In Exile From the Land of Snows

by John Avedon

  By the end of July 1959 thamzing was well underway in Lhasa. It occurred periodically within the framework of the daily “political education” meeting, held by every block committee for the hundred to two hundred people under its jurisdiction. In their more quiescent form, these meetings, conducted in abandoned monasteries and in the courtyards of large houses, served as mere platforms for propaganda designed to heighten class consciousness. A common question at the start was: “What is oppression and deception?” The correct reply: “The old society.”

  Much of the reeducation in 1959 focused on the Dalai Lama. As they maintained to the world, the Chinese in Tibet announced to Tibetans that the Dalai Lama had been kidnapped by reactionaries. Due to the utter lack of external news, various wild rumors abounded. In some renditions, he was said to have hidden in a forest for ten days, whereafter he was captured by the PLA and freed from his abductors. In Shigatse it was announced that though the Dalai Lama had indeed been kidnapped and taken to “Pandit Nehru’s country,” India could not feed him or his party, as its people were already dying of famine by the millions. Nehru was said to have given the Tibetan leader a job on board a ship but he could not earn enough to support himself. As a result, the Chinese consulate in Calcutta had fed him for twenty-one days, then flown him to Peking, where he now lived with Mao Zedong and the Panchen Lama, “sharing the same meals with them and enjoying equal status.” It was just then being arranged for the Dalai Lama to remain in Peking while Mao himself would come to Tibet to take his place. Finally, the populace was assured that any thought of escape to India was futile, as those who had fled were not only starving but were soon to be transported back to Tibet by Nehru himself.

  Thamzing, while equally fanciful, was a carefully orchestrated undertaking, much like a collective Passion play. Thamzing proper took place with the people seated on the ground before a tribunal of Chinese officials ensconced behind a table. An opening speech was made by the ranking Chinese. In it the people were informed that thamzing was not a matter of one or two meetings, but would continue until a full confession, followed by repentance, had been obtained—until the accused himself, “with the help of his revolutionary brothers,” had cleansed his mind of reactionary thoughts. Furthermore, it was designed to teach the “serfs” to stand up, unafraid of their masters, and expose past injustices. On this dramatic note—with the official gesturing angrily and yelling, “Bring that bad person in!”—the prisoner would be led to the head of the crowd, and made to bend over from the waist, hands on knees, eyes to the ground. A list of crimes was then read from the charge sheets, the official saying at the conclusion: “These are the crimes committed by this person. It is now for the people to help him admit his evil ways and decide the punishment he should receive.” At this signal the first accuser, invariably an “activist” in Chinese employ, would spring up, race forward, and denounce the “exploiter,” by yelling such epithets as “Kill the stinking dog! Skin him alive! Your mother’s corpse! Your father’s heart! Confess your crimes!” After recounting the supposed suffering he had been subjected to, the witness would beat the victim, rebels often being thrashed by their guards with the butt end of a rifle. In these cases, it would frequently be the task of those at the meeting to execute the victim, not, however, before suggestions were elicited as to the best means. Burying alive, wrapping the accused in a blanket and setting it on fire, suspending him from a tree and lighting a bonfire beneath, hanging, beheading, disemboweling, scalding, crucifixion, quartering, stoning to death by the whole group, small children being forced to shoot their parents—all these methods were suggested (by collaborators) and subsequently employed, as reported in case after case to the International Commission of Jurists. In the first year alone after the revolt’s suppression, thousands of Tibetans died as a result of thamzing, while many more were permanently maimed, losing, in part, their teeth, hearing or eyesight.

