1959–1965
1959–1965
The following order is hereby proclaimed.
Most of the kalons of the Tibet local government and the upper-strata reactionary clique colluded with imperialism, assembled rebellious bandits, carried out rebellion, ravaged the people, put the Dalai Lama under duress, tore up the Seventeen-Point Agreement on Measures for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet and, on the night of March 19, directed the Tibetan local army and rebellious elements to launch a general offensive against the People’s Liberation Army garrison in Lhasa. Such acts which betray the motherland and disrupt unification are not allowed by law. In order to safeguard the unification of the country and national unity, the decision is that from this day the Tibet local government is dissolved.
—Order of the State Council of the Chinese People’s Republic, March 28, 1959
PEKING MOVED QUICKLY following the Lhasa uprising. Martial law was ordered on March 20, just prior to the shelling of the Norbulingka. On March 23, the day after the revolt was crushed, the Military Control Committee of Lhasa was established, followed by others throughout Tibet, save in Shigatse, which, under the jurisdiction of the Panchen Lama, had remained peaceful. Five days later, on March 28, the Tibetan government was dissolved and Tibet was no longer an occupied if self-governing land but a conquered territory.
In Lhasa corpses littered the streets. Almost 10,000 people had died in three days of fighting. By the PLA’s own account, 4,000 “rebel troops” had been captured along with 8,000 small arms—Smith & Wesson .38s, Colt 45s, Sten guns, Enfields and Mausers—81 light and heavy machine guns, 27 mortars, 6 pieces of artillery and 10,000,000 rounds of ammunition. Nevertheless, to ensure its control the PLA imposed a 7:00 p.m. curfew, confiscated every conceivable weapon, down to kitchen knives four inches long, and then arrested virtually every adult male in the city, filling dozens of large houses and temples to capacity. Lhasa’s two jails, Ngyentseshar in the city proper and Shopa Lhekung just below the Potala, were emptied of their jubilant inmates, their cells refilled by the capital’s citizens. The Ramoché Cathedral, still in flames from the bombardment, served as the initial collection point for hundreds of monks and was soon joined by the Central Cathedral, which received close to 1,000 monks from 28 monasteries around the city. Outside Lhasa, 8,000 prisoners were detained in the Norbulingka, and the three great monasteries of Sera, Drepung and Ganden, all encircled by Chinese troops, saw those who had remained of their 20,000 members locked in assembly halls under heavy guard.
Disposal of corpses was a particularly difficult problem. While the wounded were left to die, thousands of cadavers were collected in piles and burned for three days beneath the willow trees of the summer palace. Because fuel was so scarce in Tibet, cremation was temporarily suspended and communal graves dug. The stench from decomposition, however, compelled the Chinese to disinter the corpses and burn them as well. Meanwhile, with stacks of captured weapons covering the Norbulingka’s charred grounds, specially detailed troops began requisitioning its priceless art treasures for shipment to China.
With the Dalai Lama gone, Peking turned to the Panchen Lama to bolster its image of Tibetan collaboration. Whatever his personal views on the situation, the twenty-two-year-old incarnation signed a telegram on March 29, addressed to Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, supporting their decision to dissolve the Tibetan government. On the afternoon of April 5, he arrived in Lhasa under heavy military escort, to take up his duties as the newly appointed Acting Chairman of PCART. To maintain a semblance of normality, Lhasans were briefly permitted to greet the Panchen Lama by burning pine boughs and offering prostrations, as flanked by Chinese generals, a bouquet of flowers in hand, he entered his new residence at Shuktri Lingka, below the Potala. The following night he was given a banquet by the military, and on the seventh he entered the city to pray at the Tsuglakhang and Ramoché. On April 8, 20,000 troops of the PLA’s Lhasa command marched south to combat the guerrillas in Lhoka. Four abreast, bayonets fixed, they wound in an awesome line down the banks of the Kyichu River, following a route parallel to that the Dalai Lama had taken three weeks before. The next day the Panchen Lama walked on the stage of PCART’s auditorium to thunderous applause from Chinese and Tibetan cadres. In the first plenary session of the “new” organization, eighteen past members were replaced as “traitorous elements,” six new departments added—beginning with a new Public Security Department—and General Dan Guansan and eight others appointed to its standing committee. With PCART reformed, most of Tibet’s high officials flew from Damshung Airport, north of Lhasa, to attend the first meeting of the Second National People’s Congress in Peking, the very event to which the Tibetan people had feared the Dalai Lama would be kidnapped.
While they were gone, PCART was not idle. In its new form, it was controlled by two groups: the Tibet Work Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the Tibet Area Military Command. The three generals who ruled Tibet headed both: General Zhang Jinwu, First Secretary of the Tibet Work Committee, General Zhang Guohua, commander of the PLA and Vice-Chairman of PCART, and General Dan Guansan, Political Commissar. Their jurisdiction applied only to inner Tibet—ranging from Ngari in the west to Chamdo in the east, Nagchuka in the north and the Himalayas in the south. The bulk of Kham and all of Amdo—two thirds of Tibet—was thus severed from the nation. Incorporated into eleven Tibetan autonomous districts and two autonomous counties appended to Sichuan, Yunnan, and Gansu, as well as into an entire province, Chinghai (previously Amdo), these areas ceased to exist as part of the Tibetan nation. Henceforth Chinese statistics reported a population of 1.3 to 1.8 million for Tibet, making the country seem small and insignificant.
As PCART divided it up, the new Tibet consisted of seven districts, seventy-two counties and one municipality, Lhasa. Controlling the population, through the “strengthened” administration, was China’s paramount concern. To that end, the first of a seemingly limitless set of policies which would govern Tibet for the next quarter century was instituted—the “Three Cleanlinesses”—cleanliness of “reactionaries, arms and hidden enemies of the people.” Enacted by committees called “Offices to Suppress the Uprising” (not disbanded until 1962), the “Three Cleanlinesses” saw either the dzong (fortress) or the largest monastery in each locale converted into a makeshift prison filled with men between the ages of fifteen and fifty. In Gyantse, Tibet’s fourth-largest city, first the post office was used and then the Gyantse Monastery, in which 400 monks and laymen were bound and manacled, among them the temple’s medium, who, dressed in his ceremonial robes, was tortured while being challenged to undertake a trance to free himself. In Shigatse, the nation’s second-largest city, the town granary became an ad hoc prison, its 700 inmates forced to construct the high detaining walls which converted the building to its new use. All unauthorized movement was banned, and work committees were created to marshal the population. Lhasa was divided into three quarters—south, east and north—between which passage for those given bad class designations was so strictly supervised that family members living little more than a mile apart often had no knowledge of one another’s condition for up to twenty years. Thereafter the city broke into 3 zone committees, 12 neighborhood committees and about 240 block committees staffed by one collaborator for every ten people. Thus construed, control filtered down to the smallest group. By April 15 the rudiments of organization were sufficiently in place to mount a demonstration of 20,000 women, children and monks—all those not imprisoned—on the open grounds at the base of the Potala. Carrying huge red banners and triangular pennants bearing Marxist slogans written in Mandarin, these Lhasans “demanded,” as China’s periodicals reported, that the rebellion “be put down,” while “enthusiastically greeting” an announcement of “new plans” for their future. The plans were just then being drawn up in Peking. Though Mao Zedong had promised in 1957 to delay “Democratic Reforms,” Peking now viewed the uprising as cause for abrogation of all its pledges to Tibet, including the original Seventeen-Point Agreement. China’s goal, though, remained the same: to incorporate Tibet into its political framework as the last of five autonomous regions. Before unification could be attained, a major transformation in Tibetan society had to be implemented. In 1956 Tibet had been classed on the third level of the Marxist scale—as a “feudal” society, above “primitive” and “slave.” The reforms of a “democratic revolution”—switching the economy from private to state ownership and destroying the “exploitive” class structure which had run it—were designed to catapult the country past the bourgeois capitalist stage directly to socialism. From there a “socialist revolution”—implemented primarily through communization—would achieve the absolute goal of a purely Communist society.
Such had been the formula for China as well. How to enact the plan, though, was a subject of fierce debate within the Party itself. For years two “lines” or camps had vied for the ascendancy of their respective doctrines: the right or moderate line, advocating an evolutionary approach, led by Liu Shaoqi, China’s president, and Deng Xiaoping, the Party General Secretary, and the left or radical line, demanding quantum leaps forward, led by Mao Zedong. In framing China’s “minority policy,” the moderates desired a “knitting together” of nationalities with their “elder Han brother”; the radicals held that nationalism was ultimately a product of bourgeois mentality and hence had to be eradicated by forceful means. The result for China’s fifty-four minority peoples was correspondingly mild or harsh depending on who was in power. In 1959, following the economic disaster of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the moderates once more stood at the helm, as they had for most of the PRC’s first decade. Therefore, the degree of Democratic Reforms recommended for Tibet by the Second National People’s Congress was, from the Party’s standpoint, rather benign.
