In Exile From the Land of Snows

by John Avedon

  —Order of the State Council of the Chinese People’s Republic, March 28, 1959

  PEKING MOVED QUICKLY following the Lhasa uprising. Martial law was ordered on March 20, just prior to the shelling of the Norbulingka. On March 23, the day after the revolt was crushed, the Military Control Committee of Lhasa was established, followed by others throughout Tibet, save in Shigatse, which, under the jurisdiction of the Panchen Lama, had remained peaceful. Five days later, on March 28, the Tibetan government was dissolved and Tibet was no longer an occupied if self-governing land but a conquered territory.

  In Lhasa corpses littered the streets. Almost 10,000 people had died in three days of fighting. By the PLA’s own account, 4,000 “rebel troops” had been captured along with 8,000 small arms—Smith & Wesson .38s, Colt 45s, Sten guns, Enfields and Mausers—81 light and heavy machine guns, 27 mortars, 6 pieces of artillery and 10,000,000 rounds of ammunition. Nevertheless, to ensure its control the PLA imposed a 7:00 p.m. curfew, confiscated every conceivable weapon, down to kitchen knives four inches long, and then arrested virtually every adult male in the city, filling dozens of large houses and temples to capacity. Lhasa’s two jails, Ngyentseshar in the city proper and Shopa Lhekung just below the Potala, were emptied of their jubilant inmates, their cells refilled by the capital’s citizens. The Ramoché Cathedral, still in flames from the bombardment, served as the initial collection point for hundreds of monks and was soon joined by the Central Cathedral, which received close to 1,000 monks from 28 monasteries around the city. Outside Lhasa, 8,000 prisoners were detained in the Norbulingka, and the three great monasteries of Sera, Drepung and Ganden, all encircled by Chinese troops, saw those who had remained of their 20,000 members locked in assembly halls under heavy guard.

  Disposal of corpses was a particularly difficult problem. While the wounded were left to die, thousands of cadavers were collected in piles and burned for three days beneath the willow trees of the summer palace. Because fuel was so scarce in Tibet, cremation was temporarily suspended and communal graves dug. The stench from decomposition, however, compelled the Chinese to disinter the corpses and burn them as well. Meanwhile, with stacks of captured weapons covering the Norbulingka’s charred grounds, specially detailed troops began requisitioning its priceless art treasures for shipment to China.

  With the Dalai Lama gone, Peking turned to the Panchen Lama to bolster its image of Tibetan collaboration. Whatever his personal views on the situation, the twenty-two-year-old incarnation signed a telegram on March 29, addressed to Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, supporting their decision to dissolve the Tibetan government. On the afternoon of April 5, he arrived in Lhasa under heavy military escort, to take up his duties as the newly appointed Acting Chairman of PCART. To maintain a semblance of normality, Lhasans were briefly permitted to greet the Panchen Lama by burning pine boughs and offering prostrations, as flanked by Chinese generals, a bouquet of flowers in hand, he entered his new residence at Shuktri Lingka, below the Potala. The following night he was given a banquet by the military, and on the seventh he entered the city to pray at the Tsuglakhang and Ramoché. On April 8, 20,000 troops of the PLA’s Lhasa command marched south to combat the guerrillas in Lhoka. Four abreast, bayonets fixed, they wound in an awesome line down the banks of the Kyichu River, following a route parallel to that the Dalai Lama had taken three weeks before. The next day the Panchen Lama walked on the stage of PCART’s auditorium to thunderous applause from Chinese and Tibetan cadres. In the first plenary session of the “new” organization, eighteen past members were replaced as “traitorous elements,” six new departments added—beginning with a new Public Security Department—and General Dan Guansan and eight others appointed to its standing committee. With PCART reformed, most of Tibet’s high officials flew from Damshung Airport, north of Lhasa, to attend the first meeting of the Second National People’s Congress in Peking, the very event to which the Tibetan people had feared the Dalai Lama would be kidnapped.

