High Frontiers: Dolpo and the Changing World of Himalayan Pastoralists

The backdrop to Dolpo’s recent history is vast, of course. The twentieth century was a seminal time for nation-state building in China, India, and Nepal. By the end of the 1940s, Mao Tse-tung’s long march to power in China was coming to an end. The Communist Party’s victory ushered in a radically different economic and political order in the world’s most populous nation and, consequently, in lands that China bordered, like Tibet. India won independence in 1947, only to be rent by religious and ethnic warfare, and mass migrations, following partition. Nepal, meanwhile, was also changing rapidly. The 1950s began with the overthrow of the Rana oligarchy, which had ruled Nepal for over a century, and led to a ten-year experiment in democracy.

As these nations came into their borders, they began to deal in earnest with the populations on their peripheries—pastoral communities like Dolpo’s, living on high frontiers. The following couple of chapters place Dolpo’s contemporary story in the larger regional context of relations between Nepal, Tibet, China, and India. Chapters 4 and 5 are written as meta-narratives of geopolitical change from 1951 onwards. I look at the formation of the Nepal-China border, and describe the actions and policies of the Chinese and Nepalese governments toward pastoralists. It is not possible to understand how Dolpo’s livelihood patterns changed without these regional historical and political perspectives. Even as I acknowledge (and experience firsthand) that the process of writing history is a selective one, I am drawn by its potential to tell this part of Dolpo’s story.

The present chapter describes some of the major political and economic developments that occurred in Tibet, especially in the nomadic regions north of Dolpo, after the Chinese assumed control. My departure point, historically, is the “Seventeen Point Agreement” signed between China and Tibet in 1951.¹ Though the Seventeen Point Agreement is still the subject of vigorous debate and interpretation, it serves as an apt marker of the modern period in Tibet. I leave judgment of this contested history to those who have provided more exhaustive accounts of the relations between China and Tibet.²

Instead, I aim here to examine the consequences—specifically for trans-border trade and the organization of pastoral production—of this pivotal period in western Tibet and, by extension, Dolpo. I trace the evolution of government policies for pastoralists in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) and describe how the devolution of China’s politics in this era affected millions of livestock-dependent people on the Tibetan Plateau, and beyond. These external changes forced the Dolpo-pa to modify their resource-use patterns and economic interactions, transformations that I will describe in chapter 6.

Frontiers are areas of potential expansion for cultures—like those of Mongolia, Russia, the United States, and China, to cite just a few historical examples—bent on occupying more territory (cf. Kristof 1959). The Chinese viewed their far frontiers with a combination of desire and distaste. China’s history is full of instances of invasion from the inner Asian frontiers, and the Han Chinese saw frontier peoples as barbarians whose pastoral way of life represented a sharp reproach to their own view of refined culture and Confucian ideals (especially as practiced in China’s urban centers). The empire also saw frontier territories as vulnerable to imperialist encroachment (cf. French 1994; Hopkirk 1994). Accordingly, one of China’s major aims—from the days of its early empires to its contemporary emergence as a Communist state—was to secure the territories that lay along its periphery (cf. Lattimore 1951; Spengen 2000). The Communist Party’s program for incorporating Tibet into China differed little from traditional Chinese frontier policies—an inner-Asian version of Manifest Destiny. Since the Qing Dynasty, Chinese leaders had actively pursued Tibet’s integration into China’s polity. The frontier territories were thought by the Communists and their predecessors alike to be rich in the natural resources necessary for China’s economic development (cf. Ginsburg and Mathos 1964; Smith 1996). The emergence of Chinese nationalism in the twentieth century drove its leaders, too: the Guomindang were just as passionately nationalistic as the Communists and believed that the territorial limits of modern China lay in the foothills of the Himalayas.³ After the signing of the Seventeen Point Agreement, China subsumed Tibet, bringing to bear centuries of resolve and accomplishing an empire’s long-held ambition.

One of China’s first tasks was to consolidate its position in Tibet vis-à-vis other nations. Hence, the Chinese conducted their diplomacy with skill and extreme caution in the first decade of the regime (cf. Shakya 1999). In 1954 the Republics of India and China signed the “Agreement on Trade and Intercourse Between the Tibet Region of China and India,” which established the “Five Principles [Paanch Sheela] of Peaceful Coexistence.” In this agreement, India agreed to give up all the special privileges in Tibet it had inherited from the British. The agreement confirmed China’s modern claims to Tibet and, at the same time, assured India’s primacy in the sub-Himalayan region.⁴

The following year, the governments of Nepal and China initiated diplomatic relations and began negotiations over their borders. The central issue in these discussions was Nepal’s privileges vis-à-vis Tibet: China was determined to do away with the extraterritorial status of Nepalese citizens living in Tibet—especially their duty-free status—as anachronisms left over from the Nepal-Tibet treaties of 1792 and 1856. The two governments exchanged diplomatic notes and signed an agreement by which Nepal relinquished the extraterritorial rights of its citizens and withdrew its armed escorts from Tibet, in exchange for assurances that China had no political or territorial ambitions beyond the Himalayas. The “Agreement to Maintain Friendly Relations and on Trade and Intercourse,” signed on September 20, 1956, placed Sino-Nepalese relations on a basis of equal sovereignty.