  Following this basic pattern, thamzing was conducted throughout Tibet in one of three forms: small, medium and large. Small thamzings were often spontaneous, occurring during regular reeducation meetings when someone gave the wrong answer to a question—and thus exposed himself as having an “old,” “green” or “unripe” mind. Medium-size thamzings involved one person being “struggled” for weeks at a time in large neighborhood or multi-village meetings. Large thamzings were a step below formal public executions. In Lhasa, the first of them began on July 26, 1959, nine days after the Democratic Reforms were announced. Lhalu Tsewang Dorje, the Cabinet minister who had organized the defense of Kham before relinquishing it to Ngabo just prior to the invasion, had been captured during the uprising and was accused of being one of its chief perpetrators—which, of course, he was. Interrogated and beaten in the maximum-security prison located inside Silingpu, the PLA’s headquarters, he was chosen as a prime example of past corruption and paraded through Lhasa receiving multiple beatings in front of huge crowds, before eventually being thrown back in jail, to be kept alive for future propaganda campaigns. Less important figures, though, came off worse, such as a sixty-year-old nun named Gyanisha Anila, who was marched through the Barkhor on October 21 while the PLA ordered onlookers to strike her. When none did, local “activists” were recruited and paid to attack her on the spot, after which, according to witnesses, she died ten days later from the injuries sustained. Tantric monks from the Ramoché were forced at gunpoint to break lifelong vows of celibacy by publicly having intercourse with nuns before the entrance to the Central Cathedral.

  By October 1959, the population was cowed. Not only had “struggle session” produced a profound fear of the Chinese; it had also, as intended, created an atmosphere of mutual distrust among Tibetans. Old friends could no longer confide in one another; parents ceased speaking frankly before their own children. In the monasteries, an even more difficult atmosphere prevailed.

  It was on the clergy, the most cohesive and hence threatening group in Tibetan society, that the Chinese vented their full wrath. Monasteries were ransacked, cartoons scrawled on their walls by the PLA. One of the most popular, called “the two-faced lama,” parodied the multi-limbed style of Buddhist deities by rendering a monk with two faces and six arms; one face and three arms were gentle, the hands in prayer and giving blessings, the other—meant to be the real one—lurid, its hands abusing and molesting helpless supplicants. In Drepung, where about 2,800 of the almost 10,000 monks remained, a museum of past horrors was hastily created, with four rooms set aside for the exhibit. The first displayed captured weapons, surrounding an effigy of the Nechung kuden in trance, who, as a nearby inscription related, was telling the people to revolt, thereby leading them to defeat. Next, an “economic exploitation” room represented Drepung as a great machine for systematically robbing the common man. The presentation recounted how, over its numerous estates, Drepung extracted a series of outlandish taxes—on dogs, cats, chickens, donkeys, flowerpots, cigarettes and snuff. A quarter of Drepung’s income was purported to come from usury. On display was a warped board, allegedly used for measuring grain taxes, illustrating how the monks cheated the people. When debts could not be paid, it was claimed, the monastery had the right to “enslave” the creditor for twenty-five years. Drepung was also held to routinely deal in opium. Monks who toured the monastic properties to collect taxes were accused of raping indiscriminately wherever they went; those who would not submit to their voracious sexual appetites were said to be flogged, exiled or tortured to death. A brisk traffic in young boys was supposedly constant. Simply put, as one monk related to a Western author permitted to visit Lhasa soon after the revolt, “The monastery is a hell in the universe that you cannot escape from.”

  The degree to which the Chinese believed their own propaganda was made evident in thamzings such as those at Sera. Ignorance of various aspects of religious practice yielded unlimited opportunities for punishment, as with the lama gyudpas or tantric monks most of whom, having mastered esoteric chanting techniques, wherein three notes or a chord w
as intoned at once, were given thamzing on the ground that they possessed “bourgeois voices.” While lamas and scholars were singled out for struggle sessions, the Chinese succeeded, only after extreme intimidation, in assembling a small group of “activist” monks to enact thamzing. Their victims, rather than being “struggled” against one at a time over a long period, were brought forth at a rate of ten a day into the assembly hall—otherwise kept in total darkness—and then bound and taken from the monastery by the truckload. Concurrently, the thousands of remaining monks were compelled to sign statements attesting to atrocities committed against them by Sera’s administrators. By late autumn, seven months after the revolt’s suppression, the Chinese decided what to do with the majority. A group of 150 of the “most dangerous” were sent to Drapchi Barracks, now a prison. The rest, along with prisoners from the Norbulingka and other locations around the Lhasan Valley, were confined in the first slave-labor camp in Tibet proper—Nachen Thang, a few miles east of the city on the shores of the Kyichu River.

