USA Today: Leaders declare 'liberation' holiday in Tibet

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Leaders declare 'liberation' holiday in Tibet
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2009-03-25-chinaserf_N.htm

By Calum MacLeod, USA TODAY March 25, 2009


Former Chinese People's Liberation Army photographer Lan Zhigui, left, shows his guests one of the photographs in his photo exhibition, Witnessing the Democratic Reform in Tibet from 1950 to 1970, in Beijing on Saturday. By Goh Chai Hin, AFP/Getty Images

BEIJING — The guide points to a display of tools used for punishment in Tibet more than 50 years ago. The heavy stone shaped like a cap kept a person's head still, so the victim's eyes could be gouged out.  

Ye Zi can barely look at it. "It was so cruel," she says with a shudder. But Ye leaves the exhibit with a smile.
"Tibetan people have a much happier life now," says Ye, 20, a student in Beijing who hopes to visit Tibet one day. "Thanks to the Chinese Communist Party, Tibet is better than ever."

To publicize that progress, Tibet will mark a new holiday Saturday called "Serf Liberation Day."

It was created this year by Tibet's Communist Party-controlled legislature to mark the 50th anniversary since the Chinese government disbanded the Himalayan region's local government. Tibetan officials compare the date to Abraham Lincoln's signing of the Emancipation Proclamation to abolish slavery in the USA.

The Tibetan government-in-exile in India led by the Dalai Lama counters by calling it a "day of mourning" for the 1.2 million Tibetans who died as a result of Chinese rule, spokesman Thubten Samphel says.

"Tibetan people will consider it very offensive," he says.

The war of words between rivals with sharply divergent interpretations of history comes amid tensions in the region. China promotes the anniversary as a commemoration of the rescue of Tibet from a brutal regime of landowners under the Dalai Lama. Yet some Tibetans protest on the anniversary of an unsuccessful uprising March 14, 1959, that led to the exile of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader.

China recently tightened security in the region to prevent anti-Chinese protests like the ones last year in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa and other ethnic Tibetan areas. Foreigners were barred from the area this month and couldn't independently report on conditions.

Saturday's holiday has been touted in a public relations campaign by the Chinese government, including appearances by Tibetan legislators in Washington and Canada to portray what they call "the real Tibet."

China's state-run media — on television and in print — have celebrated in recent weeks what they call the end of feudal serfdom in Tibet and the material progress of recent decades. A documentary film, The Past and Present of Tibet, has been shown across Tibet, including in remote and rural communities, according to the official China Tibet News website.

In Beijing, the state-organized exhibit on the "50th Anniversary of Democratic Reforms in Tibet" that Ye viewed has included visitors such as the Panchen Lama, Tibet's second-holiest figure. State-run media quoted him as citing Buddha to praise China's emancipation of a million serfs.

In Ottawa this week, Shingtsa Tenzinchodrak, a spiritual leader and vice chairman of Tibet's legislature, compared emancipating the serfs to the abolition of slavery in the USA, Xinhua said.

"This is a very provocative act," Samphel, the spokesman for the Tibetan exiled government, says about the holiday. He says Tibetans are not being encouraged to protest Saturday "as it will only bring harm on themselves."

Yet some protests are likely, says Barry Sautman, a Tibet expert at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
"This is a new and politically confrontational event. It's meant to provoke some response," Sautman says.

Although he doubts the holiday will shift opinions elsewhere in the world, Sautman says Beijing has successfully provoked the exiled community into defending the old regime.

"The Chinese government can say, 'Look, these are just a bunch of aristocrats who had a privileged lifestyle and would seek to restore that system,' " he says.

Anti-Chinese riots in Lhasa and other Tibetan areas last March are among several factors behind the holiday, Sautman says. Tibetan officials hope to "mobilize the population in Tibet to display loyalty, if not actually to feel it," he says.

China's leaders think "there is a natural rightness to their views, even though they don't make sense in a Western context," says Robbie Barnett, an expert on Tibet at Columbia University. Progress in Tibet "has been very up and down, and in the last year it has been mostly down," he says.

Barnett worries that the holiday marks a step backward. "This is the language of 30 years ago, of class struggle. It sends unfortunate and retrogressive messages to everybody," he says.

At the exhibit in Beijing, retired steelworker Li Junshan, 60, hopes to make his first trip to Tibet this summer.
"Those Tibetans who want independence have been tricked by other people," Li says, "but they won't stay tricked forever."

KenMartin

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