In Exile From the Land of Snows

by John Avedon

  Tens of thousands of Tibetans died during the 1968–73 famine. According to survivors, the famine brought the total number of Tibetans who had perished as a direct result of the Chinese invasion close to the million mark, reducing the nation’s population by one seventh. Just prior to it, the Chinese had introduced a dish called the dug-gnal drenso thugpa or “remembering sufferings soup.” This was a thin gruel of tsamba and water, without salt, which people were made to drink in order to recall the supposedly horrid conditions under which they had suffered before liberation. Younger Tibetans incredulously asked their elders, “Was it really that bad in the old society?” The adults carefully replied, “Yes, the masses subsisted only on this gruel, while the aristocrats regaled themselves at banquets.” Unfortunately for Chinese propagandists, the distorted image of the past paled in comparison with the realities of the present.

  Communes and their attendant starvation were both intimately related to a third phenomenon, commencing late in 1968 and lasting into the second half of the seventies: war preparation. On October 1, 1968, Lin Biao and Zhou Enlai issued a new call for massive war preparedness. Just as the 1962 border war with India had been employed to galvanize China following the “three lean years,” once more an external threat was used to stem the tide of internal disorder. It was complemented by the Hsia Fang movement, also inaugurated in the autumn of 1968, in which as many as 30 million Red Guards were forcibly sent to the countryside. There was a special note to the war drive, however, which accounted for both its great duration and its intensity. With heavy concentrations of Indian Jawans perched on Tibet’s borders, a divided Korea to the northeast, relations with the Soviet Union about to erupt in the volatile border clashes of 1969 and the Vietnam War at its peak, the People’s Republic was encircled by hostile forces. Belief in the inevitability of a third world war capped China’s fears, party theorists now holding that a nuclear holocaust was due at any moment. Under the threat of imminent destruction, almost anything could be demanded of the population. For the next seven years Tibetans were warned that the moment had finally come when India would attack. Accordingly, while the population starved, military grain stockpiles—which the PLA boasted were sufficient for decades (a not altogether fanciful notion in Tibet’s high altitude)—grew immense. Communes were the very engine of the war machine; nonetheless, war preparedness entailed far more than farm work.

  By 1969 three categories through which all Tibetans were to assist the PLA had been created. The first, entailing conscription directly into the army, was reserved for young Tibetan men possessing the best class designation—that of poor farmer, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five. Recruited for up to five years, they were given two months of basic training, whereafter, mixed with different recruits, they were organized into four- or five-man units appended to every 100 Chinese soldiers, one Tibetan generally to each PLA squad. Their job was to translate to the local population as well as coordinate support in the event of war. They were forbidden either to associate with other Tibetans or to discuss defense matters among themselves. Officially, they were not even supposed to know the strength of their own company. Each was given a notebook in which to periodically record his misdeeds, further enforcing security. Compelled to volunteer by 450 subdistrict offices, as many as 30,000 men in the TAR alone were initially conscripted; the numbers in Kham and Amdo unknown.

  The second category, called yulmag in Tibetan, was a people’s militia. It had been introduced on a small scale during the 1962 war, mainly in the border regions. In 1969, it was again organized in border zones, though now on an all-inclusive district, subdistrict, commune and production team basis. Two types of recruits, both between the ages of fifteen and thirty-eight, comprised the militia. The more important were burtsun chenpos, or activists, two of whom were assigned to every militia unit. Trained separately, they were enjoined to seek out spies, counterrevolutionaries and those trying to escape to India. One was equipped with an automatic weapon (such as a Sten gun), the other with its ammunition. Together they guarded strategic points including bridges, grain warehouses and dams. The majority of militia, who composed the other group, were not armed. They practiced with either wooden guns or long staves, though by the mid-seventies some three-member teams carried weapons: one man held the rifle, another the bullets, the last accounted for each round expended. Not to lose time in the fields, training was held in place of night meetings. An average commune produced one brigade of militia. While some brigades were trained in guerrilla warfare, most were given rudimentary marching drill and were counted on to function mainly as a police force when war called the PLA and elite militia away.

  The third category was called the War Preparation Army. As part of it, Tibetans thirty-five to forty-five were to accompany the PLA to the front as laborers and transport workers. Those aged forty-five to fifty-five were assigned as medical assistants; besides carrying bandages and other supplies, their job was to remove the wounded and bury the dead. The oldest and least useful Tibetans, those fifty-five to sixty-five, were called “Support the Army.” Unarmed, they were to attack ahead of the regular troops in human waves, absorbing the enemy’s fire. In all the border areas, yaks and horses were organized into transport teams.