  Nachen Thang was the site of a large hydroelectric plant. It had been under construction—with seven brigades of paid Tibetan male and female labor—for some time, and was said by the Chinese to be fondly referred to by Tibetans as “the Pearl of the Lhasa River.” After the revolt, there was no longer any need to pay workers. By the end of May 1959, less important prisoners started to arrive at Nachen Thang, bringing its work force up to 3,700, guarded by 500 troops. By the end of December, the number had grown to 8,000. The prisoners were kept in ten compounds ringed in by barbed wire on three sides, with the Kyichu at their rear. They lived in tents, divided into groups of a hundred, and hauled rocks and earth for the construction of dam sites, support ditches, tunnels and service buildings. In the evening, each group’s daily output would be announced and those who fell short of the quota subjected to thamzing and additional labor. The plant’s first generator was officially opened in April 1960, its second in October 1962. Refugees reported that hundreds died from starvation and exhaustion during their construction, famine being prevalent through all of China at this time. A monk from Drepung Monastery who managed to escape to India in 1961 maintained that in Drapchi, where manual labor was not a factor, 1,400 of the 1,700 prisoners perished from starvation between November 1960 and June 1961.

  Three of the principal labor camps created after Nachen Thang were Golmo, far north in the Tsaidam Basin; Tsala Karpo, in the changthang or northern plains, where borax was mined; and Kongpo, in the forests of southeastern Tibet. Kongpo, primarily engaged in deforestation, was the easiest camp—the climate mild, the work not excessive. Golmo and Tsala Karpo, however, were death camps from the start.

  Golmo, taken over in 1964 by the Public Security Bureau for Tibet, had already been in service as a prison camp for Chinese and Tibetans from Amdo. It represented one of China’s most important mass-labor enterprises—a railroad linking Tibet and the far northwest with the mainland. Much of the Communists’ success in absorbing Xinjiang had depended on the railroad connecting it to Langzhou. Tibet’s own railroad was viewed as the key to defending China’s southwestern frontier against India, as well as to stabilizing the country and eventually exploiting its natural resources. The landscape though, 10,000 feet above sea level at the heart of Asia, was cold and arid, with gale-force winds blowing up to seventy days of the year, vast stretches without water, and six months of full winter. At the eastern end of the region was the immense Kokonor or Blue Lake, favorite camping spot of Mongol tribes for centuries and considered by Tibetans as the northern boundary of Amdo.

  Hundreds of prisoners from the Norbulingka were transported in convoys 600 miles northeast to Golmo in September and October 1959. Within two years, they were joined by thousands more. Though it was in the Communists’ interests to keep them alive, they apparently lacked the ability to do so. Worked twelve hours a day on starvation rations, with no medical treatment and insufficient clothing against the cold, huge numbers died in the first few years alone.

  At the same time, in Tsala Karpo, a dry lake bed at the heart of the changthang northwest of Lhasa, other prisoners were set to work digging for borax. Here, as in the Golmo region, water had to be trucked in daily; the ground was so barren there weren’t even stones for cooking fires—iron tripods were used to support the pots—and the climate was scarcely tolerable. Prisoners shoveled borax, found in white, red, blue and yellow lumps, out of the lake bed. Sometimes deposits were a yard down; at other times holes the height of a house had to be opened. The original 500 Chinese guards informed the prisoners that a truckful of borax was more precious than one of silver dollars; accordingly, they worked hundreds to death, by forcing labor from dawn to sunset daily and providing only the worst grade of barley flour mixed with sawdust as rations. On Sundays, contingents were sent on a six-hour trek to a grassy region where sticks could often be found. Each group was to gather seven and a half pounds of firewood before returning at dusk. These trips afforded the sole opportunity for escape. With a small supply of food, some borrowed clothes and the assistance of nomads, it was possible to reach southwestern Tibet and, from there, Nepal. After a rash of escapes, the Chinese temporarily relaxed their policies, suspended thamzing and the indoctrination meetings in which it was conducted, held each night till midnight. When this had no result, though, the meetings were resumed, and a stricter watch was kept on the wood-collecting trips. There was, however, an added risk to the security of Tsala Karpo, that of the organized guerrilla forces under Chushi Gangdruk, still—a full year after March 1959—fighting the Chinese deep in the interior.

