China's precision poverty alleviation endeavors have delivered what amounts to a historic achievement in the autonomous region and thus gone a long way toward ensuring local residents' inherent rights to subsistence and development, experts said at a side-event of the 46th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council.

 

Tibet's efforts to balance poverty relief with ecological protection and culture development also grabbed the limelight of the symposium. A host of progress was cited at the meeting in terms of cultural heritage protection, including the newly released versions of the Tibetan epic "King Gesar."

 

Xiao Jie, a researcher at the China Tibetology Research Center (CTRC), rejected the accusations by a couple of Western scholars that the poverty relief process involved "forced labor, mandatory vocational training or cultural genocide," saying the claims are totally contrary to the facts on the ground and tinged with profound ideological prejudice.

 

Poverty relief in Tibet has long been a top priority of China's central government, according to Zhalo, director of the CTRC institute for social and economic studies.

 

An array of preferential measures rolled out over the years have helped eradicate extreme poverty in Tibet, he added.

 

The symposium was jointly sponsored by the China Society of Human Rights Studies, the Permanent Mission of the People's Republic of China to the UN Office at Geneva and Other International Organizations in Switzerland, the China Association for Preservation and Development of Tibetan Culture and the CTRC.

 

More than 100 experts and scholars from home and abroad took part in the symposium via online and offline platforms.