Returning to Lhasa late in June, the Panchen Lama and Chinese generals took twenty days to outline two stages of reforms. The first was dubbed the “Three Antis and Two Reductions.” The second was land reform. Both were to be completed by 1961. The Three Antis (the first of which subsumed the initial Three Cleanlinesses of March) were anti-rebellion, anti-unpaid labor and anti-slavery; the Two Reductions were of rent and interest. The wulag or tax which peasants paid estate owners in labor, in return for land, was abolished. Also eliminated was the position of household worker or nangzen, which the Chinese termed slavery.
The Two Reductions directly dismantled the estate owners’ holdings. Under a sub-policy called “the crop to the tillers,” the property of the three major estate owners—government, monasteries and nobility—who were deemed to have taken part in the rebellion was given outright, along with their crops, to those who worked on the land. In the case of estates said not to have taken part in the rebellion, a full 80 percent of the crop was apportioned to the workers and 20 percent to the owners. This effectively disenfranchised every vested interested in the society above the lowest grades. The second reduction, that of interest, applied mainly to debts. All debts owed by tenant farmers to landlords through 1958 were canceled outright, and the interest rate on those incurred in 1959 was reduced to 1 percent a month. At meetings convened from every segment of the populace great bonfires were lit, into which the records of loans—and generally all the other documents of the large farms, mercantile concerns and monasteries—were thrown. While PLA contingents stood by, Tibetans were forced to circle the flames, applaud and shout slogans condemning the “dark order of the past”—a rather novel form of the traditional New Year’s celebration in which the smoke from pyres of juniper and incense would be sent skyward accompanied by prayers for the good luck of all.
The foundation upon which the reforms rested was class division. However, class division under the Communists was far more strictly defined than it had been in the old society. People with 50 percent of their income remaining after expenditures were dubbed manorial lords; those with 45 percent, agents of the manorial lords; those with 35 percent, rich farmers or nomads; those with 25 percent, middle-class farmers or nomads; and those with no income set aside at all, poor farmers or nomads. A final class, called logchoepas or reactionaries, could include people from any of the above groups; in particular, at this time, it applied to all who had participated in the revolt. According to Chinese statistics, only 5 percent of Tibet’s population, those in the reactionary category, were officially considered “enemies of the people” to be openly attacked and excluded from any benefits of the new order. In reality, those designated as landlords, their agents, and rich farmers or nomads, as well as their children and relatives, were henceforth ostracized, leaving only middle-class and poor farmers or nomads with an acceptable class affiliation. In Tibet’s case—unlike China’s—the majority of the people, though tied to the land and beholden to their respective estates for taxes, were living above the poverty line; the “masses” of the poor, as defined by the Communists, constituted, in fact, a minority. This contradiction was not lost on the Tibetans, no matter how abstruse the novel vocabulary defining their lives appeared at first. The reality of class division was further brought home in the second stage of the Democratic Reforms, the attempted reassignment of wealth from the upper to the lower classes.
In Lhasa, as elsewhere, the committees called “Offices to Suppress the Uprising” carried out the redistribution. PLA squads systematically visited the houses of all “rebels” held in prison. Their families were either evicted or, in the case of those who had no relatives to stay with, permitted to remain with the livestock in their buildings’ first-floor stables. All of their possessions were then inventoried, with anything of value being placed in the empty quarters. Finally, the front doors of the building were sealed with long paper strips covered with black Chinese characters exhorting the populace to put down the revolt. A few days after the initial sealing, the soldiers returned with a truck to requisition the owners’ property. Everything was taken: furniture, rugs, kitchen utensils and even such stores of food as remained. Possessions were divided into several categories: the most valuable objects, such as jewelry, gold and silver, offering bowls and precious images, were marked to be sent to China, packaged and sealed with wax; good furniture and rugs were designated for the use of leading Han civil and military personnel in Tibet; items such as watches and expensive clothing were set aside for the Commerce Department of PCART to be sold individually to Chinese office workers. Following distribution loudspeakers summoned the poor to assemble at neighborhood committee offices to receive the wealth of those who had once exploited them. They found a haphazard array of broken chairs and tables, empty boxes, worn-out garments and an occasional teapot.
In the countryside the division progressed along similar lines, save that the wealth divvied up was labeled that “of production and of livelihood.” The wealth of production was supposed to include all livestock—yaks, dzos, mules, sheep, horses—Tibetan currency (despite its being banned) and farming tools. But most of the livestock—as well as other valuable possessions—were taken by the Chinese. This left the same old clothes, furniture and clay and aluminum utensils that the city poor had received. Meanwhile, the real plunder began to depart in truck convoys for China, seized from the true treasuries of Tibet, the monasteries, and from the Dalai Lama’s personal storehouse in the Potala. There was so much of it that the process continued all the way to the middle of the Cultural Revolution. While the antique markets of Hong Kong and Tokyo were flooded with priceless Tibetan artifacts, in China gold and silver images, the accumulated art and wealth of a millennium, were melted down into bullion.
The cornerstone of the second phase of the Democratic Reforms was land reform. An average of 3.5 mus of land (about half an acre) was designated to be given to all members of the lower class and even to the “serf owners from whom it was taken.” By the autumn of 1959 it was already underway in areas adjacent to Lhasa. Once land belonging to those associated with the revolt had been appropriated, a policy of “buying out” was announced for that of the “three Big Serf Owners,” who, not having aided the rebels, had nonetheless “passed the barrier.” This meant, as Ngabo Ngawang Jigme, the former Cabinet minister and now a leading collaborator, summed up in one of his speeches, that “those serf owners and their agents who opposed imperialism, love the country, and accept democratic reform are protected.… political arrangements have been made for their benefit and their livelihood is being taken care of according to their actual conditions.” The “conditions” referred to the fact that all landowners who had succeeded in turning an annual profit of 45 percent or more, after having lost 80 percent of their assets in the initial reforms, were now to lose the rest. Lands and goods belonging to them were appraised at 10 percent of their actual market value and then taken in return for a receipt guaranteeing eventual payment. Once more the PLA conducted a massive inventory of this segment of the population’s possessions. Where it didn’t go, individuals were required to itemize their property at the local work committee whereafter it was confiscated.
The land reform materialized in full during November 1960 in the form of 200,000 deeds, written mainly in Chinese, and sporting a portrait of Chairman Mao flanked by red flags. These were distributed in grand ceremonies to the peasant class and those below—beggars and mendicants, often old or crippled, who knew nothing of farming and had no desire to pursue it. As Ngabo Ngawang Jigme said, summarizing the achievements of the Democratic Reforms at the National People’s Congress in Peking a few months earlier: “The class consciousness of the broad masses of peasants and herdsmen has been greatly elevated; they say, ‘The sun of the Kashag [the Cabinet] shone only on three big manorial lords and their landlord henchmen, but the sun of the Communist Party and Chairman Mao shines on us—the poor people.’ They warmly sing praises: ‘Chairman Mao is the father of the various nationalities of our motherland and is closer to us than our own parents.’ They say, ‘Reactionary elements of the upper strata spoke the same language as we did, but their hearts were different from ours; the Han cadres speak a language different from ours, but their hearts are the same as ours.’ ”
Class struggle was the crucible in which the order of the future was to be forged. Its fuel, the fire which burned away the old and gave birth to the new, was thamzing or struggle session. Through it the “broad masses” would emancipate themselves by making their own people’s revolution. In practice, this meant setting workers against employers, peasants against landlords, monks against abbots, students against teachers, and children against parents. Those who held positions of authority in society were automatically seen to possess them, not on the basis of merit, but through having usurped their place, with the support of others of like kind, for the sole purpose of oppressing the people. Despite admonishments from the United Front Work Department and the Nationalities Affairs Commission in Peking to respect minorities and to nurture unity between the many peoples of China, the reality in Tibet was unremittingly racist; Chinese occupation troops were unable to relinquish their millennia-old view of the Tibetans as barbarians. As Communists, they marshaled ideology in support of this prejudice, depicting the government as “dark, feudal and cruel,” the monks as “red robbers” or “insects” sucking the blood of the people. But the “people” themselves were physically repugnant to the average Chinese in Tibet: dirty, dark, smelling of yak butter and altogether barbarously free in their behavior, they were poor material from which to fashion willfully self-regimented proletarian masses. All of this served to nourish the dedication with which thamzing was carried out, while to Tibetans thamzing was made all the more repugnant by the condescension of the Han, who prefaced every round of punishment and bloodshed with the prim assertion that what was to follow lay solely in the victim’s best interest.
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 was 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.
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?”
