Panchen Lama says committed to China's unification

By Hu Yinan (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2009-03-27 16:01

The 11^th Panchen Lama renewed a vow on Friday to commit his whole life to the unification of China and solidarity of all its ethnic groups, in a high-profile seminar in Beijing to celebrate Tibet’s first Serfs Emancipation Day, which falls Saturday.

Tibet has witnessed a “historic leap” since its abolition of slavery 50 years ago, the Panchen Lama, born Gyaincain Norbu, told the seminar, held at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

“The serfs’ emancipation is wholly in line with Buddhist principles, and the pursuit for selflessness by communists is also a basic Buddhist virtue,” he said, winning a lasting round of applause from an audience that included China’s top political advisor Jia Qinglin, Vice-Premier Hui Liangyu, State Councilors Ma Kai and Meng Jianzhu, as well as former Tibet officials and ex-serfs.

More than 1 million serfs were freed in Tibet in 1959, eight years into the region’s peaceful liberation and shortly after a failed uprising of its feudalistic upper class.

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Tibet in 50 years

Before then, about 95 percent of Tibet’s 1.14 million people were serfs, who owned no more than 5 percent of the social resources. The local upper class, accounting for only 5 percent of the region’s population, had their hands full of the rest through a brutal, theocratic rule.

In January, Tibet’s 382 legislators, most of whom came from a serf background, unanimously endorsed a bill adding March 28 to the calendar the as Serfs Emancipation Day during the local people’s congress’ annual session in Lhasa.

Jia, Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, said the region’s abolition of slavery carries symbolic ramifications as it “destroyed mankind’s last serfdom stronghold”.

The Panchen Lama said the 1959 riot, which led to the abolition of slavery and drove the Dalai Lama, Old Tibet’s supreme leader, to flee to India, was aimed at “opposing any social reform in Tibet and forever preserve theocratic feudal serfdom”.

The riot “sought the interests of very few people and the lust for power of particular individuals”, the 19-year-old added.

The Dalai Lama, who earlier this month said China has “brought hell on Earth” to Tibet during the past 50 years, constantly insists that the Old Tibet was “spiritually very advanced”.

According to a white paper released by his office in Dharamshala, India, the serfs in Old Tibet “had a legal identity, often with documents stating their rights, and also had access to courts of law”.

But that could not be further from the truth for Yeshe Lodro, a former serf-turned-servant to a senior lama in Lhasa’s Drepung Monastery, who has told China Daily in a January interview in Tibet that his “biggest hope as a child was not to be beaten and scolded. But it was futile (even as a monk).”

Yeshe, born in the same year with the Dalai Lama, arrived in Beijing for the first time on Thursday and shared recollections of his earlier years at the seminar today.

“My mother told me that as serfs, all that belonged to us were our shadows and footprints. The rest belonged to the lords. We’d just have to wait for a good fate in our next life,” the 74-year-old recalled, with the Panchen Lama looking and listening calmly just meters away.

“This now is what I call a good life… Beijing, the State leaders, Panchen. And a beautifully decorated house back at home in Lhasa,” Yeshe told China Daily after the seminar. “I’m happy. We all should be.”