by John Avedon
Meanwhile, as the People’s Daily and the New China News Agency heralded the “new socialist paradise on the Roof of the World,” Lhasa found itself glossed over with new names to create in illusion what could not as yet be produced in reality. The city’s thoroughfares became Great Leap Forward Street, Liberation Street, Victory Street, Happy Street. In reality, the more than three hundred shops that surrounded the Central Cathedral in the Barkhor were now all closed. The marketplace was empty and even the best-kept buildings showed signs of the decay—peeling mortar, chronically leaking roofs, and rotting woodwork—which would, within a few years, reduce the Tibetan quarter of Lhasa to a slum. Just outside town, Chokpori Hill, where the medical college had been razed during the fighting in March 1959, sprouted radio antennas and artillery emplacements as it grew into an important military installation and ammunition dump linked by underground tunnel to the Yuthok Bridge more than a mile distant. At the Panchen Lama’s insistence, those portions of the Tsuglakhang, Ramoché, Potala and Norbulingka that had been damaged in the 1959 shelling had their facades repaired, while according to Chinese needs, many of their interiors were put to a new use as granaries, meeting halls and military barracks guarded by detachments of PLA. With most monks imprisoned in labor camps or returned to the countryside, the “three seats” of Drepung, Sera and Ganden maintained only skeleton crews of aged caretakers. The Tsuglakhang remained open until 1966, and on Wednesdays—considered an auspicious day—Lhasans rose before dawn to offer incense and prayers at the Central Cathedral and at Bhumpari Hill across the river. Prayer flags were still made and displayed but except for these small reminders of the old life, the daily routine of the capital’s citizens was unremittent labor. Building the “new town,” the administrative center for the new rule, was the order of the day. To this end, the whole city was marshaled into labor gangs. For lifting rocks and dirt, women and able-bodied men—many of whom were released from prison a few months following the uprising—were paid between 1.2 and 1.7 yuan daily, or roughly 60 to 85 cents. People with “bad” class designations received a maximum of 40 cents a day. But more often, work was denied them and their children. “In short,” as the Panchen Lama stated in his report to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress in December 1960, “a wonderful situation prevails in Tibet today. Prosperous scenes of labor and production are found in every corner of the vast countryside and the towns. This is the main trend of our work in Tibet.”
“Prosperous scenes” did indeed exist in the countryside, though the Tibetans were hardly the beneficiaries. In the first years after the revolt, agricultural production increased dramatically—the result of the Mutual Aid Teams, the embryonic form of collectivization from which full-fledged communes would be built. The teams themselves were of two kinds, seasonal and permanent, with the latter gradually supplanting the former. Seasonal teams were generally comprised of from seven to ten families who shared for a season the work of sowing, cultivation and harvesting on one another’s land and then disbanded. Permanent teams pooled labor and land, but held property, tools and draft animals in common as well. The seasonal teams were in many ways typical of perennial village farming methods in Tibet, and thus represented no implicit threat to traditional Tibetan society. But again, in no case were “class enemies” permitted to join. They were generally issued the worst bit of land in the neighborhood, occasionally given a single draft animal for plowing and told to till it on their own.
In the summer of 1959, 4,741 MAT teams were reported to have been formed in four secure regions. By the next summer, more than 15,000 had been founded; by 1964, there were 22,000 for farmers and 4,000 for nomads. Besides leaving “no arable land idle,” the teams embarked on massive irrigation projects, built dams and reservoirs, collected human and animal waste as fertilizer and planted a second and even third crop where only one had been sown before. Bumper harvests were reaped. That of 1959 showed a 10 to 20 percent increase over the previous year. A further 15 to 20 percent increase was set as the production target for 1960. By 1961, cultivated land had expanded by 22.5 percent. By 1964, grain output was claimed to be 45 percent above that prior to the Democratic Reforms, and the number of livestock had increased by 36 percent. The Tibetan people’s reaction to these miraculous increases in producton was described as one of pure ecstasy, the “million serfs who stood up” now “celebrating with songs and dances” their “enthusiasm for production” being “unprecedentedly high.” But in reality, in every corner of Tibet, save perhaps Ngari in the far west—still beyond stringent Chinese influence—Tibetans were starving to death by the thousands.
