Adrian Zenz | Columbia International University (original) (raw)

Books by Adrian Zenz

Mapping Amdo: Dynamics of Power, 2020

Current studies on Tibetan education in China have predominantly focused on primary and secondary... more Current studies on Tibetan education in China have predominantly focused on primary and secondary education. Research on Tibetan tertiary education has been sparse by comparison. However, there have been important developments in Tibetan higher education during the past two decades that warrant closer examination. The present study seeks to provide a brief descriptive and primarily quantitative overview of the growth and diversification of Tibetan-medium tertiary degree programs across most major Tibetan regions in China during the past decade. Despite various positive developments, Tibetan higher education continues to face an uncertain future.

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Chapter 6 of the book

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The Amdo Research Network (ARN) brings together a diverse range of scholars from different fields... more The Amdo Research Network (ARN) brings together a diverse range of scholars from different fields and disciplines, all with a focus on Amdo Tibetan regions along with the western Chinese province of Qinghai.

This initial volume, subtitled "Dynamics of Change", is the result of the first ARN workshop held at the Humboldt University of Berlin in December 2014. Based on recent ethnographic fieldwork and other new data sources, the contributors of this unique volume touch on a wide range of both contemporary and historical topics, ranging from socio-economic transformations and dynamics of ethnicity and relatendess to religious and ecological dimensions.

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In the context of the ending of China's socialist job assignment system for graduates from vocati... more In the context of the ending of China's socialist job assignment system for graduates from vocational and tertiary institutions, the question of graduate employment has been a major issue – especially in minority regions. With the rapid growth of tertiary-level Tibetan-medium educational programmes and related graduate numbers first pointed out in Zenz (2013), the question of adequate employment opportunities is driving a wedge between the more conservative and the more pragmatic sections of the Tibetan community. The relative lack of secure and well-remunerated private enterprise jobs in much of China's West reinforces the strong dependence on state-related employment. This chapter examines recent increases in the number of graduates from tertiary Tibetan-medium degree programmes and compares them with corresponding figures for: a) graduate numbers for all degrees, and b) advertised government positions that require either Tibetan-medium degrees or Tibetan language skills. Public employment advertisements that stipulate Tibetan-medium degrees are an essential source of employment for Tibetan-medium graduates, because recruitment outcomes show that they are otherwise rarely able to successfully compete with Chinese-medium educated Tibetans or Han when seeking government jobs. However, the data from recent years reveals a severe discrepancy between Tibetan-medium graduate numbers and related advertised jobs. The rapid growth of Tibetan-medium education provision was driven by the creation of new Tibetan-medium degree programmes. This was designed to improve the employment prospects of graduates from Tibetan-medium tertiary education. However, public recruitment practices have failed to draw on this new diversity.

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In 'Tibetanness' Under Threat?, Adrian Zenz pioneers an analysis of significant recent developmen... more In 'Tibetanness' Under Threat?, Adrian Zenz pioneers an analysis of significant recent developments in Qinghai's Tibetan education system. Presently, Tibetan students can receive native language education from primary to tertiary levels, while university minority departments offer Tibetan-medium majors from computer science to secretarial studies.

However, positive developments are threatened by the dire career prospects of Tibetan-medium graduates. Tibetans view marketisation as the greatest threat to ethnocultural survival, with their young generation being lured into a Chinese education by superior employment prospects. But Zenz questions the easy equation of Tibetan education as 'unselfish' ethnic preservation versus the Chinese route as egocentric careerism, arguing that the creative educational strategies of Tibetans in the Chinese education system are important for exploring and expressing new forms of 'Tibetanness' in modern China.