This agreement illustrates a dominant strategy in Nepal’s foreign policy: the Nepali state has historically attempted to use China’s support as a political counterweight and foil to India. Nevertheless, since the nineteenth century, the rulers of Nepal have known that its independence was underwritten by India, though their policy was not to admit it openly. For doing so would tarnish the image that Nepal wanted to project—a country free from the tutelage of its great neighbors. This posturing is reminiscent of the attitude of the Ranas, who resented any overt paternalistic posture of the British, while making certain that Nepal’s security fell under the penumbra of the Raj.

By 1956, China had secured India and Nepal’s acceptance of its sovereignty over Tibet, which left little room for other foreign powers to raise the issue of its independence.⁵ With its regional dominion over Tibet secure, China’s Communist Party turned to the business of nation-state building there. The Chinese state was determined to integrate Tibetans, along with the rest of its minorities, into one nationalist vision: this theme in China’s relations toward its peripheral populations was repeated throughout the twentieth century (cf. Ginsburg and Mathos 1964; Ramakant 1976; Shakya 1999). But military preponderance and communications supremacy still needed to be established before it was possible for China to assimilate Tibet politically and economically. Physical control of Tibet would be won only when a transportation infrastructure linking it with the rest of China could be built, thereby binding its economic fortunes with the motherland.

Beginning in the 1950s, the Communists embarked on an ambitious network-building program in the Tibet Autonomous Region and other Tibetan areas of southwest China (e.g., Kham, Amdo). Alongside conscripted local workers, soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) built roads, bridges, and tunnels from Yunnan and Szechuan Provinces across the Tibetan Plateau. By the mid-1950s, China had achieved a virtual monopoly on Tibetan commerce, transportation, and communications. Before 1959, the majority of farmers and herdsmen had never been incorporated into a cash economy. Now the Tibetan masses were becoming wage laborers: tens of thousands were employed in construction during these years, with discernible effects on Tibetan economy and society (cf. Shakya 1999). During the 1950s, the seasonal fairs and local trade networks that characterized the Indo-Tibetan frontier were eclipsed by urban markets and a professional trade circuit, which relied on just a few roads to traverse the Himalayas.⁶ A growing cash-based economy marginalized barter partnerships, like the ones that Tibetan nomads had with traders from Dolpo.

As the Chinese built roads across the plateau, the needs of Tibetans and local economic development were secondary concerns to supplying the People’s Liberation Army: the Communists doubted the loyalty of frontier nationals and were willing to entrust the defense of China’s borders only to the PLA (cf. Smith 1996). The network of new roads was built to stockpile military barracks—including gasoline, arms, food and weapons—most of which were strategically placed along the Indo-Tibetan border. With the Szechuan-Tibet and the Xinghai-Tibet motor roads completed, the Chinese could dispatch overwhelming force to quell any rebellion along this erstwhile frontier. And, indeed, a rebellion was stirring in Tibet.

In the 1950s, a Tibetan resistance movement was organized by a loose confederation of guerrilla fighters, who took up arms against the Chinese. The ranks of these guerrillas were primarily composed of fighters from the Kham region. The Tibetan resistance army called itself Chu Shi Gang Druk (“four rivers, six mountain ranges”), which reflected the geographic origins of the rebel soldiers and their unity in defense of Tibet.⁷ The soldiers of Chu Shi Gang Druk were motivated both by patriotism and religious conviction, as defenders of Tibet and Buddhism. But this army was also created out of the intrigues of the Cold War, a time when others were used as proxies in global conflicts. The full dimensions of the role that covert operatives from India, the United States, and other countries played in the Tibetan resistance movement have only recently been publicly discussed.⁸

During the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration and the U.S. government supported anti-Communist groups worldwide. In this spirit, and with the encouragement of the Indian government and high-ranking members of the Tibetan government-in-exile, CIA agents recruited, trained, and supplied guerrillas inside Tibet to fight covert, running battles against the Chinese. Tibetans were flown to military camps in India and the United States, where they trained in techniques of subterfuge, sabotage, demolition, and code-and-cipher. The Tibetans waged a series of ultimately hopeless battles—a war of attrition—against the People’s Liberation Army until the 1959 Tibetan Uprising.

These pockets of resistance were not serious threats, but their recurrence undermined the legitimacy of the Chinese government. The main problem for China in Tibet was not military weakness but one of assimilating the Tibetans. Tibet’s feudal government—the Regents, the Parliament, and the Dalai Lama, who was coming of age under the most trying of circumstances—struggled throughout the 1950s to define its role in the aftermath of the Seventeen Point Agreement. On the tenth of March 1959, thousands of Tibetans took to the streets of Lhasa. With the eruption of protests, arrests, and violence, the Dalai Lama departed Tibet and its feudal government collapsed. It was CIA-trained soldiers who escorted the Dalai Lama to the border, and into political exile, in India. The Dalai Lama’s flight triggered an unprecedented exodus of Tibetans across the Himalayas—up to 80,000 refugees in the first years of the diaspora.⁹ An estimated 85,000 Tibetans were killed as the People’s Liberation Army suppressed the uprising. (The second act and denouement of the Tibetan Resistance would be played out mostly in Nepal and forms a critical part of the next chapter’s narrative.)

