The Panchen ignored their counsel and in mid-1962 finished the report, adding four policy recommendations for Tibet. The report was written in Tibetan, translated into Chinese and then translated back again into Tibetan to make sure it contained no mistakes. Teams of interpreters worked on it, each only seeing a portion. In the report, the Panchen Lama alleged that Buddhism was being virtually annihilated and he warned that, if current policies continued, the Tibetan nationality would either cease to exist or be completely assimilated. The text of his report has never been published, but an official biography, The Great Master Panchen, contains this extract: ‘In the last few years, the Tibetan population has fallen drastically. Apart from the women, children and the elderly who could not fight, the majority of the rest have all been arrested. All healthy, normal young men have been seized. The Tibetans living in Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan lead an unspeakably difficult life.’14 The report went on to charge the Communist Party with ‘making serious mistakes in the suppression of the rebellion’.
After it was delivered, he met with Mao in person. Senior Chinese officials, including Premier Zhou Enlai, had from the beginning encouraged the Panchen Lama to write the report and the text had been approved in meetings with Li Weihan and other senior officials from the United Front Department, the Party body responsible for Tibet. Their encouragement was part of the general rollback of Great Leap Forward policies which began in early 1961. That year the ultra-leftist Party secretaries of Qinghai and Gansu were toppled, and in other parts of the country such as Anhui, various forms of private farming were being tried out. Mao, however, was unrepentant. The Panchen Lama was being used in the continuing political struggle to overturn Mao’s disastrous policies and when this failed, he became one of the first victims of the losing side. At a meeting at Beidaihe in late August 1962, Mao decisively turned against the ‘reformers’ and insisted on a return to Communism. The Panchen Lama was immediately arrested and charged with organizing a rebellion. Although he was struggled, he refused to make a self-criticism and remained under house arrest or in prison until 1977. During the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards accused him of being a ‘reactionary slave-owner’ and the ‘biggest parasite and blood-sucker’ in Tibet. For some years he was held in solitary confinement. He is later reported to have said that without Zhou Enlai’s intervention, he would have been killed. Only in 1988 did the Party repeal the verdict that he was an ‘anti-Party, anti-people, anti-socialism element’. In the early 1990s, his officially sanctioned biography was able to describe his report to Mao ‘as the most glorious page in Master Panchen’s political life’. When he returned to Qinghai for the first time in 1982, he was greeted by huge crowds.15
Meanwhile, in 1962, other Tibetans associated with the report also fell, including Li Weihan, who was dismissed and accused of being a ‘capitulator’ for ‘kowtowing’ to the Panchen Lama. Many were arrested as ‘little Panchens’. In 1968, during the Cultural Revolution, Geshe Sherab Gyatso was beaten to death by Red Guards at the age of 86. Rinpoche Enju, Abbot of the Tashilhunpo monastery, died in similar circumstances in 1969 aged 60. The Party Secretary of Qinghai, Gao Feng, also fell victim to the Cultural Revolution and died in 1968, after he had been dismissed and moved to a post in Jiangsu province.
The tragedy of the Tibetans does not end there. The Party drew no lessons from the tens of millions of famine deaths, and the Tibetans in the TAR, who had been exempted from establishing communes, later had to follow the same disastrous path. In the TAR, famine was endemic for twenty years.