REVIEW:
'not many works carry the potential of injecting fresh perspectives into the polarized understandings of development in Tibet as either domination/subjugation or liberation/progress. Adrian Zenz offers this potential in his book (...). With a focus on the ever-sensitive subject of education, the book strikes a nuanced balance between the agency–structure dualism of Han Chinese dominance versus Tibetan-led initiatives that subvert or counter this dominance. In particular, it offers a rare insight into the dynamics of minority education that will unsettle the dominant view that Tibetan-medium education has been eroded since the “golden years” of Tibetanization in the 1980s.(...) Overall, the value of his work is immense for our understanding of contemporary Tibet, minority nationality policy in China, and the anthropology of education more generally.'
Andrew M. Fischer, The China Quarterly, 219 (2014)

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Papers by Adrian Zenz

Journal of Human Trafficking, 2023

Following research reports of widespread forced labor in China's northwestern Xinjiang region, th... more Following research reports of widespread forced labor in China's northwestern Xinjiang region, the U.S. Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act took effect in June 2022. In September 2022, the European Commission proposed legislation prohibiting products involving forced labor on the EU market. This proposal specifies the use of 11 forced labor indicators published by the International Labour Organization (ILO). However, these indicators were originally designed not for measurement, but to help inspectors recognize signs of forced labor at workplaces. They are especially ill-suited to identify state-imposed forced labor mobilization processes-an understudied and under-conceptualized form of human trafficking. This article performs the first academic assessment of the suitability of the ILO's lesser-known 2012 Survey Guidelines for measuring non-internment state-imposed forced labor systems found in Xinjiang and other Central Asian regions and examines how these systems operate. It argues that while the Guidelines are generally suitable, they require significant adaptations. Due to the inherent nature of state-imposed forced labor, policymakers need to reverse the burden of proof of forced labor or else risk severe underenforcement.

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Central Asian Survey, 2023

This paper argues that in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, work placements of re-educat... more This paper argues that in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, work placements of re-education detainees and Xinjiang's implementation of the national Poverty Alleviation through Labor Transfer program for the transfer of rural surplus laborers operate under fundamentally different policies. Drawing on new documentary and witness evidence, it is argued that within Xinjiang's unique context of frontier settler colonialism, its recent coercive labor transfer program evolved alongside decades-long efforts to facilitate surplus labor transfers throughout China. From 2014, when Beijing shifted the region's work focus towards de-extremification, Uyghur underemployment was framed as a matter of social stability and national security. Between 2017 and 2019, labor transfer coercion dramatically increased alongside campaigns of mass internment and of enforcing poverty alleviation work goals. Xinjiang's shift in 2021 from a campaign-style mobilizational to an institutionalized approach deepens coercive risks of this often poorly understood coercive labor strategy.

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The China Journal, 2023

This paper argues that China's campaign of reeducation and forced labor in the Xinjiang Uyghur Au... more This paper argues that China's campaign of reeducation and forced labor in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) through so-called "Vocational Skills Education and Training Centers" (VSETCs) represents a significant conceptual innovation over prior labor reform. Beijing's erstwhile penal labor 2 systems treated labor as an integral part of reeducation, but suffered from limited reeducation results, low work productivity, and poor resocialization outcomes. In contrast, the VSETC system pragmatically eschews Maoist tenets of labor's transformational power: its internment camps prioritize intensive reeducation, followed by a process of gradual release into potentially more efficient non-prison enterprises. The resulting potential profitability gains translate into higher economic sustainabilityan essential prerequisite for the system's primary goal of long-term assimilation and coercive integration of resistant ethnic groups into Beijing's social order. However, VSETC's and the region's focus on control and disintegrating ethnic social capital undermines its integrative efforts, replicating a long-standing weakness of prior labor reform.

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Journal of Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 2023

This study traces the evolution of systemic state-sponsored coercive labor in the cotton harvest ... more This study traces the evolution of systemic state-sponsored coercive labor in the cotton harvest in China's northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). The recent situation in the XUAR is compared to Uzbekistan, which implemented forced labor in cotton-picking until 2021. Both regions create structurally coercive labor environments through a centralized authoritarian state apparatus that deploys human resource-intensive local grassroots mobilization efforts. The article finds that while both regional entities' coercive labor dynamics are in many ways comparable, the resulting labor settings are not easily captured through static standard measures such as the ILO forced labor indicators. Instead, state-sponsored forced labor is characterized by pervasive state-induced and systemic dynamics of coercion that are deeply embedded within sociocultural contexts. Whereas Uzbekistan's coercive labor practices were primarily driven by economic considerations, Xinjiang's labor transfer program, which continued through 2022, pursues some economic aims but is predominantly designed to achieve Beijing's wider ethnopolitical goals in the region.