A combination of factors seems to have doomed Beijing’s original plans for Tibet: misunderstandings of the Buddhist nature of this society; a lack of consistency in Beijing’s political line; persistent Han chauvinism; and an inability to respond to the growing resentment of Tibetans toward the army and other representatives of the Chinese Communist regime. The Chinese had to act fast and come up with measures that would quiet a restive people. They suspended all agricultural and mercantile taxes, as well as compulsory labor, to entice Tibetans to stay. The Communist Party announced that grazing taxes would be abolished to bring economic relief to Tibet’s pastoralists (cf. Ginsburg and Mathos 1964; Shakya 1999). Though nomadic communities in Tibet had not participated in the 1959 uprising (which had been largely limited to Lhasa), they were subjected to the “Anti-Rebellion Campaign” that followed. This campaign was launched to coerce the cooperation of the Tibetans and to show clearly who the rulers of Tibet were.¹⁰ Ultimately, the Chinese relied on the use and threat of violence, along with massive population transfers of ethnic Chinese to overwhelm and reorder Tibet’s political and economic systems.

China was determined to cut off Tibet’s traditional commercial links and made it clear that Nepalese traders would no longer benefit from the duty-free exemptions they had previously enjoyed. However, practical considerations held both China and Nepal back from trying to control barter among border groups, a wide-ranging and seasonal trade in products from which these states could extract little.

The Chinese used other means of controlling their mobile populations, though: they administrated the outlets through which nomads in Tibet could dispose of their products. The Chinese attempted to regulate the sources from which nomads could buy goods like grain to supplement their diet of meat and dairy products. Chinese purchasing agencies put pressure on nomads who refused to conform by giving preferential prices and terms to those who complied with the Chinese pattern. For those who organized themselves into collectives, the Chinese made the purchase of rice, flour, grain, and tea easier (cf. Ekvall 1961).

The 1959 uprising put Nepalese traders in direct jeopardy. During the revolt, they were taken into custody for alleged complicity. They were suspect in Chinese eyes, and Tibetans were warned off from dealing with Nepalese. The Chinese put forward bureaucratic hindrances and made the business environment impossible for Nepalese traders still living in Tibet. Large numbers of Nepalese lost not only their businesses but were forced to leave the country.¹¹

Private trade in Tibet was stifled by the Chinese monopoly on transportation: industrial and commercial functions were taken over by state enterprises. Formerly, all transportation had been borne by animals, the vehicle of pastoralism (cf. Ekvall 1961; Smith 1996). The gradual diversion of Tibetan trade toward China was abandoned after the uprising of 1959, when the Chinese government assumed firm control over the volume, direction, and means of Tibet’s trade (cf. Karan 1976; Ray 1986).

In reestablishing political and economic control over Tibet, China had to cope with a sensitive border, a rebellious population, and contending factions among the Han themselves. The first years of the new Tibetan regime were characterized by crisis and conflict impelled by developments within China’s Communist Party. Political dynamics during Mao’s tenure involved recurring cycles of radicalization and reconstruction at the highest levels of the government.¹² The resulting turmoil was created and used by Mao and his cadres to eliminate real or perceived enemies, and to test their power within the party and in society at large. Chairman Mao’s interpretations of Marxism were translated into experiments of social engineering on a massive scale, at the cost of millions of lives in China and Tibet.

In the Second Five-Year Plan (1958–1962), Mao and his fellow radicals figured that China could simultaneously develop industry and agriculture if more productivity could be extracted from its rural sector. The “Great Leap Forward,” as the campaign became known, was designed to further China’s socialist transformation and increase political control through collectivization. With efficiency as its great standard, the movement took two forms: a mass steel campaign and the formation of agricultural communes.¹³ The salient feature of communes was the merging of economic, social, and administrative structures within the organization of the Communist Party.¹⁴

At every level of the party, excessively zealous production figures were set for China’s communes: nothing was impossible if the masses were mobilized to perform extraordinary feats of manual labor. An attempt to master nature, the Great Leap Forward was an abject economic, social, and ecological failure. The national campaign resulted in the overproduction of poor-quality goods, deterioration of industrial infrastructure, and the exhaustion and demoralization of the populace, not to mention party and government cadres at all levels (cf. Lieberthal 1995; Poon 2001; Spence 1999).

Industrial production dropped, and food and raw materials shortages provoked rising discontent in mainland China. The party’s failed economic development policies were compounded by a series of natural disasters: already hard-hit rural provinces were ravaged by droughts and floods, in turn, and an estimated twenty-three million people died in the famines that swept China (cf. Mueggler 2001). The Chinese army forcibly prevented peasants from fleeing rural areas stricken by famine, and in the early 1960s the military took over many government and state functions (cf. Lieberthal 1995). Mao eventually accepted responsibility for the disasters of the Great Leap Forward and stepped down from his position as chairman of the People’s Republic in 1961. He withdrew to Shanghai, where he stayed in semiseclusion and plotted his return to power.

Still, the ineluctable logic of the Communist Party pressed forward and demanded the simultaneous development of agriculture and industry. In Tibet, the Great Leap Forward resulted in a series of disastrous harvests of winter wheat—a crop demanded by Beijing’s planners in place of “traditional” barley. The industrial and agricultural reforms caused Tibet’s first recorded famines, killing an estimated 340,000.¹⁵

Matters were made worse for China when the Soviet Union withdrew its economic and technical assistance. China maintained that aggression and revolution were the only means to achieve the basic Communist purpose of overthrowing capitalism. The Soviets terminated their agreement to help China produce its own nuclear weapons and missiles, and recalled their technicians and advisers from China (cf. Lieberthal 1995; Poon 2001). Disputes with the USSR dominated China’s foreign relations during the late 1950s, and China grew further isolated. The Soviet Union had been China’s principal benefactor and ally, but relations between the two Communist powers cooled quickly. The Chinese accused the Soviets of “revisionism” and betrayal of Marxist-Leninist ideals; the latter countered with charges of “dogmatism.” Without active financing by the USSR, the Chinese scheme for developing industrial and high-level technology, including nuclear weapons, became hampered. Their alliance deteriorated rapidly and, in 1962, China openly condemned the USSR for withdrawing its missiles from Cuba.