Nonetheless three prisoners in Dr. Choedrak’s group chose—after receiving thamzing—to support the Chinese. Becoming “activists,” they turned on the others and were rewarded by removal from the cell. If found to be lenient during subsequent struggle sessions, they were pointedly asked: “Are you breathing from the same mouth as this man? Are you wearing the same pants?”: questions sufficient to keep them in the forefront of the attacks. Thus, Dr. Choedrak knew his time for thamzing had come when, after a few more days of interrogation, the PLA commander singled out the activists one morning for praise: “You have been doing very well, it’s commendable.” he said. “But today we must get to the bottom of this reactionary nest. You should question Tenzin Choedrak very closely. You must find the truth.” Shortly after the day’s questioning began, the officer stared at the activists, whereupon one stood up and said, “If you continue to lie like this, it will only lead in one direction, the dark way. So for your own sake, you’d better tell us everything you know.” As he spoke the others grabbed Dr. Choedrak, and tied his arms across a long board in a variation of the method that had previously been used. Trailing the rope off either end they pulled Tenzin Choedrak’s arms tight while his questioner demanded in a shrieking tone that he denounce the Dalai Lama for having committed incest with his sister. When Dr. Choedrak refused, the man took off one of his shoes and started beating him across the face. This was the signal for the other cellmates to join in—which, under the careful scrutiny of the guards, they did—pulling the doctor’s hair and ears, spitting in his face and pummeling his head. The pain in his arms was so great that Dr. Choedrak began to scream but only when his legs gave way and he collapsed did the officer call a halt. After a short rest, the beating began again, repeating the pattern throughout the morning. Finally, completely numb, his face and body bleeding, swollen and covered with black welts, Tenzin Choedrak heard the officer conclude the session. It had lasted four hours. Once he was untied, placed back in handcuffs and leg irons, the Chinese officer spoke directly to Dr. Choedrak. “If you reveal the truth and admit what the Dalai Lama has done, your future will be bright. This need never happen again. You will be released,” he said. “Now remember what your friends have asked you today and think it over well.” With that, Dr. Choedrak was removed from the cell and taken to the prison’s northeast quad where he was thrown into isolation.
When he recovered, Dr. Choedrak found himself in a dark room, four by eight feet, with a small, barred window, high in one wall, and a six-inch-square hole for receiving food. On the mud floor lay a straw mat, a discarded PLA overcoat and a bucket for relieving himself. He had been in prison for two and a half months. He was to spend the next four in isolation—the remainder of the summer of 1959. Throughout, an inviolable routine governed his existence. In the morning, kitchen workers opened the hatch by the door and as best he could, in irons and cuffs, he got to his feet, stuck his bowl out and received a small steamed bun together with some rice and a vegetable. After eating, he was required to sit on the mat and think over his crimes for the entire day. He could not lie down or rest, as periodically, the door of the food portal would snap back and the eyes of a Chinese guard appear, making sure that he was visibly pondering. His only relief was a brief glimpse of sky and breath of air on the evening walk to the toilet. In reality, Dr. Choedrak’s thoughts were confused and depressed. After the pain of the beating wore off, he fell into a stupor, staring for hours at a time at the stone walls, convinced that he would soon be executed. He imagined the rows upon rows of people on either side of him, all locked in the dark, waiting to die. At night his dreams were a chaotic mix of memories: his childhood, medical studies and practice blended with scenes from his arrest, prison life and the beating. When he woke, he found his only hope in wishing for death. Suicide, though, even if he had devised a method, was ruled out. A monk from Namgyal Monastery had killed himself by jumping into the Kyichu River when the prisoners had been taken out to bathe. But this was an exception. Like most Tibetans Dr. Choedrak dreaded the results of suicide even more than present suffering, no matter how great it became. As he said, “With so many life forms in this world and so few people, it is extremely hard to be born as a human being. So if you destroy this precious human life, we believe it is very sinful. It is like having a sack of gold and without utilizing it, just throwing it into the river. According to Buddhist teachings, if you do commit suicide, you will have no hope of being reborn in a human existence for at least five hundred lives.”
On the last day of each week, two guards would enter Dr. Choedrak’s cell, yell for him to stand up and then escort him at rifle point to a bell-shaped tent pitched in the center of the prison courtyard. Inside, an officer from the Public Security Bureau sat behind a bare table with a Tibetan interpreter on one side. Pushed onto a mat on the ground, Dr. Choedrak was subjected to interrogation: “Have you decided to tell the truth?” the questioning always began. When Tenzin Choedrak responded that he had told the truth all along, the officer would lose his temper, shout, “What have you been thinking about for these six days?” and, taking his pistol from its holster, bang it on the table. After a few sessions he threatened Dr. Choedrak with “consequences” for his obstinancy. At the end of a month’s time they came.
Halfway through July, Dr. Choedrak was subjected to a second session of thamzing. Removed one morning from isolation, marched to the southern quad and placed in the center of his old cellmates as before, he was asked by the officer in charge: “Have you recognized reality yet? Do you now have a confession to make?” Despite his fear, Dr. Choedrak refused to comply and, tied to the board once more, was beaten. Struck repeatedly across the face with heavy boots, his vision soon blurred, not so much from blood but from damage to his eyes. By the time he was dragged back to his cell a few hours later, Tenzin Choedrak realized that the retina of his left eye had been detached and the eyeball itself knocked to the upper left side of its socket, so that it could no longer focus straight ahead. During the next few days, he discovered that the entire upper row of his teeth had come loose. At first he was able to push the teeth back in place but within a month all of them, one by one, had fallen out, leaving bruised holes in his still swollen and bloody gums. Although the immediate pain wore off, Dr. Choedrak’s shattered mouth and eye remained as a permanent legacy of his second thamzing. Nevertheless, a third, substantially worse beating occurred the next month.
In August, after repeatedly “failing” his weekly interrogation, Dr. Choedrak was again returned to his old cell. The same incredulous questions ensued, followed by the board and a virtual storm of beatings ordered by the enraged officer. As his arms were pulled from their sockets, his head and face becoming swollen from repeated blows, Dr. Choedrak gradually lost all sense of pain. He seemed to float in a dull daze; his single sensation that of an intense dryness in the mouth. The dryness increased, and then suddenly he blacked out. He regained consciousness, still imagining blows. In reality he was lying on the floor of the isolation cell; a bucket of cold water had just been thrown over his face. When the guards saw that Dr. Choedrak had revived, they yanked him to his feet, handcuffed him and then let him collapse on the mat.
Dr. Choedrak’s next impression was of a group of men entering his cell. One of them, clearly a Chinese physician, examined him. Months later, back with his original cellmates, Dr. Choedrak heard what had occurred. Following his collapse, a PLA doctor had been sent for, there being, in fact, a premium on Tenzin Choedrak’s life. After his examination the doctor pronounced Dr. Choedrak on the verge of death and refused to take responsibility for the case. The news was relayed to the prison camp commander who dispatched a senior officer to the cell group. In the presence of the officer in charge, the aide warned that if Tenzin Choedrak died, the prisoners themselves would be held accountable and punished: “Why did you beat this man?” he asked. “It is not the policy of the Chinese Communist Party to beat prisoners. You are meant only to study, not to harm yourselves. Now you will discuss why you have done this, and who is to blame.” Soon afterwards, thamzing ceased—not, however, due to a new policy of leniency, but simply because the initial process of determining who were the most dangerous reactionaries was complete.
On October 15, 1959, the prison’s seven hundred inmates were drawn up in long files surrounded by Chinese troops, in the southern quad. Seated at a small table before them, the camp commander spoke, “Among you there is a very stubborn group who persist in telling lies and refuse to recognize the truth,” he said. “We have decided to send them for further study in China. Conditions are far better there than here. Food is more plentiful, and their needs will be amply provided for.” The results of seven months of interrogation were then read out: 4 prisoners were to be released and 21 would be sent to work at the hydroelectric plant at Nachen Thang. The 76 men bound for China were to leave within two weeks. The prisoners, however, were not told who had been selected for the last contingent until three days before their departure. At that time, on the morning of October 29, Dr. Choedrak was informed that he had been picked. Because neither charge nor sentence had been given him, he didn’t actually believe he was going to China. Instead, he assumed that the selected prisoners were to be taken somewhere nearby and, under one pretense or another, executed, their separation having been for this purpose only.
The next day Tenzin Choedrak’s handcuffs and leg irons were removed and, along with the seventy-five other men, he was driven to the Norbulingka. Quartered there for two nights and a day, Dr. Choedrak gradually made the acquaintance of his new prison mates—all of whom had held high positions in Tibetan society and government. The men were of one mind: even if China was, in fact, their destination, singled out as they were, there could be little doubt that their remaining time was limited. Their fear increased when, on the morning of their departure, they were permitted to bid farewell to their relatives. As dawn broke the prisoners were brought near a wall, from where two or three at a time were called to a window for a strictly allotted few minutes with their families. Despite Chinese threats to cancel the meeting if a single Tibetan showed emotion, everyone wept. The guards then ordered those who had yet to go forward to console their relatives. They were fortunate. They were going to the motherland itself—to receive education. On the far side of the wall the families—all of whom had brought food, clothing and blankets—were assured that their relatives would be living under the best possible conditions in China. Nonetheless, the prisoners were permitted to accept the gifts.
When Dr. Choedrak’s name was called, he walked to the window and saw his elder brother Topgyal. In tears and unable to speak, Topgyal took Tenzin Choedrak’s hands in his. Dr. Choedrak then said, “Now it’s best that you forget about me forever. You must go back home and take good care of yourself.” Topgyal offered him tsamba, a woolen sleeping rug, two blankets, some clothes, a food bowl and a washbasin. He bent over and unlaced his tall Tibetan boots, but Tenzin Choedrak refused to take them, insisting, “You’ll need to walk in these boots. I won’t.”