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This paper exploits a new and exciting source of data on public employment recruitment in order t... more This paper exploits a new and exciting source of data on public employment recruitment in order to analyse the evolution of Tibetan representation and preferential hiring practices in public employment in all Tibetan areas from 2007 to 2015. Despite the limitations of these data, they provide a far more substantiated understanding of recent conditions than currently exists in the literature, even in the Chinese literature. Several major insights can be made from scrutinizing these data. First, following the retrenchment in public employment in the early 2000s and then the ending of the job placement system (Ch. fenpei), there was a strong increase in public employment recruitment from 2011 onwards. Second, Tibetan representation within the recruitment did not collapse, although it lagged significantly; within our sample of outcome documents, Tibetans were underrepresented in the recruitments across all Tibetan areas from 2007 to 2015, without any apparent regional or temporal patter...

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In 2019 and 2020, the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) introduced new policies to promote the system... more In 2019 and 2020, the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) introduced new policies to promote the systematic, centralized, and large-scale training and transfer of “rural surplus laborers” to other parts of the TAR, as well as to other provinces of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In the first 7 months of 2020, the region had trained over half a million rural surplus laborers through this policy. This scheme encompasses Tibetans of all ages, covers the entire region, and is distinct from the coercive vocational training of secondary students and young adults reported by exile Tibetans (RFA, October 29, 2019).

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Journal of Political Risk, 2019

After recruiting large numbers of police forces, installing massive surveillance systems, and int... more After recruiting large numbers of police forces, installing massive surveillance systems, and interning vast numbers of predominantly Turkic minority population members, many have been wondering about Beijing's next step in its so-called "war on Terror" in Xinjiang. In this report it is argued based on government documents that the state's long-term stability maintenance strategy in Xinjiang is predicated upon a perverse and extremely intrusive combination of forced or at least involuntary training and labor, intergenerational separation and social control over family units. Much of this is being implemented under the heading and guise of "poverty alleviation". The findings presented below call for nothing less than a global investigation of supply chains involving Chinese products or product components, and for a greatly increased scrutiny of trade flows along China's Belt and Road.

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Central Asian Survey, 2021

Chinese academics and politicians argue that Xinjiang’s ‘terrorism’ problem can only be solved by... more Chinese academics and politicians argue that Xinjiang’s ‘terrorism’ problem can only be solved by ‘optimizing’ its ethnic population structure. High ethnic minority population concentrations are considered a national security threat. ‘Optimizing’ such concentrations requires ‘embedding’ substantial Han populations, whose ‘positive culture’ can mitigate the Uyghur ‘human problem’. Scenarios that do not overburden the region’s ecological carrying capacity entail drastic reductions in ethnic minority natural population growth, potentially decreasing their populations. Population ‘optimization’ discourses and related policies provide a basis to assess Beijing’s ‘intent’ to destroy an ethnic minority population in part through birth prevention per the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention. The ‘destruction in part’ can be assessed as the difference between projected natural population growth without substantial government interference and reduced growth scenarios in line with population ‘optimization’ requirements. Based on population projections by Chinese researchers, this difference could range between 2.6 and 4.5 million lives by 2040.

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Central Asian Survey

Since spring 2017, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China has witnessed the emergence of ... more Since spring 2017, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China has witnessed the emergence of an unprecedented reeducation campaign. According to media and informant reports, untold thousands of Uyghurs and other Muslims have been and are being detained in clandestine political re-education facilities, with major implications for society, local economies and ethnic relations. Considering that the Chinese state is currently denying the very existence of these facilities, this paper investigates publicly available evidence from official sources, including government websites, media reports and other Chinese internet sources. First, it briefly charts the history and present context of political re-education. Second, it looks at the recent evolution of re-education in Xinjiang in the context of ‘de-extremification’ work. Finally, it evaluates detailed empirical evidence pertaining to the present re-education drive. With Xinjiang as the ‘core hub’ of the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing appears determined to pursue a definitive solution to the Uyghur question.

