Tibetan Slavery?

“Was Mao Zedong the Abraham Lincoln of China?” asks the Globe and Mail. This question is in response to the Chinese government’s recent attempt to liken the 1958 Communist takeover of Tibet to the American Civil War. It implies that the Communists freed Tibetans from the shackles of the region’s tradition in the same way that Lincoln released black Americans from the shackles of slavery. “Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang suggested that Mr. Obama—who arrives in China this weekend on his first presidential visit—should understand China’s controversial Tibet policy better than other world leaders because ‘he is a black president and he understands the slavery abolition movement,’” the paper reports.