The emancipation of one million serfs in Tibet 50 years ago is a historic movement that deserves to be celebrated and remembered by 1.3 billion Chinese, a signed article in People's Daily has said.

This was because the movement to free Tibetans from the cruel and dark rule of feudal serfdom had forever changed human rights situation in Tibet, which should also be hailed worldwide, said the article, published Thursday under the byline Ren Zhongping.

China will mark the first Serfs Emancipation Day on Saturday. Legislature of Tibet Autonomous Region endorsed the setting of the day in January.

The end of the feudal serfdom system in Tibet "is a shiny chapter in the world's history of human rights progress," because since then the freed slaves, accounting for 95 percent of Tibet's population, had been equally treated as human beings, in stead of as "animals which can speak," a term used to describe them under serfdom, Ren Zhongping said in the article.

On March 28, 1959, China's central government announced it would dissolve the aristocratic local government of Tibet and replace it with a preparatory committee for establishing the Tibet Autonomous Region.

That meant the end of serfdom and the abolition of the hierarchal social system characterized by theocracy, with the Dalai Lama as the core of the leadership.

The move came after the central government foiled an armed rebellion staged by the Dalai Lama and his supporters, most of whom were slave owners attempting to maintain serfdom, the article said.

In the lengthy article, Ren excerpted several books written by westerners about a century ago as the proof of cruelties before 1959.

"... At present, the people are medieval, not only in their system of government and their religion, their inquisition, their witchcraft, their incarnations, their ordeals by fire and boiling oil, but in every aspect of their daily life," British military journalist Edmund Candler, who visited Lhasa in 1904, was quoted as saying in his book "The Unveiling of Lhasa".

It was a natural and historic choice for the Chinese government to abolish the serfdom in Tibet, especially after the momentous anti-slavery movements in Europe and America in the 19th century, said the article.

"It was a change that Tibetan people longed for and deserved," it said.

"Any government which shoulders responsibilities for the people and for the universal belief of human beings would choose this change, the one to bring a nation onto the track of modern civilization," it said.

The article said, compared with the anti-slavery movements in America and Europe, the abolition of serfdom in Tibet was even more extraordinary because it was achieved through peaceful democratic reform.

"If the same criteria is used to judge the significance of either anti-slavery movements in America and the emancipation of Tibetan serfs, the conclusion should also be the same: the latter one is also a great contribution to the progress of human society," it said.

It is a pity that a group of people in western countries have always deliberately ignored such a progress and accused the democratic reform of "infringing human rights" in Tibet, the article said.

Based on the distorted knowledge, they fantasized the old society of Tibet an Utopia-like "Shangri-la" and even thought the emancipation as unnecessary, it said. "This is ridiculous and thought-provoking."

The reality, however, is that Tibet will never return to the old society 50 years ago, just like Europe will never go back to the medieval era and the United States back to the Civil War America, it said.

(Xinhua News Agency March 27, 2009)