On March 27th, 2009, Chinese authorities celebrated the inaugural “Serfs’ Liberation Day” with ceremonies and speeches extolling the virtue of Chinese development in Tibet. The holiday marks the start of Beijing’s direct rule of Tibet in 1959.
Beijing says it liberated Tibet from the dark ages, freeing the population from medieval-style feudal slavery and bringing prosperity to its people. A crowd of more than 13,000 watched the Serf’s Liberation Day ceremony in front of Tibet’s famed Potala Palace. National television broadcast the 75-minute event live.
According to the BBC, government and military officials joined a man describing himself as a former serf and a student in praising the economic development brought by China and denouncing the exiled former Buddhist theocracy that ruled Tibet.
“Nowadays we have roads, we have televisions and telephones, children go to schools, and we have savings in the banks, all made possible by the Communist Party,” said one Tibetan man who had been born into what he described as a serf family in 1940.
Tibetans who follow the Party line, may benefit from infrastructure improvements and new educational opportunity. But critics of Beijing rule say Tibetans feel excluded from China’s considerable economic investment in the region which has mainly benefited the Han Chinese who have migrated there in massive numbers.
And, remember this one fact, ‘liberation’ came at the expense of the destruction of over 5,000 temples and 1.2 million Tibetan deaths due to torture, executions, resistance, suicide and starvation.
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