  While they were gone, PCART was not idle. In its new form, it was controlled by two groups: the Tibet Work Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the Tibet Area Military Command. The three generals who ruled Tibet headed both: General Zhang Jinwu, First Secretary of the Tibet Work Committee, General Zhang Guohua, commander of the PLA and Vice-Chairman of PCART, and General Dan Guansan, Political Commissar. Their jurisdiction applied only to inner Tibet—ranging from Ngari in the west to Chamdo in the east, Nagchuka in the north and the Himalayas in the south. The bulk of Kham and all of Amdo—two thirds of Tibet—was thus severed from the nation. Incorporated into eleven Tibetan autonomous districts and two autonomous counties appended to Sichuan, Yunnan, and Gansu, as well as into an entire province, Chinghai (previously Amdo), these areas ceased to exist as part of the Tibetan nation. Henceforth Chinese statistics reported a population of 1.3 to 1.8 million for Tibet, making the country seem small and insignificant.

  As PCART divided it up, the new Tibet consisted of seven districts, seventy-two counties and one municipality, Lhasa. Controlling the population, through the “strengthened” administration, was China’s paramount concern. To that end, the first of a seemingly limitless set of policies which would govern Tibet for the next quarter century was instituted—the “Three Cleanlinesses”—cleanliness of “reactionaries, arms and hidden enemies of the people.” Enacted by committees called “Offices to Suppress the Uprising” (not disbanded until 1962), the “Three Cleanlinesses” saw either the dzong (fortress) or the largest monastery in each locale converted into a makeshift prison filled with men between the ages of fifteen and fifty. In Gyantse, Tibet’s fourth-largest city, first the post office was used and then the Gyantse Monastery, in which 400 monks and laymen were bound and manacled, among them the temple’s medium, who, dressed in his ceremonial robes, was tortured while being challenged to undertake a trance to free himself. In Shigatse, the nation’s second-largest city, the town granary became an ad hoc prison, its 700 inmates forced to construct the high detaining walls which converted the building to its new use. All unauthorized movement was banned, and work committees were created to marshal the population. Lhasa was divided into three quarters—south, east and north—between which passage for those given bad class designations was so strictly supervised that family members living little more than a mile apart often had no knowledge of one another’s condition for up to twenty years. Thereafter the city broke into 3 zone committees, 12 neighborhood committees and about 240 block committees staffed by one collaborator for every ten people. Thus construed, control filtered down to the smallest group. By April 15 the rudiments of organization were sufficiently in place to mount a demonstration of 20,000 women, children and monks—all those not imprisoned—on the open grounds at the base of the Potala. Carrying huge red banners and triangular pennants bearing Marxist slogans written in Mandarin, these Lhasans “demanded,” as China’s periodicals reported, that the rebellion “be put down,” while “enthusiastically greeting” an announcement of “new plans” for their future. The plans were just then being drawn up in Peking. Though Mao Zedong had promised in 1957 to delay “Democratic Reforms,” Peking now viewed the uprising as cause for abrogation of all its pledges to Tibet, including the original Seventeen-Point Agreement. China’s goal, though, remained the same: to incorporate Tibet into its political framework as the last of five autonomous regions. Before unification could be attained, a major transformation in Tibetan society had to be implemented. In 1956 Tibet had been classed on the third level of the Marxist scale—as a “feudal” society, above “primitive” and “slave.” The reforms of a “democratic revolution”—switching the economy from private to state ownership and destroying the “exploitive” class structure which had run it—were designed to catapult the country past the bourgeois capitalist stage directly to socialism. From there a “socialist revolution”—implemented primarily through communization—would achieve the absolute goal of a purely Communist society.

  Such had been the formul
a for China as well. How to enact the plan, though, was a subject of fierce debate within the Party itself. For years two “lines” or camps had vied for the ascendancy of their respective doctrines: the right or moderate line, advocating an evolutionary approach, led by Liu Shaoqi, China’s president, and Deng Xiaoping, the Party General Secretary, and the left or radical line, demanding quantum leaps forward, led by Mao Zedong. In framing China’s “minority policy,” the moderates desired a “knitting together” of nationalities with their “elder Han brother”; the radicals held that nationalism was ultimately a product of bourgeois mentality and hence had to be eradicated by forceful means. The result for China’s fifty-four minority peoples was correspondingly mild or harsh depending on who was in power. In 1959, following the economic disaster of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the moderates once more stood at the helm, as they had for most of the PRC’s first decade. Therefore, the degree of Democratic Reforms recommended for Tibet by the Second National People’s Congress was, from the Party’s standpoint, rather benign.

