With leader Xi Jinping looking on, China marked 60 years of Communist Party rule in Tibet on Thursday with speeches and a parade in front of the 17th-century Potala Palace, the home of the Dalai Lama until he fled to India in 1959.
Speakers hailed economic development in the remote region in the foothills of the Himalayas and stressed the need to fight separatism. Opposition to Chinese rule has been largely quashed by a decades-long campaign of repression that has imprisoned Buddhist monks and demolished some monasteries.