The source of the famine lay not in Tibet but in China. Harvests had been poor, and the Great Leap Forward had led to a schism with the Soviet Union, which had cut off its shipments of grain. As a result, 1959 was the first of the three “lean years” in which millions all across China perished from hunger. To feed them, Tibet’s crop was no sooner harvested than it was taken from the Tibetans and either consumed by the PLA or shipped to the mother country. This was the most immediate and pressing purpose of Tibet’s socialization: to create a bread basket for the starving People’s Republic.
Given the situation in China, the compulsory formation of MATs in Tibet was tantamount to the creation of forced-labor gangs. Ration cards were distributed to one and all—on which were recorded vital statistics for the Public Security Bureau, such as the number of people in each household, their age, sex and relation—and the monthly grain ration was set at 22 pounds per person. This represented a decrease by two thirds in the average Tibetan’s diet. With travel almost completely banned, the population in the countryside hoarded wild vegetables; those in the cities—deprived now of the free markets on which they had subsisted—were even worse off, receiving as little as 18 pounds of grain per month. Horror stories abounded. People ate cats, dogs, and 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 and old people went off to die alone in the hills. Thousands of Tibetans took to eating the refuse thrown by the Chinese to the pigs each Han compound kept, while those around PLA outposts daily pieced apart manure from the soldiers’ horses, looking for undigested grain. Even for Tibetan cadres, normally better fed than the population at large, meat and butter were unavailable, salt and black tea being the sole supplement to barley grain.
The famine lasted through 1963. By then tens of thousands had died from starvation all across Tibet. When it lifted, it did so only to the extent that the meanest conditions necessary for survival could be maintained. Until the next severe famine—which struck in 1968 and lasted through 1973—every available commodity was scrupulously rationed. In Lhasa, one of the worst-hit areas in Central Tibet, each family was issued a single candle per month, 250 grams of tea and 10.8 grams of sugar. Phari, one of Tibet’s most prosperous towns—a center for trade with India, Sikkim and Bhutan—remained, owing to its delicate position close to the border, at the opposite end of the scale. Here, a man classified as a “strong worker” could draw as much as 30 pounds of barley a month; weak workers drew 26 pounds; old and infirm, 20 pounds; children from eleven to seventeen years old, 15 pounds; children under six, 5 pounds. When they were available, butter, oil, sugar, tea, gasoline, five packs of cigarettes a month, up to six boxes of matches and 10.5 meters of cloth rounded out the list of goods available to these most prosperous Tibetans. Even in Phari though, the dearth of goods reduced the norm by two thirds, resulting in numerous cases of starvation. Each day scores of families could be seen going from house to house with tsamba bags, either borrowing or repaying grain. Soon this flow of empty-handed people took on a melancholy name, “the tide of emptiness.” Conscripted into labor gangs, in this case without pay, the people of Phari vented their sufferings in songs, one of which concerned a water mill constructed to grind grain for the Chinese:
It is not very long since the water mill was built,
But tell us the
reason why we have to dust our tsamba bags so soon.
It is not very long since the people were liberated,
But tell us the reason why we have to tighten our belts.
This water mill, built through our hardship and suffering,
Will serve as a throne for the Dalai Lama when he returns,
But if Mao comes, it will be his grave.
But no matter how bad things were in the countryside, conditions in Tibet’s prisons were far worse. Here, hidden from the outside world, lived a race apart—including at one time or another one out of every ten adult Tibetans.