  Returning to Lhasa late in June, the Panchen Lama and Chinese generals took twenty days to outline two stages of reforms. The first was dubbed the “Three Antis and Two Reductions.” The second was land reform. Both were to be completed by 1961. The Three Antis (the first of which subsumed the initial Three Cleanlinesses of March) were anti-rebellion, anti-unpaid labor and anti-slavery; the Two Reductions were of rent and interest. The wulag or tax which peasants paid estate owners in labor, in return for land, was abolished. Also eliminated was the position of household worker or nangzen, which the Chinese termed slavery.

  The Two Reductions directly dismantled the estate owners’ holdings. Under a sub-policy called “the crop to the tillers,” the property of the three major estate owners—government, monasteries and nobility—who were deemed to have taken part in the rebellion was given outright, along with their crops, to those who worked on the land. In the case of estates said not to have taken part in the rebellion, a full 80 percent of the crop was apportioned to the workers and 20 percent to the owners. This effectively disenfranchised every vested interested in the society above the lowest grades. The second reduction, that of interest, applied mainly to debts. All debts owed by tenant farmers to landlords through 1958 were canceled outright, and the interest rate on those incurred in 1959 was reduced to 1 percent a month. At meetings convened from every segment of the populace great bonfires were lit, into which the records of loans—and generally all the other documents of the large farms, mercantile concerns and monasteries—were thrown. While PLA contingents stood by, Tibetans were forced to circle the flames, applaud and shout slogans condemning the “dark order of the past”—a rather novel form of the traditional New Year’s celebration in which the smoke from pyres of juniper and incense would be sent skyward accompanied by prayers for the good luck of all.

  The foundation upon which the reforms rested was class division. However, class division under the Communists was far more strictly defined than it had been in the old society. People with 50 percent of their income remaining after expenditures were dubbed manorial lords; those with 45 percent, agents of the manorial lords; those with 35 percent, rich farmers or nomads; those with 25 percent, middle-class farmers or nomads; and those with no income set aside at all, poor farmers or nomads. A final class, called logchoepas or reactionaries, could include people from any of the above groups; in particular, at this time, it applied to all who had participated in the revolt. According to Chinese statistics, only 5 percent of Tibet’s population, those in the reactionary category, were officially considered “enemies of the people” to be openly attacked and excluded from any benefits of the new order. In reality, those designated as landlords, their agents, and rich farmers or nomads, as well as their children and relatives, were henceforth ostracized, leaving only middle-class and poor farmers or nomads with an acceptable class affiliation. In Tibet’s case—unlike China’s—the majority of the people, though tied to the land and beholden to their respective estates for taxes, were living above the poverty line; the “masses” of the poor, as defined by the Communists, constituted, in fact, a minority. This contradiction was not lost on the Tibetans, no matter how abstruse the novel vocabulary defining their lives appeared at first. The reality of class division was further brought home in the second stage of the Democratic Reforms, the attempted reassignment of wealth from the upper to the lower classes.

  In Lhasa, as elsewhere, the committees called “Offices to Suppress the Uprising” carried out the redistribution. PLA squads systematically visited the houses of all “rebels” held in prison. Their families were either evicted or, in the case of those who had no relatives to stay with, permitted to remain with the livestock in their buildings’ first-floor stables. All of their possessions were then inventoried, with anything of value being placed in the empty quarters. Finally, the front doors of the building were sealed with long paper strips covered with black Chinese characters exhorting the populace to put down the revolt. A few days after the initial sealing, the soldiers returned with a truck to requisition the owners’ property. Everything was taken: furniture, rugs, kitchen utensils and even such stores of food as remained. Possessions were divided into several categories: the most valuable objects, such as jewelry, gold and silver, offering bowls and precious images, were marked to be sent to China, packaged and sealed with wax; good furniture and rugs were designated for the use of leading Han civil and military personnel in Tibet; items such as watches and expensive clothing were set aside for the Commerce Department of PCART to be sold individually to Chinese office workers. Following distribution loudspeakers summoned the poor to assemble at neighborhood committee offices to receive the wealth of those who had once exploited them. They found a haphazard array of broken chairs and tables, empty boxes, worn-out garments and an occasional teapot.