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The China Quarterly

Following a series of high-profile attacks in Beijing, Kunming and Urumqi by Uyghur militants, th... more Following a series of high-profile attacks in Beijing, Kunming and Urumqi by Uyghur militants, the Chinese party-state declared a “war on terror” in 2014. Since then, China's Xinjiang region has witnessed an unprecedented build-up of what we describe as a multi-tiered police force, turning it into one of the most heavily policed regions in the world. This article investigates the securitization of Xinjiang through an analysis of official police recruitment documents. Informal police jobs, which represent the backbone of recent recruitment drives, have historically carried inferior pay levels. Yet, advertised assistant police positions in Xinjiang now offer high salaries despite low educational requirements, thereby attracting lesser-educated applicants, many of whom are ethnic minorities. Besides co-opting Uyghurs into policing their own people, the resulting employment is in itself a significant stability maintenance strategy. While the known numbers of violent attacks have sub...

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Jamestown Foundation China Brief, 2021

Newly uncovered evidence from public and non-public Chinese government and academic sources indic... more Newly uncovered evidence from public and non-public Chinese government and academic sources indicates that labor transfers of ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) to other regions and other provinces are part of a state-run scheme to forcibly uproot them, assimilate them and reduce their population density. An independent legal analysis conducted on the basis of the new evidence presented in this report concludes that Xinjiang’s labor transfer scheme meets the criteria for Crimes Against Humanity of Forcible Transfer and Persecution as defined under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The present study draws on previously untranslated material, most notably the “Nankai Report,” deleted from the Chinese internet in mid-2020 but obtained by the author.

The Nankai Report gives strong and authoritative evidence for large-scale, coercive stated-driven recruitments into labor transfers and for the securitized nature of such transfers to other provinces. It notes that these transfers are intended to “reduce labor costs” for companies.

However, the Report also makes it clear that poverty alleviation through labor transfer is a means to a more troubling end. First, it bluntly states that the state took the “drastic short-term measure” of placing many Uyghurs into “Education and Training Centers” (a euphemism for re-education camps). Second, it notes that labor transfers represent a long-term measure to promote “assimilation” and “reduce Uyghur population density”. The Report recommends that this program should be “initiated quietly” with “no need to overly publicize this internationally.”

Overall, the evidence shows that labor transfers constitute intentional displacements of populations deemed “problematic” by the government. This is complemented by two previously unreported campaigns: a) a large-scale transfer scheme by which hundreds of thousands of ethnic minority farmers and pastoralists transfer usage rights to their land or herds to state-run collectives for the purpose of “liberating” them to become industrial laborers; and b) a campaign to settle 300,000 additional Han Chinese settlers in Uyghur heartland regions by 2022 in order to “optimize southern Xinjiang’s population structure.”

Based on the author’s survey of Chinese academic research and government figures, up to 1.6 million transferred laborers are estimated to be generally at risk of being subjected to forced labor (see Section 2.7).

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Jamestown Foundation China Brief, 2021

This paper provides new evidence from Chinese sources, notably previously untranslated documents ... more This paper provides new evidence from Chinese sources, notably previously untranslated documents such as the “Nankai Report”, that Xinjiang’s labor transfers to other regions or provinces in China meet the forced labor definition of the International Labor Organization (ILO). The report develops a process-focused evaluation model for evaluating coercion at each stage of the labor transfer program.

The Nankai Report, along with other Chinese academic sources, indicates that labor transfers are not just serving economic purposes, but are implemented with the intention to forcibly displace ethnic minority populations from their heartlands, intentionally reducing their population density, and tearing apart homogeneous communities.

Based on the new findings presented in this report, several experts in international criminal law agree that there are “credible grounds for concluding” that Xinjiang’s labor transfer scheme meets the criteria for Crimes Against Humanity of Forcible Transfer and Persecution as defined under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

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Center for Global Policy, 2020

New evidence from Chinese government documents and media reports shows that hundreds of thousands... more New evidence from Chinese government documents and media reports shows that hundreds of thousands of ethnic minority laborers in Xinjiang are being forced to pick cotton by hand through a coercive state-mandated labor transfer and “poverty alleviation” scheme, with potentially drastic consequences for global supply chains. Xinjiang produces 85 percent of China’s and 20 percent of the world’s cotton.
Chinese cotton products, in turn, constitute an important basis for garment production in numerous other Asian countries.

