Evsey Domar famously created a model where high labour demand and lots of available land creates incentives for landowners to reintroduce serfdom [1] as they didn't want to compete with each other. Is China's capital being accustomed to cheap labourers migrating from poor rural areas the reason why rural minorities are now forced into labour by the government?

[0]: https://tradingeconomics.com/china/rural-population-percent-... - this is the total rural population, but I assume eventually many of the remaining people will be old or average-off Han that like it in the villages.

[1]: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/63299/causeso...

Also, quite amusing you gave it a grade of A+. Can you define your scale? What constitutes A+ and is that the highest rating? Is this really the best example of projection you've ever seen?

My wife is from Sichuan which is bordering Tibet. It is a bit more complicated than that. Over the years the development has been fast but still far behind the majority of China. The polices to 'encourage' and harness the great overall economic growth were uniquely shaped and had an element of 'outdated' fashion (or USSR style if that's your opinion). And the flags and posters you saw is probably a chicken and egg problem: the gov sees misinformation (or propaganda from west depends on your view) and wants more territorial control (against the largely available chinese language free Tibet tabloids) and people who actually wants to use it as a way to get more support from the gov. It was nothing like that a decade ago, the social media amplification definitely accelerated that as well.

>From our Western perspective it feels so wrong that they're essentially trying to extinguish an entire culture and 'fitting' it into China.

Yeah, kinda like Hawaii. (Not to mention Native Americans' lands, civilization, and culture). Or, well, Mexico.

Sure, it's, "whataboutism". Which is an improvement on the our-shit-doesn't-smell-besides-that-was-back-a-while-ago-so-we-get-to-keep-it-now "Western perspective". Or the "sure-we-can-get-to-our-shady-stuff-but-at-some-other-time-now-let's-talk-as-if-only-those-bad-countries-do-such-things".

>Plus, China isn't going to be impressed when the old Imperial continent with 140 ex-colonies and the current imperial top-dog with 800 foreign military bases are going to lecture them about occupying a territory.

Yeah, that's the problem I'm talking about.

>For China Tibet is a buffer between India and them and it is where most of their water comes from, so they're never going to let any foreign entity control it. Seems out of the question.

Yes. Plus they have old claims to the area (as valid as a claim can be). Populations whose countries have wars and bases and proxy states and/or colonies all over the world (where they have absolutely no place to be), are in a "glass house" place to throw stones at what China does in its immediate borders...