(TibetanReview.net, Mar29’26) – China has marked on Mar 28 the 67th anniversary of its termination of what was akin to a one-country-two-systems promise it had made to Tibet in 1951 with the raising of its Red Star flag before the Dalai Lama’s Potala Palace in capital Lhasa. It organized Tibetan public cultural performances – including a Sinicized one in Beijing – and carried out a blaze of online publicity about having put an end to “the dark, cruel, barbaric, and backward theocratic feudal serfdom” in Tibet as if that justifies its current occupation rule there.
People from all walks of life attended a flag-raising ceremony at the Potala Palace Square in Lhasa on Mar 28 morning to mark the region’s 18th Serfs Emancipation Day, reported China’s online Chinadaily.com.cn Mar 28.
Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai declared the dissolution of the “local” Tibetan government on Mar 28, 1959 and he replaced it with a temporary Preparatory Committee for the Tibet Autonomous Region (PCTAR) following the largely peaceful Tibetan uprising protests earlier that month, on the 10th.
China adopted Mar 28 as its Serfs’ Emancipation Day on Jan 19, 2009 in the aftermath of another popular Tibetan uprising – the Mar 2008 large-scale protests which engulfed much of the Tibetan Plateau region, leading, as in 1959, to a full-scale military onslaught on the Tibetan civilian population. It ended with massacres, large-scale arrests, imposition of martial law, and shutting of Tibet from the outside world.
The report said the annual commemoration recalls the “democratic reforms” of 1959 in the region that ended “feudal serfdom”. Various activities have been held across the region to mark the event, it added.
Karma Tsetan, chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) government, delivered a televised speech on Mar 27 night to mark “the 67th anniversary of the emancipation of a million serfs in Xizang,” the report said, using China’s Sinicized name for Tibet.
The “great democratic reform swept across Xizang with irresistible momentum, completely putting an end to the dark, cruel, barbaric, and backward theocratic feudal serfdom,” he was quoted as saying.
However, according to the exile Tibetan government, Chinese occupation rule has led to the killing or unnatural death of over 1.2 million Tibetans. the demolition of over 6,200 religious places of study and worship, and wholesale devastation of Tibet’s fragile ecology which even led to unprecedented flood disasters in China. It is now accused of having embarked on a campaign of erasing the Tibetan identity in the name of strengthening national unity.