To add to its troubles, China’s long-standing border issues with India erupted into open conflict in 1961 and 1962.¹⁶ Since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Republics of China and India, the line of demarcation had lurked as a potentially divisive issue. Neither country had addressed the border situation, until the Dalai Lama’s departure from Tibet prompted a flood of refugees into India, which meant that it was impossible for the two countries to maintain the status quo. Their treaty of friendship lapsing, China and India met at the cusp of the 1960s, the first nuclear powers among the “developing” nations (cf. Shakya 1999).

From the outset, China had developed Tibet as a military bastion from which it could protect and demonstrate its power in bordering regions. The Chinese considered the Tibetan rebellion a foreign conspiracy, like previous insults China had suffered at the hands of imperialists. Throughout the early 1960s, the Chinese deployed large numbers of PLA troops to infiltrate and guard Tibetan border regions. The Chinese recruited hundreds of Tibetans to work for the PLA, and employed them to clear feed roads and carry supplies to troops stationed in western Tibet. India and China both built up their armed presence and, by 1962, had established more than fifty new border posts along the western Himalayas, including the high passes between Dolpo and Tibet. Trade between India and Tibet ceased as a result of this armed standoff in 1961 and 1962 (cf. Karan 1976; Shakya 1999). During these crisis years, traders hung back well beyond the appointed dates to reach markets, hesitant as they heard about conditions in Tibet from refugees—tales of disorder, unsteady prices, and failing currencies.

Peace negotiations between India and China proved inconclusive. Fighting erupted in October 1962 when Chinese troops advanced and took military possession of the Aksai Chin—a plateau of more than 100,000 square kilometers in the northwest Himalayas.¹⁷ Although the Chinese subsequently withdrew the troops to their 1959 positions, the aggression lowered China’s prestige among the nations of Asia and Africa and spurred 20,000 additional refugees to leave Tibet. Obviously embarrassed by the exodus of Tibetans, China worked from within to stem the flow and tightened its watch on Tibet’s borders with Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan. The border tension along the Himalayan belt forced the Chinese to abandon their attempts to win the Tibetans over by persuasion and to seek a more rapid integration of Tibet (cf. Shakya 1999). The Chinese were determined to cut off Tibet’s access to South Asia and demanded the withdrawal of Indian technicians from Nepal’s borders as well as an end to the use of Gurkha soldiers by India (cf. Prasad 1989; Shakya 1999).

The border controls put into effect by China and India, and eventually Nepal, made the mountain pastures in adjoining border areas of Tibet unusable for pastoral groups like the Dolpo-pa. Chinese patrols ended age-old patterns of trade and animal migrations on both sides. Herdsmen in Tibet were collectivized and moved toward settled areas, at the nodes of the Chinese economic network, where goods and government services were available.

Throughout the 1960s, the Chinese extended roads and built outposts even into uninhabited mountain passes to mark the border with India and Nepal. This added to China’s sense of security and its neighbors’ insecurities (cf. Karan 1976; Smith 1996). Roads removed the geographical barriers to China’s rule and allowed the Chinese to shift the vortex of Tibetan trade away from India, despite the much greater expense initially of doing so.

In Beijing, on January 20, 1963, the Tibet Autonomous Region and Nepal signed a “Boundary Protocol” which stated that, “Border inhabitants of the two countries may, within an area of thirty kilometers from the border, carry on the petty traditional trade on a barter basis.”¹⁸ Dolpo’s valleys were located within this conscribed, “traditional” space. Having permitted trans-border subsistence trade, the Boundary Protocol also stipulated that both governments “abolish the existing practice of transfrontier pasturing by border inhabitants of both countries. Each party shall see to it that no new cases of trans-frontier pasturing shall be allowed for its border inhabitants, nor shall the trans-frontier pasturing which has been given up be resumed in the territory of the other party.” Thus, through transnational accords like the Boundary Protocol of 1963, the governments of Nepal and China agreed to restrict the movements of their mobile pastoral populations and established a legalistic basis for these policies.¹⁹

The key premise of these statutes was that rangelands were national resources. As such, nation-states had the right to exclude noncitizen resource users. Nepal and China did away with centuries of customary property and resource-use arrangements that pastoralists across the Himalayas had used to successfully exploit rangeland resources across this ecological frontier to synergize livestock production with seasonal trade and agriculture.²⁰ In its agreements with the Tibet Autonomous Region and the People’s Republic of China, the Nepalese government managed only to secure subsistence trade rights for its border populations. It did not, however, provide for future access to Tibet’s pastures—the trans-border rangeland resources that Dolpo’s way of life had depended upon. Thus, the government was not able or did not care to advocate on behalf of pastoralists living on their borders. The Nepalese government was, perhaps, hard-pressed to concern itself with these groups—peripheral as they were in space and imagination.

Once Tibet had been physically integrated into the state, the Chinese could begin the process of altering local political institutions. Road construction became a means for the Communist Party to mobilize the Tibetan people and penetrate every level of society. During their years of guerrilla activities against the Nationalists, the Chinese Communists had used small work teams to communicate ideology and to persuade peasants about socialist reforms. They applied these selfsame thought reform techniques in Tibet.

