Tibetans need reminding of bad old days - cadre

[Coventina]

Source: Reuters

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's newly declared Serfs' Emancipation Day will help convince young people that pre-Communist Tibetan society was oppressive, an elderly cadre known for his hard-line views on Tibet said in a rare interview.

Still influential today, Yin Fatang was Tibet's Communist Party secretary from 1980-1985, when the region was just emerging from the devastation of the Cultural Revolution.

A Han Chinese, he is one of the few high-ranking officials from outside Tibet to learn the language fluently. He is considered to belong to the dominant policy view that Tibet needs economic development, but not religious concessions.

Yin, a lieutenant general, remains adamantly opposed to the influence of traditional religious institutions and of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader whom Beijing brands a separatist. His views give a glimpse into Chinese policymakers' interpretation of Tibetan unrest.



Read more: http://in.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idINIndia-38735620090327

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Tomorrow is "Serfs Emancipation Day"!!

How are you going to celebrate the glorious freedom the Tibetan people now enjoy?

[Coventina]

1. Emancipation of Tibetan serfs hailed as human rights progress

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-03/27/content_11085382.htm

BEIJING, March 27 (Xinhua) -- The emancipation of one million serfs in Tibet 50 years ago is a historic movement that deserves to be celebrated and remembered by 1.3 billion Chinese, a signed article in People's Daily has said.

This was because the movement to free Tibetans from the cruel and dark rule of feudal serfdom had forever changed human rights situation in Tibet, which should also be hailed worldwide, said the article, published Thursday under the byline Ren Zhongping.

China will mark the first Serfs Emancipation Day on Saturday. Legislature of Tibet Autonomous Region endorsed the setting of the day in January.

The end of the feudal serfdom system in Tibet "is a shiny chapter in the world's history of human rights progress," because since then the freed slaves, accounting for 95 percent of Tibet's population, had been equally treated as human beings, in stead of as "animals which can speak," a term used to describe them under serfdom, Ren Zhongping said in the article.

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This is from Xinhua

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