Their farewells completed, the prisoners were directed into two roofless troop trucks, a soldier mounted on the corners of each. A truck bearing a machine gun aimed at the Tibetans led; another, carrying ten soldiers and a second machine gun, took up the rear. With no room to sit, the thirty-eight prisoners in each truck stood shoulder to shoulder and stared in silence as the engines started and they were driven off, their wives throwing dust and crying after them the traditional phrase for dispelling sorrow, “Let all of Tibet’s suffering be gone with you! And now be done!”
Dr. Choedrak and his companions were indeed en route to China. November 1 had been earmarked for a massive transfer of prisoners from the capital; numerous convoys had already set out ahead of them and as they passed Drepung, the road behind filled with six more trucks, transporting three hundred young monks from the monastery, all thirteen and fourteen years old. Grown to ten trucks and over four hundred people, the convoy headed north for Damshung, and its first major stop, Nagchuka. For the entire journey, the prisoners, forced to stand, were whipped by the late-autumn wind as they repeatedly crossed 15,000-foot passes. Nighttime provided little respite. Jammed into the largest quarters available in whichever village they stopped in—often, for convenience’ sake, a single room—half the men had to sit on one another’s laps for lack of space. Every night was punctuated by loud yells as arms or legs were trampled. Those who had to relieve themselves could do so only in their bowls, which they then had to hold so that nothing would spill. Irritability was heightened by the drastically reduced rations, now down only to a cup of boiled water and six steamed flour dumplings a day.
On the eleventh day, the column halted on the north shore of Lake Kokonor. Herded into boxcars on a railroad, the prisoners rode east, toward Langzhou, the capital of Gansu province. Though few had seen a train before, they were too exhausted to care. Together, they sat in silence bunched against the cold, watching the light dance between the slats of the car’s walls. After one day they arrived at Langzhou, and the two groups were separated. While the young monks remained on board to continue farther into China, Dr. Choedrak’s group was placed in trucks and driven north once more. Though Langzhou had been the jumping-off point for the Great Silk Road for centuries, the surrounding countryside was empty, perennially ignored by the Chinese and populated only by the Hui, Moslem people, now a minority themselves. On the city’s northern edge, the silt-filled Yellow River ran west to east. Beyond lay Mongolia, its alien nature attested to by the ruins of the Great Wall and the edge of the Gobi Desert.
It was toward an outcrop of the Gobi, the Tengger Desert, that the prisoners were driven. A giant tract of flat rocky debris, the Tengger served as a springboard for windstorms and fierce winter gales which rifled the featureless land between it and the Wall. This forlorn expanse was traditionally spoken of as having “three too-many’s”—too much wind, sand and rock—and “three too-few’s”—too little rain, grass and soil. It had always been an area of transit—Mongols passing through, north to south and back on pilgrimage to Tibet, traders moving east or west on the Silk Road. The Communists, however, had found a new, seemingly ideal use for the region—as a vast zone for prisons.
The number of prison camps dotting the barren landscape of northern Gansu and Amdo (renamed Chinghai by the Chinese) was known only to those in Peking. Nevertheless, the general estimate was that these two provinces contained a vast sea of prison camps housing up to 10 million inmates, a “black hole,” as a 1979 Time magazine article dubbed it, “from which little information ever reached the outside world or even the rest of China.”
Owing to its 300,000 square miles of inaccessible terrain, Chinghai had been designated, soon after 1949, as the future site of most of China’s prisons. In the early fifties, small camps, holding a few hundred prisoners, had begun as tent compounds surrounded by barbed wire—sometimes electrified. As their first task, the inmates had constructed their own prison walls out of brick or mud. By the middle of the decade, these had given way to colonies of prisons—fortress-like compounds lining dirt roads for miles at a stretch. Containing from 1,000 to 10,000 inmates each, the archipelagos provided the backbone of the system. The strip north of Langzhou, for which Dr. Choedrak’s group was destined, was considered the worst. It was followed in severity by four zones, two north and one south of Chinghai’s capital, Xining, the fourth, four hundred miles due west, on the way to Xinjiang. Prisons and labor camps, though interspersed with nomad flocks, distinguished the entire countryside.
At sunset, the Tibetans passed through a ragged village of packed-mud houses, by a few stunted trees. Five miles beyond, they caught their first sight of Jiuzhen Prison. Four fortress-like stockades, set a sizable distance from one another, constituted the camp. Approaching one, the trucks passed staff quarters and a group of outbuildings behind which the prison’s twenty-foot-high five-foot-thick brick walls stretched a half-mile long by 1,000 feet wide. Two guard towers rose on either side of the red flag raised over the gate in the eastern wall; one was positioned at the center of the western wall. Within stood seven cellblocks, housing 1,700 prisoners, in either fourteen- or twenty-seven-man rooms, built in files down the central yard. The kitchen ran along the western wall; the toilets were in a block in the southwest corner. A single notice board hung to the left of the gate. In the main, the prisoners were Chinese and Hui of high social standing: ex-officers of the Moslem warlord Ma Bufeng’s army, as well as doctors, professors, judges, civil servants and other members of the intelligentsia now marked as reactionary. It was clear there was no hope for escape: the area was far too barren and remote to live alone in for more than a few days.
Inside the yard, the men were processed by four Tibetan and Chinese officials who had accompanied them, working together with the Jiuzhen authorities. Each was given a hat, a pair of gloves, a padded cotton blanket and either a black or a navy blue prison suit, the pants of which, held up by a string tie, were so baggy that they were soon nicknamed “clumsy pants.” Their parcels were individually searched and almost everything—including bedding, eating utensils and extra clothing—was taken. Then they were led to their quarters: three of the large twenty-seven-man cells located by the toilets on the south side of the prison behind an internal wall that closed them off from the main courtyard. The cells were identical. The front door of each cell was bordered by windows, their panes blocked by sheets of newspaper, but with enough clear space for guards to look through. A small foyer stood before a central aisle bisecting two mud platforms which ran the length of the room. The platforms were two feet off the floor and covered with straw to sleep on. They were the prison version of kangs, the traditional bed of northwestern China under which a fire was kindled in winter to keep sleepers warm. As there was no fuel for the prisoners, though, there was no heat. Huddled together the first night, the Tibetans discovered that there was barely enough space for thirteen or fourteen people on each kang. Fights broke out, until finally, a few days after their arrival, the men scratched demarcation lines into the brick wall above each person’s head. The divisions revealed that there was no more than a foot and a half of width space available for a single sleeper.
Two other Tibetans were already in the camp. After being placed in with the group it was then learned from them that they were the sole survivors of three hundred monks from Labrang Tashikhiel, Amdo’s second-largest monastery, imprisoned three years before, in 1956. The rest had died from starvation. Two months later, when the first propaganda play was staged before the kitchens in the main yard, those from Central Tibet immediately noticed that the maroon curtain used for a backdrop had been fabricated from the robes of monks. Subsequently, during a work assignment in a storage room, one of their number came across the distinctive boots of Tibetan clerics, the soles worn off by hard labor and only the leather tops remaining, saved for a future use.
The day following their arrival the men were acquainted with Jiuzhen’s rules. Communication, save for practical necessities, was forbidden. “This is a maximum-security camp for those who have committed the worst crimes,” the guards informed them. “No spreading of reactionary rumors will be tolerated.” On the basis of recommendations by the officials who had accompanied them, a “progressive” leader was appointed from each group of ten to fifteen prisoners. Although the leader lived side by side with his cellmates he was exempt from thamzing. In return, he was required to report the most minute occurrence down to potentially significant looks exchanged between their prisoners. Accordingly, from the first days of their new life in Jiuzhen, a second invisible prison held the men, a virtual moratorium on all human contact. The only statements made were for the informer’s benefit and were stock phrases such as: “The new Communist leadership is so much better than the exploiters of the past.” Or: “The conditions here are truly excellent, we are really enjoying it.”
Each day, before dawn, the prisoners were mustered. Once in line before their cells, they were led in a rousing propaganda song, the first verse of which began: “Moscow has announced revolution so the imperialists are shivering with fear.” They were then marched to work in the fields, returned briefly for lunch and, after the day’s labor, required to sing again before dinner, which was served, as were all meals, in the cells by the kitchen staff. Following dinner, political “study session” lasted until ten o’clock, after which they slept. Every ten days each prisoner was subjected to a private interrogation session. In addition, prisoners were randomly taken to a small room in the staff quarters outside of Jiuzhen’s walls where, for an entire day, four interrogators would question the man in turn, trying to wear him down by probing for “crimes” in the smallest details of his past life. Otherwise not a moment was spent away from the group, which was marched to and from the toilet as well as the worksite by armed guards.
It was the middle of the “three lean years,” and Jiuzhen’s produce was not for the prisoners’ own consumption but that of the staff and the army units in the region. Guarded by the PLA, who shot on sight any man crossing his field’s perimeter, each prisoner, equipped only with a shovel, had to break enough barren ground daily, including irrigation ditches, to be suitable for cultivating thirty pounds of wheat. The soil was turned a foot deep, covering an area of roughly 4,000 square feet. The task was so daunting that, even with clear soil, a strong man could barely manage to complete it. More often, the earth was hard and stony. In this case, after they had removed the larger rocks, the prisoners were ordered to fetch sand and clay from a nearby area in pairs; a long bamboo pole from which two baskets were hung suspended between them. The new earth was then mixed in with the old. Speed was of the essence. A point system rewarded those who completed their quota. Those who did not were punished. On returning from collecting sand, the inmate received a blue or a white slip of paper. Tabulated at day’s end, the slips determined the number of baskets he had carried. The next day a red flag would be placed beside the field of the best team, whereas all those groups who had failed to approach its level were given increased labor time and a longer nightly meeting. Stretchers were always on hand for the frequent cases of collapse. If a field was close to the pickup point for sand, sixty trips could be made in a day, running both ways; if far, no more than twenty-five.
