The United States said Tuesday it was imposing visa sanctions on Chinese officials pursuing "forced assimilation" of children in Tibet, where UN experts say one million children have been separated from their families.

In the latest of a series of US moves on Beijing despite a resumption of high-level dialogue, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States would restrict visas to Chinese officials behind the policy of state boarding schools.

"These coercive policies seek to eliminate Tibet's distinct linguistic, cultural and religious traditions among younger generations of Tibetans," Blinken said in a statement.

"We urge PRC authorities to end the coercion of Tibetan children into government-run boarding schools and to cease repressive assimilation policies, both in Tibet and throughout other parts of the PRC," he said, referring to the People's Republic of China.

The United States since 2021 has accused China of waging genocide in another region, Xinjiang, through what US officials, rights groups and witnesses say is a vast network of forced labor camps. China denies the charge.

A State Department spokesperson said the new restrictions would apply to current and former officials involved in education policy in Tibet but did not give further details, citing US confidentiality laws on visa records.

The United States separately imposed sanctions in December on two top-ranking Chinese officials, Wu Yingjie and Zhang Hongbo, over what Washington said were widespread human rights violations in Tibet.

The program appears aimed at unwillingly integrating Tibetans into China's majority Han culture, with compulsory education in Mandarin and no instruction culturally relevant to the Buddhist-majority Himalayan region, the special rapporteurs said.

A separate report this year from UN experts said that hundreds of thousands of Tibetans have also been forced out of traditional rural life into low-skill "vocational training" as a pretext to undermine their identity.

The International Campaign for Tibet, a pressure group close to the region's spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, applauded Blinken's action against the "unconscionable" separation of children.