  While the Tibetans in western, southern and southeastern Tibet were engaged in training, their brethren in the big cities had an equally tiring drama to act out. Like cities in China proper, Lhasa, Shigatse, Gyantse, Chamdo, Jyekundo, Dartsedo and all other major towns were hardened against aerial assault. Parallel walls were constructed in the strongest room of each home; parallel trenches and air-raid shelters were dug—by Tibetans—lining main thoroughfares. In Lhasa, civil defense exercises were carried out day and night, a siren atop Chokpori Hill signaling their start and finish. Even hospitals were evacuated as PLA antiaircraft batteries and civilian fire squads took control of the city for an hour or two. Underground headquarters for all of the TAR’s major departments were tunneled into the hills around the valley, plans drawn up for relocation at a moment’s notice. It was rumored among Tibetan cadres that important documents had already been transported out of the city to the secret locations.

  War preparation provided a check not just on Red Guard violence but on revolts by the Tibetans themselves. The Cultural Revolution had offered a natural opportunity for a renewal of attack against the Chinese. Young Tibetan men began by joining the Revolutionary Rebels, who, in exchange for their enlistment, promised higher grain rations and even—remarkably—freedom of religious practice. Under their auspices, Tibetans donned the Red Guard’s universally worn red armband, “encircled” hated Chinese cadres, ambushed convoys and whenever they could provoked clashes between rival factions. Freed from labor for the first time in their lives, youths spent long hours avidly fashioning staves, spears and axes for pitched battles with the Great Alliance. Their elders, Tibetan cadres working in the employ of the Chinese, denounced their superiors, walked off their jobs and threatened anyone who sought to prevent them with the dreaded accusation of being “pro-Liuist.” Insubordination, though, was a comparatively mild form of resistance. By the end of 1968 a number of popular revolts had swept the country, catalyzed by the withdrawal of Chinese troops to the capital, with only isolated garrisons, their communications cut, left in the countryside.

  One incident in particular galvanized Tibetans into revolt. On the morning of June 7, 1968, a group of teen-agers became embroiled with a PLA unit in the courtyard of Yuthok House in Lhasa. Two Chinese were killed. Frightened, the youngsters fled to the hallowed interior of the Jokhang, the Central Cathedral’s inner sanctum, where they were soon surrounded by three hundred military police. The PLA commander informed them that, unless they returned weapons and ammunition stolen in the fight, he would open fire within five minutes. The youths insisted that they had taken no weapons; moreover, they claimed that they all came from poor and middle-class backgrounds. With no further word they held up their copies of Mao’s Little Red Book and began t
o chant a Communist slogan, hoping to defuse the confrontation: “The army and people are one; beneath the sky none can separate them.” When the time elapsed, the PLA fired directly into the crowd, killing twelve and wounding forty-nine, many of whom were bayoneted and beaten with rifle butts following the fusillade. The Chinese commanders then denied those wounded medical attention until a team of Tibetan doctors from Mendzekhang arrived to take them away. In the interim, the large crowds gathered outside heard the survivors within singing a well-known underground song:

  “Do not mourn, people of Tibet,

  Independence will surely be ours.

  Remember our sun,

  Remember His Holiness.”

  Word spread quickly of the massacre in Tibet’s holiest shrine. Popular resentment was brought to such a pitch that Chinese authorities, to dampen the crisis, announced that there would be an investigation (which was never, in fact, conducted). But the city’s will to resist could not be diminished. Anti-Chinese acts proliferated, and a full year later, in June 1969, mass disobedience occurred when the entire population openly defied the ban on religion by celebrating Saka Dawa—the anniversary of Buddha’s birth, enlightenment and death. The following month office workers in the capital walked off their jobs, ostensibly to celebrate World Solidarity Day. Erecting tents in Lhasa’s old lingkas or picnic grounds by the Kyichu River, they opened their Little Red Books on the ground, as though studying, and proceeded to play dice and mah-jong for an entire week. Outside Lhasa, in Lhoka, resistance took a less playful turn. There, 3,000 young Tibetans attacked the PLA, killing 200. Two months later, 200 more troops were killed in Tsethang; similar uprisings were reported to have occurred in five areas of western Tibet as early as 1967. By the summer of 1970—long after Red Guard fighting had subsided, communes had been imposed and war preparation begun—a major revolt broke out across southwestern Tibet, in which more than 1,000 Chinese soldiers died, by the account of a local PLA commander. A spate of mass executions followed—the victims usually members of underground groups—often scheduled to coincide with public holidays. Undaunted, the inhabitants of Kham’s original eighteen districts began openly attacking Chinese under the Tibetan flag. By 1972, fighting had yet to be put down, with the largest revolt of all affecting some sixty of the seventy-one districts in the TAR and reportedly claiming the lives of 12,000 Tibetans.