Reeducation proper took place at the nightly study meeting. The subjects generally fell under the heading of either China’s domestic or foreign affairs. The most frequent topics dealt with the dictum that increasing production through hard labor was the key to social harmony and how, in the past, imperialist nations such as the United States, Great Britain and Japan had oppressed China. The prisoners were required to express individual opinions on the subject at hand. In the beginning, though, some of the men had yet to learn the correct terminology. Labeled “stone heads,” they repeatedly suffered thamzing until soon, most knew what to say. The first man would begin: “Tibet was a feudal state run by reactionary serf owners and running dogs of the imperialists. Then, after Comrade Mao Zedong liberated the motherland, we struggled against the earth, fought against the sky and cultivated everything, so that now our people are living in peace, happiness and prosperity.” The second man would improvise: “The imperialist and reactionary cliques worked hand in glove to exploit the masses. But now they have been overcome. This is because the Chinese Communists are the vanguard of all Communists. This is because Mao Zedong is the leader of the whole world. Right now he is the only one worthy of even being called a leader!”
With the arrival of summer, arid desert heat replaced the dry cold. Prisoners were issued baggy, gauze-like cotton uniforms. On the morning of May 1, 1960, six months after the Tibetans’ arrival, the kitchen staff came to their cells bearing the usual basket of dumplings and a bucket of greens. The dumplings, though, were the size of an egg. When the prisoners asked why they were so small, they were told that rations had been cut from sixteen and a half to eight and a half pounds a month. Henceforth, three dumplings a day were given and they were no longer even made from wheat. To save yet more grain Jiuzhen’s authorities had instituted the mixing of indigestible roots and barks with the food. Three types were most easily identified. The first was rotten bark taken from trees in an area of low-lying hills far from the camps. After it was powdered and mixed with the dough, the dumplings were tinged red; they left a heavy, painful feeling in the stomach. If ingested over too long a time the bark produced bleeding sores inside the stomach and intestines. After eating them for even a few days many of the men found blood in their stools. Chaff was also mixed in and, in the autumn, a further additive which destroyed the semblance of a bun altogether. This consisted of waste material from soybeans. With the kernel of the bean removed to make tofu for the staff, its remaining skin was steamed to form a sort of porridge mixed with flour. The gruel was so loose, though, that the steamer itself had to be brought to each cell, where two spoonfuls per man were dispensed. Over the winter, meals had included the exterior layers of cabbage and other leafy greens, their interiors already taken by the guards. Now a native plant with flat green leaves topped by a yellow flower was used. Collected by periodic details, the plant was boiled in water and one ladle’s worth for each man given out. Altogether, a single meal comprised little more than a mouthful of food.
Hunger governed the prisoners’ every thought. Order broke down. The strong bullied the weak over who had received a larger ladle of greens. Even when the Chinese took to skimming off each spoonful with a chop-stick to make sure all the portions were of uniform size, the men’s anguish about potentially unequal allotments focused itself as an obsession over the size of their bowls. There had never been a standard issue of containers. Thus, each man used what he had been permitted to retain from his relatives’ gifts or, failing that, from containers he had somehow managed to pick up from guards. The assortment was varied. Dr. Choedrak had brought a mug as well as a washbasin. As the mug proved too small to eat from, he secretly procured a pair of scissors from a brigade of ex-prisoners, kept on as laborers, who lived outside Jiuzhen’s walls. With these, he cut down the high sides of the basin so that it fit fully over his face and could easily be licked clean. Most were not so fortunate. Some had cups, others tin cans, the rest metal ashtrays—given out by the Chinese. Those worst off possessed only pieces of wood in which crude indentations were carved. Eventually, the men devised a system for randomly exchanging containers after the meals were portioned out and just before they ate. In this way, some measure of peace was restored, though as the next month unfolded it mattered little.
With the beginning of summer, the first symptom of starvation appeared: extreme enervation. While walking, their knees frequently buckled, and a number of the men found themselves unable to stand once they had fallen. Even if they managed to sit, their legs would not carry them until after a few hours of rest. By July one and all resembled living skeletons. Ribs, hips and shin bones protruded, their chests were concave, their eyes bulged, their teeth were loose. Gradually their eyebrows and hair, once shiny and black, turned russet, then beige and then it fell out, the hair coming loose from the skin with just a slight pull. Each morning, those who could rise placed both hands against the wall and inched up, carefully balancing their heads in an effort not to fall. Once erect, they would edge dizzily through the straw down the back of the kang toward the cell door. From there they would go to the toilets by supporting themselves against the window ledges and walls of the buildings en route. From now on no one could walk securely, much less run for baskets of sand. Leg joints felt locked in place; feet were dragged along, too heavy to lift. When the men returned to the prison at night, they lowered their bodies gingerly onto the platform, this time only one hand against the wall, the other used to steady the head; tilted to the side, its weight was sufficient to bring one crashing down, unable to check the fall.
The first man to die was a lama from Nagchuka. He had fainted many times in the fields, and was repeatedly carried by stretcher to the hospital room, where he was permitted to rest for a few days at a time. One day in September he could no longer lift himself from the sleeping platform. The prison guards arrived and demanded to know why he was not out working. He replied, “How can I work when I can’t lift my legs or my head?” Then he added sarcastically, “Now I finally understand the policy of the Chinese Communist Party. It’s very good. I’m a person who can’t move and might live for just a day or two more—that’s all—but I’m asked to go to work. This is truly a policy for the people.” After this, he was taken to the hospital, where, as he had predicted, he died two days later.
This first death, which Dr. Choedrak and the others had expected almost daily for a year and a half, was notable only in that it had taken so long to occur. It was greeted indifferently; no mental breakdowns had occurred since arriving at Jiuzhen, no expression of fear or depression, and none appeared now. Save for continued quarreling over food, starvation had stunned all other feelings into abeyance. The Tibetans now recognized, though, that they would not be executed or tortured to death; they were to die through forced labor, so that the authorities—by their own standards at least—could appear blameless.
Within just a few days, the next man died—a government official named Rongda Jamyang, whose sister later married an American and moved to the United States. From then on, an average of two to three prisoners died every week with the longest interval between deaths lasting no more than a fortnight. The process was always the same. Those who succumbed without complications, from starvation alone, would simply lie immobile on the kang. Their breath became softer and more shallow until, at the last moment, bubbles of saliva slipped over their lips and they died. In some cases, a man would linger for months before passing away. The elder of the two monks from Tashikhiel, who had survived the demise of his 298 fellows, ultimately perished in this manner. For two months he remained prone, sustained by spoonfuls of gruel and water given by his fellow prisoners. After each feeding he regained some strength, looked around and even spoke briefly before relapsing into a semi-conscious state, saliva continually seeping from his mouth. For others, death would come after only a few days of lingering, as with another early victim, the ex-abbot of Gembung Lhakhang temple in Lhasa. Those who had died during the night were removed by the hospital staff, stripped of any useful possessions and placed in a pile in front of the toilets. Before dawn, the corpses were taken out of the camp by a three-man burial detail. The graveyard was a field not far from the prison walls. Its markers were made of hand-sized stones picked at random by the detail, who then wrote the prisoner’s name in red enamel paint before placing the stone over the grave. The earth was so hard—frozen in winer, dry and tensile in summer—that only a shallow hole could be dug, into which, without ceremony, the naked body was thrown. Dr. Choedrak saw Chinese families wandering through this field, searching to retrieve the bones of a deceased relative. Some had come to visit from as far away as Peking or Shanghai, only to be informed of their family member’s death on arrival. Lent a shovel, they were told to find the remains and take them away if they wished—a gruesome and heartbreaking ordeal, due to the sometimes incompletely decayed cadavers unearthed.
For the prisoners, a death occasionally provided an increase in rations—for a single day at least. If they were lucky, the loss could be hidden from the guards and the deceased’s ration obtained. Dr. Choedrak himself benefited from this. Waking one morning, he noticed that the man lying next to him was unusually still. He nudged him, listened closely and realized that he was dead. By then, the prisoner on the fellow’s far side had realized the same thing. By mutual consent, they managed to partially cover the dead man’s head with his blanket, telling those around—and the Chinese, when they arrived—that he was too sick to move. By this, they obtained an extra portion of food, which they discreetly shared between themselves after the kitchen staff departed.