Every Tibetan began to feel the presence of the Chinese. After a day of road construction, PLA troops would organize political study classes to publicize that the Chinese had come to modernize Tibet. The military’s collectivist organization was posited as the model for the socialist transformation of China’s frontier areas (cf. Karan 1976; Smith 1996). In fact, during this period many Tibetans did join the party and related organizations, since membership guaranteed a job and conferred privileges (cf. Shakya 1999). Even as these major changes were occurring in urban and densely settled agricultural centers, the nomads who ranged the plains north of Dolpo remained largely unimpacted by China’s reforms (cf. Goldstein and Beall 1989; Shakya 1999).

Before the 1950s, Tibetan society had been organized as a feudal, theocratic state.²¹ Large estates were the dominant unit of economic production and constituted the basic pattern of land organization, especially in the more densely settled areas of central and southern Tibet. In pastoral areas, the feudal system taxed households in the form of livestock products, especially butter and meat, as well as agricultural and herding labor (cf. Epstein 1983). Monasteries, too, were nodes of political and economic activity, and they relied on tributes from nomads within their dominion to provide livestock products for trade and consumption.

Confronted with Tibet’s feudal society—a system antithetical to their vision—the Communists sought to break up the theocratic state. Their goal was to replace the old economic structures—in which monasteries and feudal estates controlled the use and development of natural resources, wealth, and trade—with a centrally planned socialist state. In this new economic order, the state would own and operate industrial, commercial, and transport facilities. A major land redistribution program was initiated to collectivize agricultural and pastoral production in Tibet, and this involved the breaking up of the big estates formerly owned by the monasteries and nobility.

The categories of subjects, which had determined Tibet’s internal economic relationships for hundreds of years, were disbanded. Farming estates were confiscated and redistributed to lower strata. A Tibetan refugee, interviewed later in Nepal, described the results: “They distributed land and for many of us it was the first land we had worked for ourselves. Then, when our granaries began to fill they taxed and rationed us and nationalized all property” (cf. Karan 1976:41–42). Cooperatives paved the way for eventual collectivization of agro-pastoral production and the introduction of communes. With the suspension of property and tax categories, Tibet’s feudal economic structure collapsed. The dissolution of the economic power base of the monasteries and manorial lords was “the most significant social and political event in the history of Tibet since the introduction of Buddhism” (cf. Shakya 1999:254). A few monastic estates that stood under the protection of the Panchen Lama were tolerated until the 1960s, before they too were expropriated.²²

In the early phase of their rule, the Communists were realistic enough to recognize that indiscriminate application of reforms in nomadic areas would lead to catastrophe. The formulation and implementation of pastoral policy in Tibet after 1959 was based on a number of premises: some were historical, while others were doctrinaire in nature and related to the Marxist blueprint for developing a socialist society. Some policies were imitative and owed their genesis to the example of Soviet experience in dealing with the nomads of Russian Central Asia. Still others stemmed from subsistence techniques of Chinese tillers, who had little experience in—and, therefore, little aptitude for—raising livestock on the Tibetan Plateau (cf. Ekvall 1961; Grunfeld 1987; Cincotta, Yanqing, and Xingmin 1992).

It is a little known, and even less appreciated, fact that the final stages of the Long March, just before the Chinese turned back into China, were a bitter and traumatic experience for the Chinese Communist leaders. They found that a tough Chinese and a tough Communist who, against all enemies, could pass unscathed throughout the breadth of China, might yet succumb to the rigors of the grasslands and the unwavering enmity of the people of the grasslands. (1961:1)

Another difficulty confronting the Communists was how to distribute land and livestock held in accordance with patterns of ownership and use rights that were unfamiliar to the Chinese.

In April 1961, the [Chinese Communist] Party announced that it would not establish livestock breeders’ cooperatives in Tibet in the next five years…. The [Communist] Party would try to “persuade” the nomads to undertake “experiments in mutual aid and cooperation” with the hope that these experiments would be successful and could gradually be “popularized” in other “qualified” areas. (1961:2–3)

As a result, a series of gradual pastoral policies were put into place until the radical reorganization of Tibetan society—which began in the 1960s and continued through the Cultural Revolution.

During the early 1960s, the political tide in China had begun to swing to the right, with the ascendance of more moderate leadership. To stabilize the economy after the disastrous experiments of the Great Leap Forward, the government initiated a series of corrective measures, including the reorganization of the commune system to allow for more autonomy in production and marketing.

Chairman Mao grew uneasy about “creeping capitalist” and “antisocialist tendencies.” As a hardened revolutionary, Mao continued to believe that material incentives in economic development were counterrevolutionary and would corrupt the masses. The Tenth Plenum, in 1962, marked the return to power of the radical faction within China’s Communist Party. As a result, Mao began an offensive to purify the ranks of the party. Bitter partisan battles erupted, a riptide on the corrective economic measures that the moderates had put into place after the Great Leap Forward. Social well-being was once again subordinated to politics.

Mao Tse-tung systematically regained control of the party and launched his Socialist Education Movement (1962–1965). This campaign was meant to arrest China’s so-called capitalist tendencies by restoring ideological purity, intensifying class struggle, mobilizing the peasantry, and reinfusing revolutionary fervor into the party and government bureaucracies. Until the Socialist Education Movement, Tibet had not been directly exposed to the volatile political culture of Beijing. This time, the aim was to steer the Tibetan masses into overthrowing the old society and embracing a new one led by the party (cf. Shakya 1999). The Communists began to advocate that Tibet’s former serfs and indentured nomads should denounce their enemies—landlords, rich farmers, and religious leaders.