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Journal of Political Risk, 2019

After recruiting a hundred or more thousand police forces, installing massive surveillance system... more After recruiting a hundred or more thousand police forces, installing massive surveillance systems, and interning vast numbers of predominantly Turkic minority population members, many have been wondering about Beijing’s next step in its so-called “war on Terror” in Xinjiang. Since the second half of 2018, limited but apparently growing numbers of detainees have been released into different forms of forced labor. In this report it is argued based on government documents that the state’s long-term stability maintenance strategy in Xinjiang is predicated upon a perverse and extremely intrusive combination of forced or at least involuntary training and labor, intergenerational separation and social control over family units. Much of this is being implemented under the heading and guise of “poverty alleviation”. ---- Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 12 --- Access at https://www.jpolrisk.com/beyond-the-camps-beijings-long-term-scheme-of-coercive-labor-poverty-alleviation-and-social-control-in-xinjiang/

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Mapping Amdo: Dynamics of Power, 2020

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Chapter 6 of the book

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Journal of Human Trafficking, 2023

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Central Asian Survey, 2023

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The China Journal, 2023

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Journal of Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 2023

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Journal of Political Risk, 2019

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Central Asian Survey, 2021

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Central Asian Survey

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The China Quarterly

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Jamestown Foundation China Brief, 2021

The present study draws on previously untranslated material, most notably the “Nankai Report,” deleted from the Chinese internet in mid-2020 but obtained by the author.

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Jamestown Foundation China Brief, 2021

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Center for Global Policy, 2020

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Journal of Political Risk, 2019

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Journal of Political Risk, 2020

More than any other government document pertaining to Beijing’s extralegal campaign of mass inter... more More than any other government document pertaining to Beijing’s extralegal campaign of mass internment in Xinjiang, the Karakax List lays bare the ideological and administrative micromechanics of a system of targeted cultural genocide that arguably rivals any similar attempt in the history of humanity. Driven by a deeply religio-phobic worldview, Beijing has embarked on a project that, ideologically, isn’t far from a medieval witch-hunt, yet is being executed with administrative perfectionism and iron discipline. Being distrustful of the true intentions of its minority citizens, the state has established a system of governance that fully substitutes trust with control. That, however, is also set to become its greatest long-term liability. Xinjiang’s mechanisms of governance are both labor-intensive and predicated upon highly unequal power structures that often run along and increase ethnic fault lines. The long-term ramifications of this arrangement for social stability and ethnic relations are impossible to predict.

Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 8, No. 2
https://www.jpolrisk.com/karakax/

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Jamestown Foundation China Brief, 2020

A sweeping crackdown starting in late 2016 transformed Xinjiang into a draconian police state. Wh... more A sweeping crackdown starting in late 2016 transformed Xinjiang into a draconian police state. While state control over reproduction has long been a common part of the birth control regime in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the situation in Xinjiang has become especially severe following a policy of mass internment initiated in early 2017 by officials of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

In 2019, a growing number of witnesses testified to the fact that Xinjiang authorities were administering unknown drugs and injections to women in detention, forcibly implanting intrauterine contraceptive devices (IUDs) prior to internment, coercing women to accept surgical sterilization, and using internment as punishment for birth control violations.

For the first time, the veracity and scale of these anecdotal accounts can be confirmed through a systematic analysis of government documents. Key findings include:

Natural population growth in Xinjiang’s minority regions declined dramatically since 2017. Growth rates fell by 84 percent in the two largest Uyghur prefectures between 2015 and 2018, and declined further in several minority regions in 2019. For 2020, one Uyghur region set a near-zero birth rate target of 1.05 per mille.

Government documents bluntly mandate that birth control violations are punishable by extrajudicial internment.

Documents reveal a targeted campaign of promoting “free” birth prevention surgeries and services in southern Xinjiang’s rural minority regions starting in 2019, with two counties publishing targets for sterilizing up to 34 percent of all rural females of reproductive age in 2019 alone. This project had sufficient funding for performing hundreds of thousands of tubal ligation sterilization procedures in 2019 and 2020, with at least one region receiving additional central government funding.
By 2019, Xinjiang planned to subject at least 80 percent of women of childbearing age in the rural southern four minority prefectures to intrusive birth prevention surgeries (IUDs or sterilizations). In 2018, 80 percent of all net added IUD placements in China (calculated as placements minus removals) were performed in Xinjiang (the region only makes up 1.8 percent of the nation’s population).