As the death rate increased the Tibetans began to consume their own clothes. Leather ropes, used to tie the bundles brought from Tibet, were cut into daily portions with stones and shovels. Each piece was slowly chewed during work, in the hope that some strength could thereby be gained. Small leather bags were put to the same use. Dr. Choedrak owned a fur-lined jacket, which had proved invaluable through the first winter, but in the course of the following summer he was compelled to eat it. He began with the fur. As winter came again, he managed to secure a small quantity of brush with which to make a fire under the kang. Piece by piece, he roasted the rest of his coat. Walking to and from the fields, prisoners picked as many plants—dandelions were a favorite—as they could eat, scavenged leaves from the few trees in the area, hunted for frogs and insects and dug for worms. One worm was particularly sought after as a source of grease, there being no fat of any kind in the diet. White, with a yellow head, the inmates nicknamed it “Mapa,” after the best, most tasty form of tsamba mixed with butter.
A more constant source of food was the refuse discarded by Chinese guards. Crowds of prisoners would gather around bones or fruit rinds thrown by the roadside. Those lucky enough to have arrived first masticated their finds for hours to make them last. The results of this scavenging, though, could be perilous. One day Dr. Choedrak was assigned—in company with a low-level government official named Lobsang Thonden—to work on a garbage pile outside the prison walls. It was in a large area where the camp’s waste was mixed in with human excrement before being taken to the fields as fertilizer. Together, the two men shoveled the feces into trunk-sized baskets, which were then carried off by their cellmates. As he shoveled, Lobsang Thonden came upon a small baby pig—pigs were kept by the staff—dead and almost completely decomposed. When the guards were not looking Lobsang retrieved it and whispered to Dr. Choedrak, “We should eat this. It might help us.” Wiping the excrement from it, he pulled the pig apart to see if there was any edible flesh to be had. A portion about the length of an index finger remained, still red, between the shoulder blades. He then decided to take it back to the prison to eat more palatably with the evening’s greens. Dr. Choedrak admonished his companion to consume the meat immediately. On one count, Tenzin Choedrak pointed out, he was so weak that it would be of instant benefit; on the other, if it was discovered during the check at the prison gate, there might be trouble. Lobsang Thonden ignored the advice. Instead, he placed the meat in his back pocket, where, as Dr. Choedrak had warned, it was found a few hours later at the evening check. The Tibetan’s small piece of meat infuriated the prison guards. That night he was threatened and abused; the next day work was delayed and a public thamzing involving the entire camp was convened in the prison yard. Lobsang Thonden was brought forward and tied by the special method used to twist the shoulders in their sockets. The camp commander shouted indignantly: “Taking such unclean food is a grave insult to the Chinese Communist Party and to the nation itself. Eating anything that can be found is a direct attempt to abuse the government. The conditions and rations here are very good. Such an insult cannot be ignored. It must be corrected by thamzing.” “Activist” prisoners jumped up to beat and “struggle” Lobsang Thonden in the usual manner, repeating the charges against him. Soon, however, he collapsed. Afterwards, he could no longer walk or care for himself and was taken to the hospital. There, for the one and a half inch of flesh, he died four days later.
Despite such harsh reprisals, the prisoners had nothing to lose and were little dissuaded. On one occasion a group of Chinese inmates attacked the kitchen staff—all of whom were fed to the point of being portly—as they were leaving the kitchen carrying baskets of dumplings. Grabbing all they could, the men ate as they ran away; yet by that night each had been identified and punished. Unprovoked cruelty was common as well. While Dr. Choedrak was in the toilet one day, a Chinese prisoner came in to relieve himself. The man was so weak that when he squatted down, he fell on the floor, foaming from his mouth, unable to move. A guard entered. He began kicking the prisoner, berating him for lying in the toilet until, in a minute’s time, he died on the spot. Taunting was a favored means of abuse. Dr. Choedrak witnessed a Chinese inmate being dragged helplessly to the fields, the guards reproaching him for being “too lazy to work.” After moving about listlessly for a few minutes, he simply collapsed and died. On another occasion Chinese inmates were discovered eating a donkey’s head which they had retrieved from the same pile of feces and garbage that Lobsang Thonden’s pig had been in. Handcuffed and severely beaten, they were brought in front of 900 prisoners for thamzing. The prison staff railed at them, “You Kuomintang officials have badly abused the poor people under you, and now you’re even abusing the Communist Party by eating a donkey’s head. This is why you’re dying, because you don’t know how to look after yourselves.” Twice Dr. Choedrak himself received thamzing for “insulting behavior” concerning food. In one instance he was caught eating cabbage leaves from the manure pile. The other involved his training as a physician. With the traditional Tibetan doctor’s vast knowledge of plants, he quietly advised prisoners what to eat and what not to eat in the fields, despite the risk of such unapproved communication. Discovered, he was brought to trial once more on the grounds that his actions were premeditated provocation of the authorities, who maintained throughout that the entire camp was receiving “ample sustenance.”
Dr. Choedrak’s advice, though, was badly needed. Prisoners ate anything they came across. Some items were not so dangerous. One cellmate managed to find the knee joint of a small sheep. There was no meat on the bone, but for an entire month he kept it hidden under his bedding, taking it out each night for a few precious gnawings. On New Year’s Day, to demonstrate magnanimity, a single mule was boiled for the entire prison. A friend of Dr. Choedrak, a steward for a noble family in Tibet, noticed that the water the animal was cooked in had been thrown by a staff member onto a refuse pile not far from the kitchen. Though not the toilet proper, this was a place where prisoners also went to relieve themselves, and the whole area was covered with pools of urine. Regardless, Dr. Choedrak’s friend ran to the mound with his mug and collected all the surface dirt he could, in the hope that some of the boiled water could be strained out of it. He showed Dr. Choedrak the soaked mud and asked if he thought this would benefit him. Like every prisoner, the steward had been suffering from an inability to sleep, difficulty with his vision and a constant loud rushing noise in the ear—all caused, according to Tibetan medicine, by the rising of “lung” or wind, which was produced by starvation. Dr. Choedrak agreed that if he could succeed in getting some of the soup water separated from the mud and urine, it would help to repress the “lung.” The man did so and actually felt better for a short while. But other cases were not so salutary. People were dying in the most horrible manner from abrupt dysfunctions in their digestive tracts. A prisoner named Gyaltsen Dagpa, whom Tenzin Choedrak was unable to assist, perished when his intestines burst. For weeks he had been indiscriminately picking and eating whatever wild grass he could find. Soon he had a bad case of diarrhea and after a few days a viscous, jelly-like substance emerged with his stools. Then, only water was ejected. At this point, whenever the man ate or drank he would scream from the excruciating pain. Soon the pain became constant, and he could no longer consume either liquids or solids. For two days he lay on the kang clutching his stomach, screaming, and then he died. Dr. Choedrak deduced that the interior lining of the man’s intestine had been scraped away by the roughage, accounting for the viscous substance. Once worn through, the intestine then burst—at which stage, when the man drank water, it passed into his abdomen, causing intense pain. At the very end, when nothing at all emerged, the internal wound had disrupted the digestive tract entirely and become fatal. Another man, named Teykhang Chopel, succumbed when his sphincter cracked apart due to the hard indigestible objects lodged in his intestine.
Though he knew what not to eat, Dr. Choedrak could not endure such conditions long. As the anniversary of the Tibetan’s first year at Jiuzhen arrived, he too collapsed and was taken to the hospital—a place visited at one time or another by all the prisoners. It was here, during an intermittent stay lasting three months, that he gained a view of camp life outside the isolation of his own group’s daily existence. The hospital itself—no more than a barren room—existed as such in name only. There was virtually no medical equipment or supplies except for a few ointments for applying to wounds and some Chinese herbs said to help digestion. On occasion, when a patient was in the most dire condition, a shot of glucose would be administered or a mug of carrot juice given. The main function of the hospital staff was to dispose of the dead, many of whom had perished on its premises. Staff members were mostly prisoners who had received the jobs as a reward for being “progressive.” It was, in fact, a substantial dividend. Not only did the assignment replace grueling field labor; it also provided a veritable cornucopia of extra food, the staff routinely disguising deaths and thus continuing to receive the dead men’s rations.
The hospital was run by three so-called doctors, all prisoners, but only one of whom was actually a physician. There was little he could do. The other two were the only women in Jiuzhen. Both were rather remarkable. They belonged to the work brigade of semi-released prisoners who lived beyond the camp’s walls. They too had once served terms within the prison, but, via a policy applied throughout the Chinese penal system, they were not released following completion of their sentences. Instead, their status was merely upgraded to that of “permanent laborer” and freedom forever postponed. Such laborers no longer received food, but had to toil, as did the population at large, for “work points,” which enabled them to purchase rationed grain. In Jiuzhen, the 800 to 900 additional people so classified were mainly allotted the light labor of planting fields the prisoners had already broken.
Of the two women doctors, one was compassionate and selfless, the other driven and businesslike. The kind woman was a Christian, and fearlessly so: she openly wore a cross around her neck even after receiving repeated thamzing. An energetic and skilled worker, the guards had come to depend on her despite her attempts to thwart their practice of forcing patients back to field work. Her care was the sole sign of humanity in the prison. In one case witnessed by Dr. Choedrak, a Chinese inmate, bedridden for months, developed severe bedsores over his entire body. Once infected, the sores filled with maggots. Each morning the woman arrived from outside the prison walls and sat by his side to pick the maggots from the sores one at a time. Going to the kitchen, she obtained ashes from the stoves which she carefully strained so that only a fine powder remained. Spreading this on a large cloth, she placed it beneath the man. Whereupon great numbers of maggots fell off. The patient eventually died, but until the end, she continued to relieve him in this way.