The Communists wanted to create a new set of values by which individuals and communities would judge their thought and behavior: the goal was to inculcate a sense of belonging to the state. The Socialist Education Movement placed class and class warfare in the forefront of politics. Throughout the 1960s, Communist cadres organized “struggle sessions” in Tibet’s villages, where important religious figures and rich landlords were forced to confess that they had exploited the poor and were thereafter subjected to verbal abuse and often beaten (cf. Shakya 1999). But these struggle sessions, and the class warfare they entailed, were but a prelude to the Cultural Revolution that was to engulf China and Tibet.

Just as Tibet and China appeared to be recovering from the cataclysm of the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s cohort conspired to foment another revolution. The Communist Party was hewn to conflict, it seems. Its cadres had come of age with war—Japan’s invasion of China, the Long March against the Nationalists, and World War II. The Cultural Revolution would thrust the party, and the whole of China, once again into a self-destructive maelstrom, from which it would emerge only ten years later (cf. Ghoble 1986).

Mao was convinced that he could no longer depend on the formal party organization, which had been permeated with “capitalist inroaders” and “bourgeois obstructionists” (cf. Epstein 1986; Smith 1996). By the mid-1960s, Mao’s crusade to cleanse the party had erupted into a nationwide phenomenon—the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. This was the first mass action in China to emerge against the Communist Party apparatus itself. As the movement gained momentum, community meetings were organized throughout China to rally the masses around class consciousness, rather than ethnic or national loyalties.

Beginning in 1963, the Chinese attempted to institute an elaborate system of class groups among nomads in eastern Tibet, based on ownership of livestock. The number of animals a householder owned, and whether a household had hired laborers to look after its animals, defined Tibetans’ class membership (cf. Shakya 1999). “Bureaucratic logic is pleasurable when it accomplishes successful classifications,” according to Don Handelman, and the Chinese took great pains to organize Tibetan society into categories (Handelman 1998:xlix). Nomads’ pasture allocation systems and seasonal migrations were radically reworked, with concomitant transformations in social and labor relations.²³ The application of agrarian models to effect the socialist transformation of nomadic areas was seen throughout the 1951 to 1976 period. Likewise, the collectivization program had been designed for agrarian, not pastoral, production.

From the divested herds of former estates, “Mutual Aid Teams” of six to seven families were formed, and Tibet’s nomads took their first steps toward communization.²⁴ Owners of large livestock herds found it increasingly difficult to hire labor for herding and were compelled to adapt to the growing collective sector of the economy.²⁵ By 1965, more than four thousand Mutual Aid Teams had been formed, encompassing half of Tibet’s stockbreeders (cf. Dargyay 1982; Epstein 1983).

The radicalization of politics in Tibet—where the loyalty of the population to China and the Communist Party could certainly be called into question—was inevitable. The first half of the 1960s proved to be an economic disaster in Tibet, and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution only deepened the crisis.²⁶ Butter—one of Tibet’s essential commodities—was already scarce, and livestock numbers fell as state-driven quotas expropriated pastoral produce (cf. Shakya 1999). The Tenth Panchen Lama was one of the few who dared to speak out about the worsening conditions in Tibet. He wrote Chairman Mao a 90,000-word letter describing, in part, how his starving countrymen had been reduced to picking apart horse manure for undigested grain.²⁷

After 1965, China began to actively reorganize Tibet’s agro-pastoral economy by introducing reforms that redistributed land and livestock, banned bartering, and imposed new forms of taxation. The animals of wealthy herd-owners were confiscated and distributed among work brigades. Poor herdsmen were to be the mainstay of the subsequently organized communes, though they had never been the moving force of pastoral communities in Tibet.²⁸

A negative opinion of the nomadic existence is common in sedentary agricultural societies, whose members see nomads as shiftless and difficult to control (cf. Scott 1998). Mobility confounds settled relationships and raises uncomfortable questions of teleological histories, undermines state attempts to territorialize and control its population, and confounds accepted understandings of the relationships between private property rights and community resources (cf. Agrawal 1998). The Chinese denigrated nomadic life as “neither beneficial to the development of animal husbandry nor to the prosperity of the human population” (Li 1958:294; see also Smith 1996). There were deeper roots, too, for China’s antipathy toward the Tibetan way of life: the traditional equation by Han Chinese of nomadism with barbarism. The free-roaming nomads of Tibet had no place in the Maoist world of social uniformity and close supervision:

In the Marxist blueprint for the theoretical socialist state there is no place for the nomad who is an anachronism that does not fit into any sector of the socialist economy or belong in any stage of its development…. In the historic mission of making Tibet, actually and truly, a part of China, that plateau could only be safe for Chinese when the nomads—who control most of the transportation of the land, produce most of what Tibet exports and are most difficult to number, tax and administer—were placed under tight control. (Ekvall 1961:4–5)

Given these predilections, the Communists concentrated their livestock development efforts on anchoring nomads to permanent winter quarters. Settling nomads would unmoor pastoral communities and reorient them toward the state. Immobility would allow the state to develop these isolated populations by diffusing goods and services through government-controlled nodes, in urban areas and along transport and communications networks (cf. Karan 1976; Goldstein 1991; Cincotta, Yanqing, and Xingmin 1992; Agrawal 1998; Scott 1999; Miller 1999b; Fernandez-Gimenez and Huntsinger 1999).