IN THE WINTER of 1959, Dr. Tenzin Choedrak, one of the Dalai Lama’s four personal physicians, lived in Yabshi House, the residence of Tibet’s first family. Having served as the Dalai Lama’s physician for three years, he had become a close friend of the young ruler’s family, almost half of whom remained in Tibet. The atmosphere at Yabshi House, though, was burdened by anxiety over the growing revolt. In its midst Dr. Choedrak remained undecided on what role he should play—unsure whether the Chinese would help Tibet and then leave, as they said, or whether the congenial facets of their occupation were a facade designed to conceal some unspecified but inevitably harsher form of domination. Finally, when Khampa refugees poured into U-Tsang with stories of atrocities and forced collectivization, he resolved to support the revolt. During the March 10 demonstrations, he met with colleagues from Mendzekhang and representatives of all the major religious institutions in the Norbulingka. There he put his name to a document (later valuable to the Chinese in making arrests) which, declaring Tibet independent, swore its signatories to fight for freedom.
Late on the night of March 19, 1959, Tenzin Choedrak woke to the sound of artillery as the PLA bombardment of Lhasa began. Yabshi House was less than a quarter of a mile away from the Potala and directly in line with incoming rounds from Drib, a village on the far side of the Kyichu. Donning a layman’s chuba and pants, he retreated from his room near the front gate to the main house, where no one knew that the Dalai Lama himself had already fled.
On the afternoon of March 22, the day Lhasa capitulated, Chinese troops arrived at the compound. Without warning they fired a field gun, destroying the gate that led to the main house and called for those within to surrender. Four of the sixteen people in the house decided to walk out to meet them. As they stepped through the front door, they were killed by machine-gun fire—having neglected to raise their hands. Soldiers armed with machine guns then stormed the building. While some guarded the remaining Tibetans, the rest ran through the house, shooting at each storage trunk, closet, cupboard and bed, throwing grenades into the toilets and finally emerging to riddle the outhouses with bullets. Families who rented apartments in the Yabshi compound, thirty people in all, were brought to the main house and locked in a windowless room without light on the first floor. The following morning they were permitted to relieve themselves, and were then locked in once more. That evening, a Chinese officer informed the group through a translator that they had been selected for “studies,” an expression all believed to be a euphemism for execution. With two soldiers before and behind, they were marched through the compound’s demolished gate and down the empty road leading to the edge of the city. Here they were deposited in a small room in Tsarong House, the private home of one of Tibet’s great popular leaders, Wangchuk Gyalpo Tsarong, which had been requisitioned by the PLA as a collection point for prisoners. Dr. Choedrak stayed there for two days, incarcerated with other prisoners in the room once lived in by Heinrich Harrer. During this time, he received no food or water. More than once he heard bursts of machine-gun fire mowing down those who tried to escape. As his second night began, his group was summoned and marched in a new detail to PLA headquarters. There, he was brought to a maximum-security prison, originally built by the Chinese to hold their own people: two stockades surmounted by barbed wire, the outer corners of which were capped with guard towers manned by sentries. Each quad housed 350 prisoners, in 12 30-man cells facing the central courtyard; the northeast quad contained additional isolation cells.
Relieved of their watches and jewelry, the Tibetans were manacled—some merely in handcuffs, others, like Dr. Choedrak, in foot-and-a-half-long leg irons. The irons were so cumbersome that Dr. Choedrak had to untie the cloth laces of his boots and loop them around the bar, lifting it each time he took a step.
Unprepared for the inundation of prisoners following the revolt, the PLA took six days to classify Dr. Choedrak’s group (with subsequent detainees this classification was performed immediately). Members of the upper classes—lamas, physicians, government workers and traders—were kept in the maximum security prison, the others were sent to the Norbulingka. Those who remained soon realized they had been singled out as prize prisoners, the core of the alleged “reactionary clique.” Once informed that the “local government” had been dissolved, they were told that, as its chief “running dogs,” criminal charges would be preferred against them. It was then announced that the first duty of every prisoner was to “study” so as to acknowledge his crimes. The initial question asked was: “Who fed you?” The correct answer: “The people—whom I exploited.” To reveal his “crimes,” each prisoner was compelled to dictate an autobiography from the age of eight—a process that lasted a month. Thereafter, seven months of study, self-criticism and thamzing followed—their goal to elicit a confession of crimes and a sincere adoption of Communist ideology.