After 1959, most of the peasants were forced to form mutual-aid teams and then co-operatives. Starvation soon set in. Dawa Norbu in Red Star in Tibet describes what happened:
Immediately the harvest was over, the Chinese exaggerated the results as usual. They claimed that the yield was about ten times the seed... it followed that if we could produce a bumper crop in the first year of our liberation, there was no reason why we could not double this year’s yield in the following season. We were made to sign a pledge to the effect that we would obtain a yield of twenty times the seed in the next season.16
As in the rest of China, the same ill-conceived irrigation schemes and the same insistence on using organic fertilizers and planting second and third crops were instituted. The fields were not rotated and were exhausted after the first year. Canals were built which proved useless because they relied on unpredictable glacial meltwater. Sometimes even existing water supplies were damaged by draining small pools and lakes. The Chinese introduced some successful innovations, among them steel instead of wooden ploughs, but most of the trumpeted achievements, such as the development of special ‘high-altitude wheat’ and other new varieties, were bogus. Grain output in the TAR temporarily rose in 1959 but then fell. A tough rationing regime began and Tibetans said they ate only a third of their normal diet. Dawa Norbu gives details: ‘A working person was allotted a monthly ration of 22 lbs of tsampa, half a pound of oil or butter, a third of a brick of tea and a little salt. Only the tea was sufficient, the rest was a starvation diet to us. Old people and children received even less.’17
In the cities, people were given monthly ration tickets for 18 lbs of grain, as low as prison camp rations. In consequence, as one account describes, ‘People ate cats, dogs, insects. Parents fed dying children their own blood mixed with hot water and tsampa. Other children were forced to leave home to beg on the roads. Old people went off to die in the hills alone. Thousands of Tibetans took to eating the refuse thrown by the Chinese to the pigs that each Han compound kept, while those around PLA outposts daily pried apart manure from the soldiers’ horses, looking for undigested grain.’18
Anyone who admitted the existence of food shortages was violently punished and declared an ‘enemy of socialism’. The Tibetans in the TAR had the additional burden of feeding a garrison of some 200,000 Chinese troops and another 100,000 civilians.19 These were entitled to national grain tickets and access to state grain reserves. However, several Tibetan interviewees said that many Han Chinese also resorted to eating grass and leaves and had heads and legs swollen by oedema. As in other regions, the Tibetans saw their grain being taken away as ‘national patriotic wealth’ after every harvest. ‘Some was taken away to China in trucks as “preparation for war”. We were told that a war with Russia, or the USA, was imminent. Another part was left in Tibet to sell to the Chinese officials and their families,’ said one interviewee. It is not certain, though, if this grain really was transported to China, or if it was held in granaries and tunnels for a war which never happened. Most of it probably just rotted away uneaten. Some Tibetans are convinced it was shipped to the Soviet Union to pay for help with the building of China’s first nuclear bomb. It is certainly plausible to link the food shortages with an accelerated effort to build a nuclear bomb, as it was developed in Qinghai. Some Tibetan prisoners worked on the construction of China’s nuclear research centre near Lake Koko Nor in Qinghai and others worked on the railways, roads and mines connected with this and Mao’s other preparations for a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
Labour camps in the TAR had extraordinarily high death tolls. In Drapchi prison outside Lhasa, one survivor claimed that between November 1960 and June 1961 out of 17,000 prisoners, 14,000 died.20 According to a joint statement by two nuns who fled to India in 1961, two-thirds of those in this prison died: ‘Cartloads of dead bodies were taken away daily for burial or for use as manure on the fields. People were not allowed to say that those deaths were caused by starvation. If they were caught saying so they would be punished severely.’21
Among the rest of the population, most interviewees from the TAR reckoned that the death rate from famine in the years of the Great Leap Forward was around 10 per cent, although a few estimated a higher figure of 15 per cent. Yet more were to die of hunger later on. From the mid-1960s, the TAR authorities began to set up communes. The first was established in 1965 in Damzhung county. The Cultural Revolution delayed the spread of the communes
but by around 1970 most nomads and peasants belonged to one. This was also the highpoint of the ‘study Dazhai’ campaign. The leader of the Dazhai model commune in Shanxi province, Chen Yonggui, toured Tibet as well as the rest of China. His commune became the model for the Tibetans, as one of the slogans of the time declared: ‘For nomads, study Red Flag, for agriculture study Nyemo. The whole country should learn from Dazhai.’