The second woman, named Wangchen, was, with the male physician, at the hub of a thriving black market. At night carrot juice was brought to the hospital by the kitchen staff—one carrot’s worth for each patient who had been put on a list by the doctors. Coming into the room, the staff would announce, “Carrot juice is ready,” at which point, Dr. Choedrak noticed, the same three Tibetans always received portions though they were far from the worst cases. At the time, he could only guess the reasons. Suspicious themselves, the authorities called in the doctors and the patients concerned, and soon had it out that the latter had bribed the former with such articles as shoes and even a German fountain pen brought from Lhasa. But long before this news was made public, Tenzin Choedrak himself was deeply involved in this new avenue for survival.
Wangchen’s activities went far beyond small bribes taken from those under her care. The bulk of her business involved serving as go-between for transactions amongst the prisoners and the labor brigade. Whatever goods were dealt, she always took a large commission in kind. While the prisoners procured bits of clothing to trade, the laborers had worked out a technique for obtaining extra dumplings. To discourage theft of the grain given out for planting, Jiuzhen’s guards coated it with poison before distribution to the laborers. Despite this precaution, because they were never searched, the laborers stole handfuls at a time, which they later washed. This they cooked for their own fare, reserving the dumplings they received from the prison kitchen, on the basis of their work points, to trade through Wangchen. Dr. Choedrak offered Wangchen an old chuba, the wool of which had been rubbed off. In exchange he received thirty dumplings: unfortunately, the kind tinged red from rotten bark. Of these, Wangchen took five as commission, and he obtained the rest two or three at a time over a month. But whatever the black market offered, it was still far less than that required for subsistance. Hence, the prisoners continued to eat whatever they could. One day Dr. Choedrak saw a Chinese inmate holding a long red worm in his cup. Through a fellow Tibetan who spoke Chinese he asked where he had found it. The man replied that he had defecated the worm in his stool. Careful not to be caught by the guards, he had picked it out, washed it and brought it back from the toilet to eat—which he did that day mixed in with his other food.
The hospital also served as an additional place for interrogation. Shortly after a Tibetan was admitted, he would be visited by the security cadres, whose ongoing task was to question the prisoners. Their purpose was dual. While it was clear that the authorities considered a man’s borderline state to be fertile ground for extracting a confession—hunger accomplishing what struggle sessions and beatings had, as yet, failed to achieve—interrogations also discouraged inmates from entering the hospital and thus kept them at work filling the labor quotas.
At the beginning of 1961, Tenzin Choedrak was released from the hospital and resumed work. His recovery was due not only to rest but also to his own form of cure. He had noticed one symptom shared by all those who died: severe diarrhea. In most, a thin watery stool was constantly emitted; to absorb this flow, a rag had to be kept in the pants. In Tibetan medical theory, Dr. Choedrak knew, the digestive power or heat of the stomach is the key to health, the level of digestive heat determining not only metabolism but, through it, the harmonic function of the three humors. In Jiuzhen, however, this heat had been subjected to a twofold attack: from the severe cold and the consumption of coarse, indigestible material with no grease or fat. To increase his digestive heat, Dr. Choedrak quietly practiced, for half an hour each night, an advanced form of meditation—called Tum-mo Bar Zar, literally meaning “Rising and Falling Heat.” After his cellmates had gone to sleep, Dr. Choedrak visualized purifying energy—in the form of white light—suffusing him, drawn in with each inhalation to a point just below his navel. Picturing a triangular flame the size of a rose thorn, he imagined it extending up the central channel of his body, through the tantric energy centers at the navel, stomach, heart, throat and crown of his head where, burning away the layers of mental impurity, it released a fountain of clear, nectar-filled light which returned, blissfully, down his body. He would then conceive all of the sufferings experienced in prison to be washed away, replaced by the ineffable joy embodied in the light. “In the beginning, one just imagines all this,” he recalled. “But after five or six months there was an unmistakable improvement, a slight rise in body heat. I was very weak, but I never had any more diarrhea or other digestive problems. Also, despite all the suffering we experienced, the meditation gave me more courage. I had no more fear, I just accepted my fate.”
Dr. Choedrak returned to work at the worst possible time. The death toll had soared since early autumn. There was now more room on the kang—one could turn in one’s sleep—but lacking a fire, the prisoners still had to huddle together. The winter weather made work almost impossible. Their hands and feet wrapped in whatever scraps of cloth they could find, the men trudged to the fields under guard, where, in a frozen wasteland, they were expected to break the same amount of ground as they had in summer. The sores on their hands never seemed to heal, making it agonizing even to hold a shovel. Paradoxically though, the weather provided an occasional respite in the form of the so-called Mongolian wind. Rushing down from the Tengger Desert, the wind collected the gobi or rocky sand beneath it into a whirl of stone and dust which, resembling a needle from a distance, struck down from the sky, scouring the land. The first warning of its onslaught came from the village of Jiuzhen, five miles away. Over the intervening fields the prisoners heard the town’s loudspeakers faintly call for the inhabitants to take cover, at which time their own guards would send up a cry to retreat to the ditches they had dug for refuge around the work site. Here the prisoners could rest for up to three hours, battered from above by pebbles and debris, but otherwise undisturbed, until the all-clear command was given and work resumed.
By the spring of 1961, forty of the original seventy-six Tibetans had died. The worst, though, was still to come. Even beyond the camp, no place in the countryside could hope to break loose from the tide of starvation. The prison itself was now sought out as a source of hope by the people of Jiuzhen village. The first sign that the local population was suffering as well came with the admittance of two new prisoners, both Chinese, from the town. One, a little man with a slightly hunched back, was so hungry that he had killed and eaten an eight-year-old boy. Although cannibalism was unknown within the prison walls, the prisoners had, on occasion, joked about it. Now the surviving Tibetans nicknamed the man “the Vulture”—after the vultures who were given corpses to eat in Tibet. The second arrival, an eighteen-year-old boy, had killed his own mother for nine pounds of flour which she had refused to part with.
More direct evidence of life in the village of Jiuzhen was witnessed by the prisoners later that summer while laboring in the fields. Looking up from his work one day, Dr. Choedrak saw a large group of children, carrying small bamboo baskets, heading toward one of the fields. They were of all ages and all uniformly destitute—barefoot, emaciated and naked save for ragged shirts. Dr. Choedrak did not notice them again until some time later, when he heard a nearby officer detailing a detachment of guards to round up the children and bring them to the prison. At the end of the day, passing the field where the children had been, the Tibetans saw that the beans planted for that year’s crop had all been dug up. Later they heard that when prison guards asked the children which adults had sent them to steal the beans, they replied that none had; they were so hungry they had come on their own. Unwilling to arrest them, the authorities sent the group home. The guards, however, remained extremely sensitive about this clear evidence of famine. Their ire was such that one prisoner, overheard referring to the children as “human birds,” received thamzing for this single comment.
A second incident, soon after, could not be denied. Dr. Choedrak’s group was now working on a field some distance from the prison. To get to it, they had to use the main road. As in many places in China, the road was lined on either side with trees. Beneath one of these, the inmates, on their way to work one day, came across a young mother in her late teens. She was plainly starving, her face and body badly swollen. Clinging in tears to her was a child of six and another four years old. The group leader stopped the procession and asked if she would like some vegetable to eat. The woman replied, “There’s no point in living any longer under such a government as this. I’d rather die. I don’t want this vegetable you’re offering me.” The prisoners left her and went on. The next day, they passed again and saw the family still hanging listlessly about the road. On the third morning, the prisoners found them lying across one another, still at the foot of the trees, all dead.
Finally, the starvation in town was brought home to the prison itself. It began with an act Dr. Choedrak himself participated in. On the way to the toilets one afternoon, Dr. Choedrak and a companion named Champa Thondup encountered a young Chinese girl who had managed to slip into the prison. She was extremely thin, but swollen, her hair light brown and matted. On seeing them, she begged for something to eat. They managed to get her a small portion of vegetables and water and then watched as she started to consume them. The moment she ate, however, fluid poured from her nostrils and she began to cry out in pain—a common symptom of extreme famine. Hearing the commotion, the staff took her to the kitchen, where they gave the girl one egg-sized bun and then sent her back to the village. The result of their charity became apparent the next day. As the prisoners passed through the gate on their way to work, they witnessed a mass assault on the prison walls by scores of men and women from Jiuzhen demanding food. A full-scale melee ensued until, beaten back with rifle butts by the guards, the townspeople retreated across the fields.
Despite the breakdown of conditions within their domain and the chaos without, the Chinese prison officials never deviated from their policies. With hundreds of prisoners already dead, executions—a constant feature of the camp—continued to be carried out. Charges were never specified. The names of those to be shot would simply appear on small posters periodically glued to the prison walls, beside such observations as “stubborn” or “suffers from old brains.” When the executions had been carried out—they were not, as in other prisons, held publicly—a red check would appear next to the names of the executed, and the poster would be left up for some time as a warning. Then in the nightly meeting the officers would repeat a well-worn observation: “If one reactionary is destroyed, that is one satisfaction. If two are destroyed, that is two satisfactions. If all the reactionaries are destroyed, then you are fully satisfied.”