Between 2015 and 2018, about 860,000 ethnic Han residents left Xinjiang, while up to 2 million new residents were added to Xinjiang’s Han majority regions. These figures raise concerns that Beijing is doubling down on a policy of Han settler colonialism.

These findings provide the strongest evidence yet that Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang meet one of the genocide criteria cited in the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, namely that of Section D of Article II: “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the [targeted] group” (United Nations, December 9, 1948).

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Since spring 2017, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China has witnessed the emergence of ... more Since spring 2017, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in
China has witnessed the emergence of an unprecedented reeducation
campaign. According to media and informant reports,
untold thousands of Uyghurs and other Muslims have been and
are being detained in clandestine political re-education facilities,
with major implications for society, local economies and ethnic
relations. Considering that the Chinese state is currently denying
the very existence of these facilities, this paper investigates
publicly available evidence from official sources, including
government websites, media reports and other Chinese internet
sources. First, it briefly charts the history and present context of
political re-education. Second, it looks at the recent evolution of
re-education in Xinjiang in the context of ‘de-extremification’
work. Finally, it evaluates detailed empirical evidence pertaining
to the present re-education drive. With Xinjiang as the ‘core hub’
of the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing appears determined to
pursue a definitive solution to the Uyghur question.

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China Brief, 2017

Over the last year, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) Party Secretary Chen Quanguo (陈全国) h... more Over the last year, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) Party Secretary Chen Quanguo (陈全国) has dramatically increased the police presence in Xinjiang by advertising over 90,000 new police and security-related positions. This soldier-turned-politician is little known outside of China, but within China he has gained a reputation as an ethnic policy innovator, pioneering a range of new methods for securing Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule over Uyghurs, Tibetans and other ethnic minorities in western China. (published via China Brief, Jamestown Foundation)

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Based on an entirely unexplored source of data, this paper analyses the evolution of Tibetan repr... more Based on an entirely unexplored source of data, this paper analyses the evolution of Tibetan representation and preferentiality within public employment recruitment across all Tibetan areas from 2007 to 2015. While recruitment collapsed after the end of the job placement system (fenpei) in the early to mid-2000s, there was a strong increase in public employment recruitment from 2011 onwards. Tibetans were underrepresented within this increase, although not severely, and various implicit practices of preferentiality bolstered such representation, with distinct variations across regions and time. The combination reasserted the predominant role of the state as employer of educated millennials in Tibetan areas to the extent of re-introducing employment guarantees. We refer to this as the innovation of a neo-fenpei system. This new system is most clearly observed in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) from 2011 to 2016, although it appears to have been abandoned in 2017. One effect of neo-fenpei, in contrast to its predecessor, is that it accentuates university education as a driver of differentiation within emerging urban employment. The evolution of these recruitment practices reflects the complex tensions in Tibetan areas regarding the overarching goal of security and social stability (weiwen) emphasized by the Xi–Li administration, which has maintained systems of minority preferentiality but in a manner that enhances assimilationist trends rather than minority group empowerment.

根据一组完全没有被研究过的原始数据, 本文分析了 2007 年至 2015 年之间, 整个藏族地区公职人员招聘中藏族的代表比例和优待的演变。虽然在 2000 年代早中期工作分配制度结束后, 招聘一度瓦解, 2011 年以后公职人员招聘又有强劲增长。藏人在这波增长中没有被充分代表, 但是并不严重。各种隐性的优待招聘实践还增加了这种代表比例, 在不同的地区和时间有明显的区别。这种组合重申了国家在受教育的千禧一代的就业中的主导地位, 以至于到了重新引入就业保障的地步。我们把此种创新称为新分配制度, 这种情形在西藏自治区最为明显。相对于它的前身, 新分配的一个效应就是它强调了大学教育在新兴城市就业中作为划分的驱动因素。这些招聘实践的演变显示了习李政府强调的安全和维稳的总体目标在藏族地区的复杂的张力 ——它虽然保持了少数民族优待的制度, 却在某种意义上强化了藏族的被同化而不是少数民族的自主性。

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