Where did you hear that had happened
Comment on Think about it
toadjones79@lemm.ee 3 weeks agoIt’s not even true. Like not even close. The Chinese liberation army forcing Tibetan children to murder their parents to “liberate” them from “religious oppression” is one example.
frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Objection@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Gonna need a source on that one, chief.
perfectly_boiled_pizza@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I think they are referring to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Kids publicly denounced, criticised and some even harmed their parents but we are not sure if they killed them. This was done to achieve several things. Destroying religious practices was a part of it.
Recommended book:
The cultural revolution : a people’s history, 1962-1976 - Frank Dikötter
Objection@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
It’s really ambiguous what they’re talking about or what they even mean. Here are two things that could both be described as, “Forcing Tibetan children to kill their parents.”
A Tibetan soldier volunteers to join a war, and through sheer chance, they learn that their parents are fighting on the other side of the battlefield. They ask to leave the front and their CO refuses - technically, they’ve been forced to kill their parents.
A communist agent abducts a family in the dead of night and hands the child a gun while putting a knife to their sister’s throat and telling them if they don’t kill their parents, they’ll be killed, along with their siblings. This happens systematically across Tibet, and only Tibet.
They could be referencing the Cultural Revolution. A lot of shit happened during this period, including what you described. But to my knowledge, the struggle sessions and such were more the actions of the Red Guards, who were student led paramilitary groups, not the same as the People’s Liberation Army that went into Tibet.
So like, what they said was, “the liberation army forced Tibetan children to murder their parents,” but, what actually happened (so far as it’s possible to connect that claim to anything in reality) was that the army failed to maintain control against young radicals denouncing their parents and subjecting them to public humiliation, which happened decades after the army went into Taiwan, which wasn’t (to my knowledge) really a main area involved in the chaos.
And that’s why I asked for a source.
toadjones79@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Fairly common knowledge. Even portrayed in movies like Kuru and Seven Years in Tibet. Unfortunately the whole thing has been wrapped up in lots of misinformation. The Tibetans have both accused China of atrocities and claimed that they didn’t happen. Outsiders looking in on this could argue that they were trying to appease the Chinese to maintain the paltry religious autonomy granted by the Seventeen Point Agreement. Here is a link to a PDF from the Tibetan Bureau in Geneva listing their atrocities. It is worth noting that even these claims are impossible to verify. The Chinese government has worked tirelessly to scrub the world knowledge base, and most search companies are more than willing to cooperate with such large governments with huge resources. Additionally, sensationalism is equally attractive, meaning it is easy and tempting to over report and exaggerate war crimes.
But the simple fact remains that May Zedong openly opposed religion and claimed that his annexation of Tibet was a “liberation” from what he called “religious oppression.”
Objection@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Oh, well if it’s portrayed in movies it must be true.
That document lists 100 atrocities, which of them are you referencing with “forcing children to murder their parents?”
Mhm.
Yes, because Tibet was subject to religious oppression. They had an aristocratic system of serfdom with extreme poverty (while the religious rulers lived in luxury), and an average life expectancy in the 30s. It was a cruel, oppressive theocracy. After the aristocrats and theocrats were thrown out, the Tibetan people experienced the same massive increases in life expectancy and improvements in material conditions that the rest of China experienced during this period, including doubling of life expectancy.
Tibet emerged along with countless other warlord states following the collapse of the Qing, it was always considered part of China by the KMT and it was never recognized as an independent state by the international community (iirc, it was only ever recognized by like Mongolia). The communists and nationalists fought side-by-side against most of these warlord states with a common understanding that the nation needed to be unified, however, Tibet wasn’t a priority because of it’s remoteness. Had the KMT won they’d have brought it back into the fold eventually too, as evidenced by the fact that Taiwan still maintains a territorial claim over all of Tibet.