The Far-Eastern Sweet Potato

Some Tibetan lessons for Taiwan

Next month will mark the 50th anniversary of the “liberation” of Tibet by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). As Beijing — and purportedly all Tibetans — ready themselves to rejoice in the festivities surrounding “Serf Emancipation Day” on March 28, people in Taiwan would be well advised to turn to the history books.

For starters, the so-called liberation of Tibet did not occur in 1959, but rather nine years earlier, when the PLA made its first incursion into Tibet. Along with thousands of soldiers, the liberators brought the Seventeen-Point Agreement, a document that was purportedly intended as a blueprint for the “modernization” of “backward” and “barbaric” Tibet by a benevolent China and which called for the ouster of “reactionary governments” and “imperialist” forces that had thrown Tibet “into the depths of enslavement and suffering.”

Op-ed, published today in the Taipei Times, continues here.