The ‘serf question’

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China’s com­mu­nist gov­ern­ment has repeat­edly claimed that Tibet was a bru­tal feu­dal serf­dom before 1959, where the oppressed under­class lived in abject mis­ery. We speak with Dr. John Powers, a pro­fes­sor of Asian Societies and Histories at The Australian National University who has done exten­sive research on Tibet’s his­tory and asked him, did China lib­er­ate Tibetans from the yoke of feu­dal­ism as Beijing claims?