In essence, the procedures mirrored those imposed on the population at large. In prison, however, they were conducted with far greater rigor. Dr. Choedrak’s case was, moreover, exacerbated by two incidents. One morning while washing his face in the prison lavatory, he found himself next to a fellow physician from Mendzekhang. Though guards stood all around, he seized the chance to relate a piece of news he had just heard. It was May, and the Dalai Lama’s arrival in Mussoorie had been reported in a Chinese newspaper seen by some prisoners. “There’s no need to worry now,” Tenzin Choedrak whispered to the doctor. “Gyalwa Rinpoché—the Precious King—is safe in India. Soon the truth will come out.” Under the pressure of thamzing, the man reported the comment to the Chinese. Meanwhile, as struggle sessions got underway in his own cell, Dr. Choedrak proceeded to make an even more serious mistake. Three of the five friends with whom he had exchanged anti-Chinese sentiments in the past were in the prison. Observing how the smallest incident was elevated into a crime, he wrote to warn the men to avoid mentioning their conversations. Though he delivered the notes undetected all three were later caught and under pressure identified Dr. Choedrak as the writer. Following this discovery he was immediately put on trial, accused of being an accomplice of Gyalo Thondup, who, according to the Chinese, had masterminded the revolt, on the behest of Taiwan.
The trial began early in June. An officer, accompanied by two adjutants carrying pistols, entered Tenzin Choedrak’s cell, leaving a sentry armed with an assault rifle just outside the door. The officer motioned his assistants to one side and ordered Dr. Choedrak to sit in the middle of the room, surrounded by his fellow prisoners.
The few episodes of thamzing already witnessed by Tenzin Choedrak had been gruesome. They included an interrogation device peculiar to the Communists, which was worse than that used by the Kuomintang during its occupation of eastern Kham. The Nationalists had merely tied a prisoner’s hands behind his back and then to a rope around his neck. The new technique was considerably more complex. The rope was first laid across the front of the prisoner’s chest and then spiraled down each arm. The wrists were then tied together and pulled backwards over the man’s head. Next the rope-ends were drawn under either armpit, threaded through the loop on the chest and pulled abruptly down. Immediately the shoulders turned in their sockets, wrenching the prisoner in a grisly contortion without, though, strangling him. The pain from this torture was so great that a man would invariably lose control of his bowels and bladder.
Dr. Choedrak’s trial began with questioning. He
was asked about his life in Choday Gonpa, the monastery he had lived in before attending medical school. He replied matter-of-factly that he had studied religion. “What were your thoughts though? You must have had bourgeois tendencies?” the officer asked. Not comprehending precisely what a “bourgeois tendency” was, Dr. Choedrak was unable to respond. As the questioning progressed, however, his silence turned into willful intransigence. The Chinese, he realized, had singled him out for a specific purpose: to defame the Dalai Lama’s character. To avoid thamzing, the officer informed him, he would have to detail every element of the “Dalai’s plots”—the comings and goings at Yabshi House, what foreigners Gyalo Thondup was in contact with and the exact nature of their discussions. Furthermore, he continued, though the Dalai Lama posed as a religious man, it would have been apparent to Dr. Choedrak, of all people, that, in reality, he was a thief and a murderer who also had affairs with women—in particular, his own eldest sister, Tsering Dolma. Expected to verify the accusations, Tenzin Choedrak continually replied that, as medical officer to the Tibetan leader, he saw the Dalai Lama only briefly each day at dawn to read his pulse. “To denounce His Holiness with these lies was unthinkable,” the doctor explained. “For us Tibetans he is like our parents, our very own heart. Who could say such things?”