Nomads in Tibet experienced a basic transformation in their lifestyle, as the government attempted to implement a more radical vision of pastoral development. The introduction of veterinarian stations, schools, lending banks, experimental breeding stations, and winter feed areas for livestock led to a marked decrease in the mobility of Tibet’s nomadic populations. The Chinese established these fixed points of economic and political reference as a means of inducing nomads to become semisedentary. Supplementing the veterinary stations were experimental breeding farms, designed to make the fixed bases even more attractive to the nomads, who knew the value of improved breeding stock. The establishment primary schools also encouraged nomads to leave family members at permanent bases and thus further restricted mobility (cf. Ekvall 1968).

Throughout the 1960s, pastoral communities in Tibet were resettled, sometimes hundreds of miles away from their original homes.²⁹ Chinese authorities planned and pursued this social isolation in order to make the Tibetans more open for Communist indoctrination (cf. Dargyay 1982; Clarke 1987; Smith 1996). The Chinese logic for relocating nomadic populations seems evident: in exchange for government goods and services, the nomads would relinquish their patterns of free movement as well as their informal social alliances and economic relationships, which had sustained agricultural and trading communities on both sides of the Himalayas.

The introduction of the communes in Tibet was meant to solve its economic backwardness and realize the ideological goal of self-reliance. But besides being collective economic units, the communes were also intended to be grassroots organs of political power, a means for the Chinese to install their own hierarchy in Tibetan society. However, the party’s authoritarian policies of forced settlement and communal reorganization imposed an alien code; they failed to recognize that Tibetans took pride in their cultural differences based on whether they were nomads or farmers.

By monopolizing transport, the commune system was also designed to inhibit private commerce. Each collective unit had the right to exchange livestock products with agricultural communes. Beholden to central production quotas, the surplus of Tibet’s agro-pastoral producers was siphoned to China, and resulted in grain shortages and steep declines in livestock numbers. The Chinese failed to recognize not only the environmental constraints to farming on the Tibetan Plateau but also the cultural ones. A fundamental cultural obstacle to communization arose from the fact that, in Tibet, there was real pride in the nomadic way of life. In Tibet the tough life of nomads was, in fact, a desirable livelihood in terms of its greater income opportunities and independence.³⁰

Many minority nationalities in China experienced collectivization as a rapid and unprecedented imposition of state control (cf. Smith 1996). The organizational principles of communes were fairly uniform throughout nomadic areas. Communes collectively owned and managed pastures and livestock, as well as equipment like carts, milk separators, butter churns, tractors, and other machines (cf. Epstein 1983; Goldstein and Beall 1990). Up to one thousand households were organized into a production unit under a Chinese official. The commune production system had “five fixed quotas”: the number of persons assigned to each task; the number of animals taken care of by each team; the pasture area for each herd or flock; targets for natural increase; and sales to the state.³¹

Road building in Tibet and neighboring Nepal continued unabated through the 1960s. King Mahendra of Nepal concluded an agreement with China to build a road connecting Kathmandu with Lhasa, which Beijing agreed to finance and supervise. A 300-mile, east-west military road parallel to the Nepalese border was also completed. These new roads were disconcerting to India, in light of its border disputes with China, and signaled a shift in the balance of power as Nepal moved closer to China.

The building of roads into Nepal was more than good neighborliness: China was facing chronic difficulties supplying its large military establishment in Tibet. The road afforded the Chinese the possibility of supplying their army through Nepal, and India lost its strategic advantage: India could no longer cut off China’s access to South Asia by closing the Himalayan routes through Sikkim and Bhutan (cf. Ramakant 1976; Raj 1978; Ghoble 1986; Prasad 1989). The urgency with which China built the Lhasa-Kathmandu road demonstrates that, despite the heavy strain it placed on limited foreign-exchange reserves and its own domestic economic crisis, this project was critical to China’s position in Tibet.

The Chinese provided all the needed building materials, tools, trucks, bulldozers, and so on for the road, which they completed in 1966.³² The Chinese focus remained on expanding and improving the road system through the 1960s, until the total road grid covered over 13,000 miles (21,000 km) throughout the Tibet Autonomous Region. The improving transportation network reinforced the ties of isolated nomadic communities to Chinese-dominated centers and made the task of controlling the plateau, as well as restructuring its economy, substantially easier.

The Cultural Revolution caused massive physical displacements, the destruction of thousands of monasteries, the exile of Tibet’s spiritual and political leaders, and the death of over one million people.³³ The Cultural Revolution precipitated another exodus from Tibet, as thousands of refugees again crossed into India to escape the factional violence of the movement. In mainland China, normal economic activities ground to a halt during the first years of the Cultural Revolution, and agricultural and industrial production fell precipitously.

The logistical and social obstacles of reorganizing Tibet’s far-flung nomads into communes may have been overcome had it not been for the Cultural Revolution, and the overriding interests of security that the Chinese imposed on the border areas. While the cooperative nature of pastoral labor organization could have lent itself to the socialist collective, the Chinese poured resources into transforming rangelands into farmlands—an enterprise with a high risk of failure on the highest plateau in the world.

As it was, the first years of the Cultural Revolution in western Tibet were confined mainly to the castigation of rich nomads and lamas in struggle sessions.³⁴ Further alienation came from the forced confiscation of weapons—a prized possession among nomads—and the apparently random humiliation of revered clerical figures in an effort to diminish their prestige, and hence power, among the general population (cf. Grunfeld 1987). Monasteries, fortresses, and other symbols of Tibet’s feudal theocratic state were torn down. While shepherds were freed from forced feudal labor, they were often compelled to work in labor gangs to build government infrastructure projects; many were relocated by their communes.