  Hundreds of guerrilla bands remained active in Tibet long after the suppression of the Lhasa revolt. While the number of major battles decreased as the guerrillas were isolated from the villages they used for support, ambushes of PLA convoys continued intermittently. Besides Lhoka, the main theater of combat lay in a zone above Lhasa where southern Amdo, northwestern Kham and the changthang met. Here, large groups, cut off from escape routes through Central Tibet, fought major battles for a full three years following the revolt. The Goloks, a nomadic warrior tribe from Amdo numbering over 100,000, were particularly stubborn. Their name meant “Backwards Heads,” or rebel—which they had always been, mainly against the central government in Lhasa. They had fought fiercely from as early as 1952, waging guerrilla campaigns in which large numbers of Chinese had died. By the time the revolt erupted in Central Tibet, they still had not been crushed. Though both they and the other “wild men” of Tibet, the Khampas, were hampered by limited supplies, catching them, in the rugged and trackless countryside, was not so simple. Once a guerrilla band was located, the Chinese, equipped with machine guns, mortars and field artillery, would attack its camp in the middle of the night, or at dawn, and the massacres that resulted were characteristic of the fighting all across Tibet, just as the stand at the Norbulingka had been. But despite the Tibetans’ massive losses, combat continued. In December 1964, almost five years after the uprising’s official suppression, General Zhang Guohua noted publicly that “the feudal lords have not been eliminated; they are resentful of their defeat and attempt to regain power by all means.” Almost a year later, he again referred to internal turmoil by stating: “The people can thoroughly smash the reactionary administration of the feudal lords only by carrying out resolute struggle, especially armed struggle.”

  Covert resistance as well hampered China’s assimilation of Tibet. Peking claimed that both the Democratic Reforms and the “rechecking” of those reforms (a euphemism for a second wave of mass arrests) had in the main been completed by the end of 1961, but they had not. On April 2, 1961, Radio Lhasa assured Tibetans that they would remain at the stage of “democratic revolution” for a further five years before socialization began in earnest. Completing the Democratic Reforms—as well as all the other policies on which the rudiments of civil administration depended—was relegated to a non-military bureaucracy comprised of Tibetan and Han cadres alike. As the hierarchy came into place
, reforms could often be carried out only at gunpoint, with PLA support. Yet the army was primarily engaged initially in destroying the remaining groups of freedom fighters and later in the 1962 border war with India. Furthermore, the universal social leveling sought by the reforms was only the first of two steps necessary before the Tibet Autonomous Region could be inaugurated. While the population was reduced to a classless state, it also had to be organized in collectives. This first stage in socialization—beginning around Lhasa with the Mutual Aid Teams (MATs) in mid-1959—was crucial to stabilizing the region. Without it, higher degrees of collectivization—including centralized control and increased production for the state—could not be achieved. It was a time-consuming task, matched only by that of creating the veneer of self-government, a cardinal component of Chinese policy pursued to demonstrate that Tibet had attained political emancipation. But though general elections were officially discussed by PCART in August 1961, the actual Election Committee could not be installed until a year later, the rules for the election were not passed for another several months, and once they were enacted it took more than two and a half years to carry them out, the longest election period of any region in the People’s Republic.