  In the countryside the division progressed along similar lines, save that the wealth divvied up was labeled that “of production and of livelihood.” The wealth of production was supposed to include all livestock—yaks, dzos, mules, sheep, horses—Tibetan currency (despite its being banned) and farming tools. But most of the livestock—as well as other valuable possessions—were taken by the Chinese. This left the same old clothes, furniture and clay and aluminum utensils that the city poor had received. Meanwhile, the real plunder began to depart in truck convoys for China, seized from the true treasuries of Tibet, the monasteries, and from the Dalai Lama’s personal storehouse in the Potala. There was so much of it that the process continued all the way to the middle of the Cultural Revolution. While the antique markets of Hong Kong and Tokyo were flooded with priceless Tibetan artifacts, in China gold and silver images, the accumulated art and wealth of a millennium, were melted down into bullion.

  The cornerstone of the second phase of the Democratic Reforms was land reform. An average of 3.5 mus of land (about half an acre) was designated to be given to all members of the lower class and even to the “serf owners from whom it was taken.” By the autumn of 1959 it was already underway in areas adjacent to Lhasa. Once land belonging to those associated with the revolt had been appropriated, a policy of “buying out” was announced for that of the “three Big Serf Owners,” who, not having aided the rebels, had nonetheless “passed the barrier.” This meant, as Ngabo Ngawang Jigme, the former Cabinet minister and now a leading collaborator, summed up in one of his speeches, that “those serf owners and their agents who opposed imperialism, love the country, and accept democratic reform are protected.… political arrangements have been made for their benefit and their livelihood is being taken care of according to their actual conditions.” The “conditions” referred to the fact that all landowners who had succeeded in turning an annual profit of 45 percent or more, after having lost 80 percent of their assets in the initial reforms, were now to lose the rest. Lands and goods belonging to them were appraised at 10 percent of their actual market value and then taken in return for a receipt guaranteeing eventual
payment. Once more the PLA conducted a massive inventory of this segment of the population’s possessions. Where it didn’t go, individuals were required to itemize their property at the local work committee whereafter it was confiscated.

  The land reform materialized in full during November 1960 in the form of 200,000 deeds, written mainly in Chinese, and sporting a portrait of Chairman Mao flanked by red flags. These were distributed in grand ceremonies to the peasant class and those below—beggars and mendicants, often old or crippled, who knew nothing of farming and had no desire to pursue it. As Ngabo Ngawang Jigme said, summarizing the achievements of the Democratic Reforms at the National People’s Congress in Peking a few months earlier: “The class consciousness of the broad masses of peasants and herdsmen has been greatly elevated; they say, ‘The sun of the Kashag [the Cabinet] shone only on three big manorial lords and their landlord henchmen, but the sun of the Communist Party and Chairman Mao shines on us—the poor people.’ They warmly sing praises: ‘Chairman Mao is the father of the various nationalities of our motherland and is closer to us than our own parents.’ They say, ‘Reactionary elements of the upper strata spoke the same language as we did, but their hearts were different from ours; the Han cadres speak a language different from ours, but their hearts are the same as ours.’ ”

  Class struggle was the crucible in which the order of the future was to be forged. Its fuel, the fire which burned away the old and gave birth to the new, was thamzing or struggle session. Through it the “broad masses” would emancipate themselves by making their own people’s revolution. In practice, this meant setting workers against employers, peasants against landlords, monks against abbots, students against teachers, and children against parents. Those who held positions of authority in society were automatically seen to possess them, not on the basis of merit, but through having usurped their place, with the support of others of like kind, for the sole purpose of oppressing the people. Despite admonishments from the United Front Work Department and the Nationalities Affairs Commission in Peking to respect minorities and to nurture unity between the many peoples of China, the reality in Tibet was unremittingly racist; Chinese occupation troops were unable to relinquish their millennia-old view of the Tibetans as barbarians. As Communists, they marshaled ideology in support of this prejudice, depicting the government as “dark, feudal and cruel,” the monks as “red robbers” or “insects” sucking the blood of the people. But the “people” themselves were physically repugnant to the average Chinese in Tibet: dirty, dark, smelling of yak butter and altogether barbarously free in their behavior, they were poor material from which to fashion willfully self-regimented proletarian masses. All of this served to nourish the dedication with which thamzing was carried out, while to Tibetans thamzing was made all the more repugnant by the condescension of the Han, who prefaced every round of punishment and bloodshed with the prim assertion that what was to follow lay solely in the victim’s best interest.