China chose the arrival in Beijing of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mrs Mary Robinson today to issue a strident justification of its occupation of Tibet.
A lengthy White Paper on China's 50-year rule over the Himalayan region - decried by critics as a catalogue of repression, rights abuses and cultural genocide - insisted Tibetans had seen vast improvements in wealth and freedoms under Chinese rule.
Mrs Robinson is in China for a two-day visit to attend talks on human rights education and will meet President Mr Jiang Zemin.
The 16,000-word Tibet document issued this morning by China's cabinet, the State Council, was aimed at "clearing up various misunderstandings on the 'Tibet issue' in the international community," it said.
"The society of old Tibet under feudal serfdom was even more dark and backward than in Europe in the Middle Ages," it said.
Chinese rule had "cleaned up the filth and mire left over from the old Tibetan society" and brought the region's grateful people into the modern era, it said.
"To sum up, the development history of Tibet in the past five decades since its peaceful liberation has been one of proceeding from darkness to brightness, from backwardness to progress, from poverty to prosperity," the paper concluded.
It also repeated sweeping condemnations of the "Dalai Lama clique" - based around the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader who fled to India after a failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959.
The Dalai Lama represented "the retrogressive religious culture of the theocratic system and the interests of the dying privileged few of the feudal serf-owner class," the document said.
AFP