  Despite both the formation of a Revolutionary Committee in the autumn of 1968 and an end to Red Guard fighting in 1969, Peking felt that Tibet required a massive purge to regain stability. It began early in 1970. Officially designated as simply another “class-cleansing campaign,” the purge was directed, unlike the Democratic Reforms and their rechecking, not just at the upper strata, but at all segments of society. “Traitors, conspirators, saboteurs, arsonists and anarchist elements”—everyone from ultra-leftists to those remnant anti-Maoists who had somehow escaped the Cultural Revolution were subjected to “weeding out.” In April 1970, tens of thousands of Tibetan cadres who had proved their untrustworthiness during the upheaval were culled from the bureaucracy. Simultaneously, the records of every Tibetan in the TAR, meticulously kept by each branch of the Public Security Bureau, were reviewed. Afterwards, thousands were arrested in surprise nighttime raids, taken to prisons and submitted to interrogations. In each area, groups of ten to twenty were singled out as examples to receive one of three fates; thamzing, imprisonment or public execution. The photos of those to be executed were posted around each district, the requisite red X marked across their body or face, their crimes of “anti-party and anti-people activities” listed beneath. The executions themselves took place on large public meeting grounds where the victim, a wire pulled tight around his or her neck by a Chinese guard (to keep them from yelling a last word of defiance) would receive a bullet to the back of the head. Immediately thereafter, their family members, assembled at the head of the crowd, would be made to applaud, thank the Party for its “kindness” in eliminating the “bad element” from among them and then bury the still warm and bloody corpse, unceremoniously and without covering, in an impromptu grave. In this manner, almost four years after the Cultural Revolution had plunged Tibet back into the turmoil it had just begun to leave behind, Chinese officials hoped once more to regain control over the population.

  AT MIDNIGHT on October 18, 1962, Dr. Tenzin Choedrak’s truck drove in sight of the Potala. The twenty-one survivors of the group who had left Tibet three years before had been taxed to the utmost by their return trip from China. Only the strongest could balance themselves against the shifting movement of the vehicle as it plied the mountains and valleys on the Xining-Lhasa route. With each turn, the others were helplessly thrown about, despite their efforts to press against one another for stability. As the Thangbu Pass, five hours from Nagchuka, was crossed, all required drafts from the oxygen pillows to breathe; even so, a number fainted. From then on, the thin air and cold dulled the men’s anticipation of returning home. It was briefly revived only at journey’s end as the somber mass of the Potala, its windows blank and featureless, came into view silhouetted against the mountains behind.

  Taking the northern road, the truck skirted Lhasa, and passed ten minutes later through a gate in the twenty-foot-wall surrounding Drapchi, Tibet’s foremost prison. Originally headquarters for the Drapchi Regiment of the Tibetan army, the compound’s barracks had, by September 1959, received 3,000 prisoners, the majority of whom were monks from Sera and Drepung monasteries. Ordered to build their own cells, the men had begun by constructing a windowless maximum-security block, capable of housing 200 high lamas and officials, behind an interior wall. An outer courtyard and cellblocks bounded by exterior walls came next, followed by a hospital, for the use of Chinese personnel in Lhasa. Thereafter Drapchi began serving as the region’s chief clearinghouse for prisoners arrested during the Democratic Reforms. Once their cases were decided, most were dispatched to the TAR’s growing string of labor camps, which eventually held upwards of 100,000 people. Drapchi’s permanent inmate population was kept, according to one ex-inmate, at 1,700, which despite frequent deaths, was replenished by a monthly addition of between ten to fifty new prisoners.

  At Drapchi the real meaning of “reeducation” was brought home to Tenzin Choedrak. Unlike the other five prisons in and around Lhasa, which, well into the eighties, held 7,000 to 8,000 political prisoners—almost a fifth of the city’s Tibetan population—Drapchi did not emphasize forced labor. Indoctrination was its specialty. Permitted to leave their cells only for trips to the toilet, Dr. Choedrak and his companions were to spend every waking hour in study—an assault on the spirit, which, in its own way, proved more destabilizing than the physical hardships of the past. It was now that mental breakdowns, depression and suicidal behavior appeared—previously held in abeyance by the body’s suffering, but unavoidable when the mind alone had to bear the brunt of hardship. Eight rules, required to be memorized on the prisoner’s arrival, served as the basis of “reeducation.” Inmates were not permitted to discuss their backgrounds, the reasons for their incarceration or any topics other than those being taught. Instead, faults were to be confessed daily; to which end, it was every man’s duty to inform on his neighbor. On the other hand, the prisoner had to regularly extol the Tang or CCP, citing examples from his personal experience to demonstrate how much he had benefited from the Party’s guiding light. Finally, no complaining about rations was permitted, all orders were to be obeyed without appeal, no destruction of property, laughing, singing or loud talking was allowed, and a clean appearance was to be maintained at all times.