Red Flag was the name of the model commune for Tibetan nomads in the Nagchu district, north-east of Lhasa. The Nyemo commune in Lhuntse county, about 280 miles north-west of Lhasa, was the model for Tibetan peasants, and its Party secretary, Rigzin Wangyal, was the Tibetan counterpart to Chen Yonggui. Tibetans had to imitate the large-scale terracing and irrigation techniques practised in Shanxi. There, the loess soil is soft and easy to terrace but the Tibetans had to slave for twelve hours a day trying to create terraces on the rocky slopes of towering mountains and then carry water up to irrigate the fields. The ill-fed peasants simply collapsed and died from exhaustion, or were beaten to death in struggle sessions for failing to meet their quotas. One source claimed that at the Nyemo commune, 30 per cent of the population died in these circumstances. It was sheer madness from the start. The terracing of mountains over 12,000 feet had already been tried during the Great Leap Forward in the Qilian mountains bordering Gansu. These and others built in Qinghai and elsewhere proved equally useless and have now been abandoned.
For the nomads in the TAR, the communes brought disaster just as they had for the Goloks ten years earlier. A former official from western Tibet described the folly of what took place:
They were forced to start farming the high pastures. Old and young were yoked to the plough because their yaks were not domesticated and so could not be trained to plough a field. The nomads were also forced to build drystone walls, four or five feet high, to protect the grass and the fields from wild animals and the wind. Of course, they only lasted two or three days and then fell down. Because it was so high, 14,000 feet or more above sea level, they did not sow wheat but highland barley. However, even this could not grow at such altitudes. They planted 100 lbs per mu but gathered almost nothing at harvest time, perhaps a pound per mu. The officials had to do this otherwise they would be disregarding Mao’s orders. The attempt at farming was only stopped in 1978 or 1979 and a lot of the pasture was ruined.
In New Tibet, Doije Gashi claims that ‘out of three or four years, there was only one year in which the Tibetans could say there was a barley harvest. In most cases, 80 per cent of the barley crop was destroyed by frost.’22
The collectivized yak herds died because the nomads were forbidden to move them to their summer or winter pastures. Soon there was no butter, milk or cheese. The authorities forbade, too, the hunting of wild animals, another standby of the nomads. As one source put it: ‘We hardly saw meat because of the dialectical argument that ran thus: if you killed your animals that worked and reproduced, you were killing the national economy and you were committing anti-motherland sabotage.’23 Every animal had to be registered and, before it was slaughtered, permission had first to be obtained from the prefecture’s headquarters. ‘The herds constantly declined, but officials had to report that they were increasing,’ one former official recalled. Many nomads died not from hunger but from the tremendous cold. They no longer had yak hair to make tents with which to keep out the fierce winds. The Chinese also copied Soviet cross-breeding ideas, interbreeding the tough Tibetan mountain sheep with Ukrainian sheep. The crossbreeds were supposed to produce a heavier, coarser wool but the new sheep were not hardy enough to survive the winters.
The growing hunger and desperation of the peasantry led to a number of revolts in the countryside within the TAR. At a place called Nyima, about 50 miles north-west of Lhasa, a former nun called Ani Trinley Choedron led a revolt in 1969 which lasted for three or four months. Troops were sent in and reimposed control after heavy fighting. In Lhasa, the Party had the leaders of this revolt and others publicly executed. In one case, nine members of a group called the ‘Gelo Zogha’, or ‘Association against the Rulers’, were shot. In another case, a senior Party member, Ada Chongkok, was shot for, amongst other crimes, writing a poem ridiculing the food shortages.24
No one can understand the continuing enmity between Tibetans and Chinese without grasping the bitterness created by these artificial famines. It is conceivable that in many places one in four Tibetans died of hunger although it may never be possible to arrive at a definitive statistic. No one is sure how many Tibetans there were before the famine, particularly since the national census did not extend to the TAR either in 1953 or in 1964. Official Chinese population statistics show a 10 per cent decline in the number of Tibetans between the 1953 and 1964 censuses. According to Forty Years of Work on Nationalities, published by the Nationalities Commission, the number of Tibetans fell from 2.78 to 2.5 million.25 This is partly because up to 100,000 Tibetans fled to India after the abortive 1959 revolt but one must also remember that, as in the rest of China, the population may have grown after 1953. It is revealing that the same book shows that from 1953 to 1964, the number of ethnic Mongolians rose by 400,000 to 1.97 million, despite the famine. If the Tibetan population grew at a similar rate from 1953, it might have peaked at 3.4 million in 1959. Since by 1964 the population had decreased to 2.5 million, this suggests that some 900,000 are missing. If one subtracts the 100,000 refugees, then the rebellion and famine may have cost 800,000 lives. In his 1962 report the Panchen Lama talks of the population of Tibet numbering 3 million. This indicates that the population may have declined by 500,000 and that one in six may have perished.
