OPINION> Columnist
A big day to remember
By Li Hongmei (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2009-01-22 15:12

A historic decision was made on Monday when Tibetan legislators unanimously endorsed a bill to designate March 28 as an annual Serfs Emancipation Day to mark the date on which about 1 million serfs in the Himalayan region were freed half a century ago.

To those who experienced or who retain memories of the dark era of serfdom, it is a big day and a festival. On March 28, 1959, the central government announced it would dissolve the aristocratic local government of Tibet, or Gaxag government, and usher in democratic reform for preparations to establish the Tibet Autonomous Region. The move came after the central government foiled an armed rebellion staged by the 14th Dalai Lama and his supporters, most of whom were slave owners attempting to maintain serfdom. The Dalai Lama clique thus fled in exile.

That day, therefore, conveyed a special meaning to then Tibetan population, of whom more than 90 percent was serfs and slaves, by signaling the end of serfdom, and the abolition of the hierarchic social system characterized by theocracy, with the Dalai Lama as the core of the leadership.

In old Tibet, Serfs were treated as private property by their owners, with the most powerful one being the family of the Dalai Lama. These happy few, accounting for less than 10 percent of the population of old Tibet, owned some 80 percent of production materials—farm land, pastures and livestock. The serf owners were entitled to legally insult, punish, buy and sell, give away, whip and even kill their serfs.

In the museum, there still preserve a score of black- and- white photos showing the brutality of serf owners: serfs’ eyes gouged out, fingers chopped off, noses cut and tendons of their feet removed. In the late 1940s, when the Dalai Lama was to celebrate his birthday, the Gaxag government issued an order that people should prepare human skulls, blood, skin and guts for the religious ceremony.

But to a few others whose minds have been befogged by the Dalai Lama’s crooked ideas and fabricated stories, the day is considered a doomsday. Invariably, it seems to defy any rational explanation why some people deliberately choose to be blind to facts, but so readily form unrealistic pictures of old Tibet, and always go into raptures at the mere mention of the so-called ‘Tibetan issues.’

While in actuality, one can easily detect true or false only by giving it more than a passing thought. The Dalai Lama tends to highly tout the serf system of old Tibet describing it as a system which delivered peace and contentment to the snow land bathed in the Buddhist light. What actually came about in the old plateau region was that the Buddhist light was only shining over the minority of Tibetan aristocrats, and exclusively for the happiness and benefit of the fewer serf owners.        

The overwhelming majority of Tibetans then, on the other hand, led a wretched life under the system featuring strict social hierarchies. Even serfs were classified into three categories in accordance with their scanty possessions—Tralpa, Duchung and Nangsan, with the third one being the most miserable who could be sold by his owner as cattle.

That explains why the proposal of establishing the commemorating day was so widely supported for by all the 382 legislators attending the session, as nobody who experienced those dark days would want to go back, and it is also desirable to set the day so as to have the new generation of Tibetans remember the bitterness and sufferings of the old days.

Admittedly, different voices and even some din are heard amid the forces preaching or supporting ‘Tibet independence’, and foreign views also vary toward the proposal. Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC), for instance, called the decision as a ‘hype’. The organization is among the most hard-line advocates of ‘Tibet independence’. Thomas Mann, President of European Parliament Intergroup for Tibetan Issues, said having such a day was ‘unequalled humiliation of Tibetans.’

So appalling was his statement that people cannot help but raise a question, ‘unequalled to whom, Tibetans or the Dalai Lama clique, who self-claims to act on the Tibetans’ behalf and out of the Tibetans’ interests but represents, as it is, the interests of a small galaxy of Tibetan aristocrats, the used-to-be serf owners seeking to restore the old system? If Mr. Thomas Mann had the basic knowledge of the true color of Tibetan history and opened his eyes to the reality as well as radical changes which have taken place in Tibet since 1959, he would realize how ridiculous it was making the utterances so rashly, for in so doing, he spelt both insult and injuries for all the Tibetans who survived the tears-and-blood stained past.

It is no need whitewashing, as fact will speak for itself. There are currently 1,700 monasteries open in Tibet, drawing tens of thousands of pilgrims each year. Strolling in the streets of Lhasa, tourists can easily find crowds of lamas and believers chanting Buddhist mantras and praying at monasteries and Buddhist statues. But they cannot find any evidence to show the so-called cultural genocide or the clampdown on Tibet’s traditional religion as often accused by the Dalai Lama clique in an attempt to rally the international support. The increasingly prosperous Tibet has proved their attempt to tarnish the Tibetan reality is doomed to failure.

Compared with the peace and happiness which finally descend upon Tibet and benefit all the Tibetans, old Tibet shrouded in the feudal serfdom is by no means the fanciful Shangri-La, but a real hazard and a ‘hell-on-earth’ to its inhabitants.