China on Tuesday hailed its controversial 40-year control of Tibet as a victory over feudalism and branded the region's exiled spiritual leader a liar for alleging human rights abuses in his former homeland.
"New Progress in Human Rights in China's Tibet Autonomous Region," carried by the official Xinhua news agency, offered everything from prison menus to color television ownership data to back the official Chinese view of the 1950 communist takeover as the "liberation" of Tibet."The democratic reform carried out in Tibet in 1959 ended the history of a feudal serf system which merged religion with politics, and gave the more than 1 million serfs and slaves in Tibet, accounting for more than 95 percent of the population, the right to be their own masters," the document said.
"The situation as regards human rights in old Tibet bears no comparison with the situation in Tibet today," it said.
In 1959, China's army crushed the last of a series of anti-Chinese uprisings in Tibet and the Dalai Lama, spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet's traditional theocracy, fled into exile in northern India.