Whatever the true figure, the evidence for the enormous scale of the famine and its long-term effects is considerable. Food supplies in Tibet only began to improve after 1980, when General Secretary Hu Yaobang and Wan Li, who introduced reforms in Anhui, visited Lhasa and replaced the Tibetan leadership. The communes began to be dismantled and a measure of religious freedom was restored, but fifteen years later Beijing admits that in a quarter of the TAR’s counties people cannot feed or clothe themselves. A third of all children do not attend school and the literacy rate is the lowest in China at around 30 per cent. Despite the subsidies pumped into the TAR, put at 35 billion yuan between 1952 and 1994, the Tibetans are still among the poorest people in China. Long after the famine, life expectancy is still the lowest in China and scientists continue to debate how to restore the large areas of pasture ruined in this period. In 1995, the Chinese government estimated that it would take twenty-five years for Tibet to catch up with the rest of the country.26
12
In the Prison Camps
‘The Buddhist classics speak of six ways one can be reincarnated. There is hell, hungry ghosts, animals, Asura, humans and heaven, and the worst of these is to become a hungry ghost.’ Zhang Xianliang, Grass Soup
Millions were sucked into China’s vast network of prisons and labour colonies during the Great Leap Forward, indeed more than in any other period after 1949. And, with the onset of the famine, these institutions became in effect death camps.1 In his book Laogai: The Chinese Gulag, Harry Wu, who himself spent nineteen years in the camps, estimates that during this period the number of political prisoners peaked at close to 10 million. (By comparison, in the forty years up to 1989, he estimates that a total of 30—40 million were arrested and convicted for political reasons.2)
During the Three Red Banners movement that began in 1958, anyone who expressed dissatisfaction with the hardships caused by Mao Zedong and the Communist Party leader’s impractical policies, or anyone who showed resentment over the following three years of hunger and food shortages, was seen as directly threatening the stability of the Communist Party’s dictatorship. The Communist Party responded with draconian measures of suppression.
The majority, around 70 per cent, of those imprisoned were sentenced to ‘reform through labour’ and held in the labour reform camps of the Ministry of Public Security. Such prisons contai
n both common and political criminals. As in the Soviet Gulag, intellectuals and political prisoners were treated more harshly in these labour camps than real criminals, who were considered easier to reform and indoctrinate. Harry Wu claims that political prisoners were given longer sentences, reprimanded and beaten more often and given lower food rations. They also found it harder to adapt to the treacherous dog-eat-dog environment in the camps and were not able to cope with the physical demands made on them which, in turn, led to punishments for failing to meet their work quotas and still lower rations.
In exceptional cases, life could be better for intellectuals. One interviewee from Guangzhou said both her parents were sent to labour camps during the famine. Her father never returned, dying in a camp in 1975, but her mother was sent to the Yingde labour farm in Guangdong province which grows tea. As a professional player of the erhu, a Chinese musical instrument, she was invited to join a prison orchestra which toured other camps. She was given four meals a day and ate better than did her children left behind in Guangzhou. Gao Ertai, a painter, only survived the camps because he was summoned by the Gansu Party Secretary, Zhang Zhongliang, to paint a tableau celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Daqing oilfield. At that stage, his legs were so swollen by oedema that he had to be lifted up on to the scaffolding to complete the huge tableau.3
Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine Page 21
