Editor's note: China's Tibet Autonomous Region is celebrating the 70th anniversary of peaceful liberation, a turning point in the region's history. Although some Western countries have always looked at the region through rose-tinted glasses and tried to sabotage its development, the tremendous efforts that have been put into improving the local people's standard of living have depicted a whole new picture of Tibet.

Today, let's talk about Tibet. 

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the peaceful liberation of Tibet. Before its peaceful liberation, Old Tibet was a society of feudal theocratic serfdom. Serf owners made up only five percent of the total population. The other 95 percent of people were serfs, or you can just call them slaves.

Seventy years ago, 14th Dalai Lama was the supreme leader of Tibet and the ruler de facto of Lhasa. With such strong political and religious influence, Dalai became the richest and the most potent serf owner. The 14th Dalai Lama and his family directly controlled 27 manors, 36 pastures, 6,170 filed serfs and 102 house slaves. Dalai alone owned 160,000 taels of gold and 95 million taels of silver. Even more unimaginable, the rosary he used was made from 108 different human skulls.

Alexandra David Neel, a French scholar who had been to Old Tibet several times, wrote in her books: Dalai and other slave owners lived in luxurious palaces, possessed huge fortune and hundreds of slaves, while all the peasants were indebted for life and had no personal freedom.

All this changed after the liberation, as democratic reforms were launched in Tibet. All the serfs were liberated and given their own land. Dalai's brutal rule finally came to an end.

However, the U.S. tries to contain the spread of communism around the world, and the CIA started a two-decades-long anti-China covert operation designed to train Tibetan insurgents. According to a book written by Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison titled "The CIA's Secret War in Tibet," in 1959, CIA agents helped the 14th Dalai flee to India.

But that's not all. As early as the 1950s, the U.S. began to secretly support the secessionist guerrilla movement in Tibet in line with its "National Security Council-5412" program, which is part of a grand plan to contain China. Between the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. government flew hundreds of Tibetan separatists to far-flung bases in Saipan, Guam and even Colorado. Thinley Tenzing was one of them. In 1959, some Americans found him in India and asked if he wanted to kill the Chinese. After giving an affirmative answer, Tenzing was sent to a top-secret U.S. military base in Colorado, where he learned the use of modern weapons and guerrilla tactics. Then, he returned to Tibet on board a U.S. military plane. The CIA also airdropped a large number of weapons, ammunition, food and medicine to aid the rebel forces.

With the strong support of the U.S., the rebels made frequent raids in Tibet, attacking People's Liberation Army convoys and camps. According to released U.S. Intelligence documents, the CIA provided the Tibetan separatists with $1.7 million a year for operations against China, including an annual subsidy of $180,000 for Dalai.

In addition to military patronage, the U.S. has continued to give political support to Tibetan separatists. In 1987, the U.S. House of Representatives passed Bill 2476, which provided financial aid and university scholarship for Tibetan separatists legally. This was the first and by no means the last attempt by the U.S. Congress to intervene in Tibet.

In December 2020, a so-called Tibetan Policy and Support Act of 2020 was passed by the U.S. Congress, which maliciously distorts Tibet's social development, denigrates China's ethnic and religious policies. On July 28, 2021,  U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken held talks with a representative of the 14th Dalai.

It is with the full support of the U.S. that Dalai has organized several separatist activities. On March 14, 2008, the Dalai clique planned and executed violent riots in Lhasa, causing 18 deaths and nearly 400 injures. Then the clique published a "Self-immolation Guide" on the internet, with which they openly encouraged the Tibetans within the Chinese border to "carry out self-immolations according to the plan and procedures." And Dalai quibbled that "it was their way of defying the Chinese government's cultural genocide policy."

Well, I can hardly believe what a slave owner says. But facts and data could tell the real picture of Tibet.

Statistics show Tibet's GDP increases almost 1,500 times over the past 70 years. The population of Tibet has increased from 1.23 million in 1959 to nearly 3.65 million in 2020, with ethnic Tibetan people accounting for 86 percent of the total. There are 1,787 sites for the practice of Tibetan Buddhism and more than 46,000 resident monks and nuns in Tibet.

Now, Tibet has ended absolute poverty; all of the 628,000 registered poor and 74 designated poor counties in Tibet had risen from poverty. Students in the region could receive 15 years of publicly funded education, six years longer than students in the interior. The per capita living space of residents in 2020 reached about 40 square meters, while more than 90 percent of Tibetan residents didn't have private housing before 1951. Moreover, the average life expectancy in Tibet has increased to 71.1 years in 2020, twice before the peaceful liberation. The peaceful liberation of Tibet has set the region on a new journey.

The world has witnessed the development of Tibet for the past seven decades, increasing income, wealth and well-being. Since ancient times, Tibet has been an integral part of China, and the Tibetan ethnic group has been a communal member of the Chinese nation, sharing a common destiny. Under the Strategic Plan of Rural Revitalization, Tibet will embrace thriving businesses, an eco-friendly environment, social etiquette and civility, and a brighter future.

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