The redistribution of livestock begun in the 1960s accelerated through the 1970s. Many Tibetans liquidated their herds before their animals were absorbed by the state-sponsored communes (cf. Karan 1976). Throughout this period, livestock in Tibet were assigned to various forms of state enterprises, in which herders were team members. The Chinese met with strong resistance to communization among the nomads; in the western Tibetan region of Phala an open revolt broke out in 1969 (cf. Goldstein and Beall 1989). The Chinese were forced to deploy the People’s Liberation Army to restore order and attempt governance simultaneously. Though western Tibet’s nomads had not taken part in the 1959 uprising, they rebelled ten years later when the commune system was imposed, telling of how important local history and regionalism were in shaping political and economic history in Tibet.

The Chinese speeded up the introduction of communes during the 1970s, and many herdsmen built houses and animal shelters; by 1976, 90 percent of Tibet’s population was organized into production units (cf. Peking Review 1971; Epstein 1983). Each county in the Tibet Autonomous Region was subdivided into communes, each with teams of herding units. The few accounts of this period attest that, although there was a general increase in livestock production due to technological inputs and improved transport infrastructure, the living standards of Tibetan nomads did not improve because the government expropriated whatever surplus was produced (cf. Cincotta, Yanqing, and Xingmin 1992; Shakya 1999).

The border regions of Tibet were governed directly by the PLA (as opposed to the TAR administration) since the early 1960s, partly as a deterrent to the Tibetan guerrillas based in Mustang. Despite the partisan battles of the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards dealt severely with party cadres who tried to catalyze factional politics in the sensitive border areas and, in the interest of stability, refused them entry. Infighting within China’s political ranks continued unabated through the mid-1970s while Mao Tse-tung was alive (cf. Lieberthal 1995; Shakya 1999). In 1976, Mao died, ushering in a new era in China.

Mao’s political campaigns to effect rapid transitions to socialism had resulted in repeated and destructive campaigns to mobilize a beleaguered population. These campaigns, with their attendant social and economic disruptions, precipitated tremendous changes in the pastoral areas of Tibet and, by extension, Dolpo after 1959. In western Tibet’s Ngari region, rangelands were degraded when nomads were settled and forced to turn pasture into fields. At great expense, the Chinese supplied enormous quantities of grain to seed the plains, only to see the crops continually fail because of Tibet’s extreme climate. Similar experiments were carried out among other nomadic groups in China, also without success (cf. Sneath 2000; Williams 2002). Moreover, the economies of scale that communes were meant to achieve through centralized production were impossible in the wide-flung nomadic regions.³⁵

The goal of extending the state’s control over nomads often trumped its stated objective of raising production: a captured nomadic population is not necessarily a more productive one. Most states are younger than the societies they purport to administer: they confront patterns of settlement, social relations, and production that evolved largely independent of state plans.³⁶ The Marxist interpretation of pastoral development fell short in Tibet when it faced the problem of transforming power into effective administrative structures that could systematically regulate affairs on China’s peripheries (cf. Burnham 1979).

Since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, China tried to solve pastoral production problems among its minority nationalities by applying modern technology and management, denying the idea that the traditional values and practices of rural communities might be of use (cf. Clarke 1987). The disquiet of Chinese rule in Tibet is rooted, in part, to the application of a unitary administrative structure that is unresponsive to local knowledge and conditions.

China took a decided step toward capitalist organization of its economy in the 1980s, though these changes still passed through the socialist political and rhetorical filter of the Communist Party. In 1980, members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party—China’s highest political cadres—made an inspection tour of the Tibet Autonomous Region.³⁷ The tour resulted in a highly critical report that equated China’s rule over Tibet to colonialism and urged that immediate relief measures and resources be released for Tibet’s development (cf. Shakya 1999). Wheat cultivation was abandoned, and Tibetans were granted a tax hiatus on agricultural and animal products, as well as industrial and commercial goods. The Chinese relaxed trade restrictions and in 1984 pastoralists from four Nepali border districts were allowed to migrate once again with their animals to seasonal pastures in Tibet.

The period of reform after 1980 had an overarching aim: to generate material prosperity through large state subsidies and to make political dissent based on differences of nationality irrelevant (cf. Clarke 1987). China was determined to assimilate its minority regions into the motherland, but in the 1980s, toward the end of the collective period, administrative units were reorganized into smaller production teams, scaled to reflect village and household production units. The Communist Party came to recognize that livestock was best left to independent operators working in closely knit kin groups, and that changes in relations of production could still be affected through market mechanisms. After 1980 there was greater government stress on stockbreeding. Livestock development programs in the Tibet Autonomous Region shifted their emphasis from sedentarization and communization to mobile ranching and animal breeding (cf. Clarke 1987). Private pasture rights were instituted, replacing the fluid, seasonal kin-based structures of nomad lands (cf. Clarke 1987; Levine 1989).

In the process of becoming modern nation-states, both China and Nepal enacted policies that reorganized the economics of pastoral production and cross-border trade. The Chinese constructed administrative centers across the Tibetan Plateau, while Nepal linked its northern border regions with the center by building district outposts, airports, and other government facilities. The differences between Dolpo and western Tibet by 1970 were marked. After centuries of fluid interactions, these contraposited border communities now had radically different schemes of hierarchy and economic production (cf. Donnan and Wilson 1994). How the Nepali state would negotiate this turbulent period, and how the discourse and practice of “development” played out in Nepal’s peripheries, are the concerns of the next chapter.