“Liberation” and “sovereignty” were the buzzwords in Tibet this weekend, as the autonomous region celebrated 50 years of abolishing slavery and urged to maintain peace and stability from separatist forces.
“The struggle between us and the Dalai clique is not an issue of ethics, religion or human rights,” Tibet’s Party chief Zhang Qingli told a crowd of 13,000 people in front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa, the region’s capital city, on Saturday, the first Serfs Emancipation Day.
“It’s about maintaining national sovereignty and territorial integrity... (we must) firmly stand guard and severely crack down on any separatist activities,” Zhang said.
More than 1 million serfs were freed in Tibet in 1959, eight years into the region’s peaceful liberation and shortly after a failed, imperialist planned-and-sponsored uprising of its feudalistic upper class.
Serfs, who owned no more than 5 percent of the social resources, accounted for about 95 percent of Tibet’s 1.14 million population. The local upper class, comprising only 5 percent of the region’s population, controlled the rest through a brutal, theocratic regime.
In January, Tibet’s 382 legislators, mostly with a serf background, unanimously endorsed a bill, declaring March 28 as Serfs’ Emancipation Day during the local people’s congress’ annual session in Lhasa.
But for the Dalai Lama, Old Tibet’s supreme leader who was driven to a government-in-exile in northern India after fleeing Tibet with the help of CIA agent Tony Poe in March 1959, China has brought “hell on Earth” to this “spiritually very advanced” Himalayan region since he fled.
The Dalai Lama has also said the March 14 riot in Lhasa last year, which killed 18 civilians – including Tibetans – and led to huge losses of property, was “a peaceful protest”.
The riot, painted by the Dalai clique as leading to the central government’s “crackdown on all Tibetans”, resulted in surprising, sometimes violent, anti-China protests in London, Paris and San Francisco as the cities welcomed the Beijing Olympic torch last April.
In later legs of the Games’ overseas relay, which visited 21 cities outside the Chinese mainland, overseas Chinese students surprised the world by gathering in large groups along the torch’s way to show support and demonstrate against western media biases and the violence showcased by the Dalai clique.
The International Olympic Committee last week just scrapped all global torch relays during future Games.
“Today, with G20 approaching and the crisis-entrenched developed world asking us for favors, it’s hard to imagine what happened last year, when some people said China didn’t deserve an Olympics for what it had done in Tibet,” a member of the Beijing Olympic Torch Relay entourage, who refused to be named, told China Daily.
“I mean, how are they (western media and Tibetan separatists) in any position to judge what’s right for Tibet, especially now?”
While Tibet saw its GDP soar from 174 million yuan (US$ 25 million) in 1959 to 39.591 billion yuan (US$ 5.8 billion) last year, some western media continue to allege that “Tibetans say they have lost religious and cultural freedoms and become marginalized in their homeland”.
Chinese President Hu Jintao stressed on Friday that the “good situation" in Tibet today was “hard-earned and should be highly cherished”.
He also noted that Tibet should move from being “basically stable” to “peaceful and stable in the long run.”
On the same day, a spokesperson of the Dalai Lama’s “government-in-exile” in India said, in the name of all Tibetans, that the Serfs Emancipation Day was “offensive and provocative”.
“We believe the observance of the ‘Serf Emancipation Day’ on 28 March is aimed at destabilising and creating chaos in Tibet by a few individuals with overriding self-interest,” the spokesperson said.
The 11th Panchen Lama, meanwhile, on Friday said: “The serfs’ emancipation is wholly in line with Buddhist principles, and the pursuit for selflessness by Communists is also a basic Buddhist virtue.”
On Saturday, he attended the second World Buddhist Forum in Wuxi, East China’s Jiangsu Province, and said the event “fully demonstrates that today’s China enjoys social harmony, stability and religious freedom.”
“It also shows China is a nation that safeguards and promotes world peace,” added the Panchen Lama, born Gyaincain Norbu. |