Propaganda plays, performed on three holidays a year, also continued. One play depicted the defeat of the Japanese occupation of China, another celebrated the virtues of hard labor, the third—always received with the greatest interest—portrayed the evils of capitalism. With a translator for the Tibetans standing beside them, the action would begin on the high platform framed by the backdrop of the dead monks’ robes. A figure representing Uncle Sam emerged. Wearing a beige suit and black top hat, he sported a long red nose, sharp birdlike claws and a tail, hung from which was a sign in Chinese characters identifying him and noting that he was “a nuclear power.” Holding his hands before his chest like a cat about to pounce, Uncle Sam went about exploiting Africans, played by prisoners in blackface. After suffering much brutal oppression, the Africans, with the help of the Chinese people, ultimately overcame their oppressor in a glorious revolt and subjected him to the all too familiar thamzing.
The third year of the Tibetans’ stay at Jiuzhen brought sudden, unexpected relief to all the prisoners in the PRCs northwestern gulag. According to one survivor who spent twenty-one years in five separate camps, roughly 70,000 Tibetans were imprisoned north of Langzhou, 35,000 of whom perished from starvation in 1959–61. The death rate throughout Qinghai and Gansu was so high during the early sixties that prisoners had to be continually shifted around in order to keep the prisons functioning as labor camps. One system located ten hours west of Xining and called Vebou housed 30,000 inmates in thirty camps, the larger ones holding 9,000 men, the smaller, 7,000, 5,000 and 1,000. Ten percent of the inmates were Tibetans and members of other minority groups, the rest Chinese. By the time the famine lifted there, Chinese officials sent from the mainland to take a census reported that 14,000 had died. Another prison, named Bhun-cha tsa Shen-shu, contained six camps within a three-mile stretch, housing 12,000 men, more than half of whom also died. In Jiuzhen, twenty-one Tibetans were still alive, enough to fill only one of three cells the group had originally occupied. Early in the year, the four security officers who had accompanied them returned from their main office in Lhasa. With fifty-five dossiers closed, and the remaining ones as complete as could reasonably be expected, it was determined that nothing more was to be had from the Tibetans. Interrogation stopped, the “reeducation” classes lost their zealous fervor and the number of thamzing declined dramatically. The survivors were transferred to three adjoining rooms in a corner of the prison. A front door opened on a small entranceway, to the right and left of which were cells designed to accommodate ten men. At night the door was left unlocked, making it possible to go to the toilet unattended; this minor relaxation, in turn, afforded the first opportunity since the men’s arrival for unobserved contact. As the interpersonal barriers melted, so did mutual suspicion, and in consoling one another over the loss of their comrades, the prisoners began once more to speak hopefully about the Dalai Lama and the thousands of Tibetans they knew had escaped with him to India.
The new leniency was soon complemented by an increase in rations. As China’s famine eased, sixteen and a half pounds of grain a month—borderline rations under normal conditions, but a feast for the inmates—were issued. New Year’s Day 1962 featured a meal of pork soup, with actual bits of pork in each prisoner’s portion—their first taste of fat in two and a half years. The new cells, as well, afforded unexpected benefits. Permitted to keep some of the wheat chaff and small kindling from the autumn harvest, the men made fires at night beneath their sleeping platforms. Sometimes they were lucky enough to corner a rat on the floor, which they cooked and ate. Rats also ran in the hollow space between the wooden beams of the ceiling and the old newspapers which covered them. Open hunting for them soon got underway. Each night, the rats scurried over the papers, while the men waited below, armed with long sticks, following the sound of their feet. With good aim and a fierce upward thrust, it was possible to stun a rat long enough to capture and kill it. As infrequent as these meals were, they nonetheless provided meat.
With the worst of the famine over, the death rate quickly dropped. In two years Jiuzhen had lost over 1,000 prisoners—more than half its population. Most of the Chinese survivors were now transferred to prisons in other areas of Qinghai and Xinjiang, where their labor could be of more use to the state. As they embarked, the remaining Tibetans gained access to a far greater supply of food.
The newly empty cells throughout the camp were used by the kitchen staff to store cabbages, turnips and carrots. Aware of this, the remaining prisoners began to make nocturnal raids. One night a man named Thubten Tsundu shook Dr. Choedrak’s feet and whispered, “Now’s our chance to steal some cabbages.” The two men snuck from their cell with a pillowcase and pair of pants, its legs tied. Breaking into a nearby storeroom, they waited for a Chinese prisoner to pass on his way to and from the toilet, filled their bags with cabbages and hurried back to their cell, where they hid the load under their bedding. On their return from work the following day, a prison guard singled out Dr. Choedrak. “Tell me yourself what you have done,” he said threateningly. Knowing that execution was the punishment for stealing, Dr. Choedrak replied that he had done nothing. The guard then ordered him inside, where Tenzin Choedrak saw that not only his bedding but all the bedding in the cell had been turned upside down. The cabbages that he and Thubten Tsundu had stolen were surrounded by a vast quantity of other cabbages, carrots and turnips. Everyone was stealing, it turned out—making punishment impossible. In the new plenitude, any item at all could buy at least a few extra dumplings on the black market, resulting, ironically, in a rather odd form of crime wave. During the day, those who had been detailed—with Chinese approval—to guard their mates’ cells often took the opportunity to raid neighboring rooms. Even the patients in the hospital would drag themselves out of bed in the hope of finding something to bargain with. After dark, prisoners slipped from their cells and broke into others. There were fights, ambushes were laid by one cell against another and even group forays occurred. To steal grain directly from the prison store, Tibetans concealed handfuls in their socks and shoes, fashioned pouches in their undershirts and made long, narrow bags which, hanging inside their pants tied back to front between their legs, could be discreetly filled while bending over to sow seed.
By the autumn of 1962, only 300 inmates remained in Jiuzhen. A rumor began to spread that some men had arrived from Lhasa. On September 28, the announcement was officially made: “Now you have been well educated,” a Chinese official said to the twenty-one Tibetan survivors lined up before him. “So we have decided to let you return to your home. And look,” he continued, holding up a rubberized oxygen pillow of the kind used by the Chinese in Tibet, “we have gone to great effort on your account and spent a good deal of money. We’ve bought five such bags at twenty yuan each so that you will not die on the high passes on the road. You will be given a holiday until your departure. Now wash yourselves and clean up,” he advised. “But don’t damage your bedding. Don’t tear it or burn it. It has to stay here.”
For the entire week excitement and doubt gripped the prisoners until, the night before their announced departure, an officer arrived with new suits for them to wear, sewn together from the clothing of prisoners who had died. The cotton padding had been redistributed smoothly, then covered over with a fresh piece of rough linen. Jiuzhen’s authorities, it seemed, cared a good deal about the Tibetans’ appearance now that they were to be released into the custody of other guards.
At eight o’clock in the morning of October 5, 1962, a canvas-covered army truck was driven into the prison yard. Carrying small bundles, the Tibetans marched to the truck, where the weakest were helped up by the stronger. As they left, the prison staff bade them farewell: “Now that you’re finally going home,” they called out, waving vigorously, “look after your health and take good care of yourselves.” Incredulous, the Tibetans replied through their translator, “Thank you so much. And we promise to do as you say.” Then, as the engine started, they cursed under their breath, and with that, waving and cursing, they were driven through the gate, on their way out of China.
FIFTEEN DAYS AFTER Dr. Choedrak’s release from Jiuzhen Prison, the 1962 Sino-Indian border war broke out. For China it represented the greatest dividend to date from the years of effort expended in Tibet. Following 1959 the PLA had hurried to consolidate its position for an eventual strike on India, a move Peking viewed as essential to its drive to assert military and thereby political dominance over Central Asia. Accomplished exclusively with forced Tibetan labor, a network of roads was created linking the PLA’s three forward headquarters in Chamdo, Shigatse and Rudok, in the Himalayan border regions. Once the roads were in place, observation posts, airfields, bases and supply dumps all had to be carefully built at night and with the utmost secrecy. As readiness for the attack was stepped up, thousands of Tibetans from southern and western Tibet were conscripted to supplement local workers by carrying supplies. Simultaneously, those left behind were told in nightly meetings that India had occupied the very best regions in Tibet making it the PLA’s sacred duty to regain them for the people. Reinforcements of men and ammunition now arrived from China, and with them came a further drain on the Tibetan economy, the greater portion of the harvest being diverted to feed the newly arrived troops. But the most ruthless aspect of the war occurred for Tibetans after the fighting started. Blood donations became compulsory and though 3,000 or so Indian prisoners were captured, it was soon obvious from the extent of the blood drive that the Chinese themselves had not been immune from losses. In as many areas as it could be mounted, the policy required Tibetans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five to give one and a half times the amount of blood normally taken. Chief donors were those labeled as “class enemies”; the Chinese themselves were exempted. At the start, it had been claimed that all who voluntarily came forward would receive twenty-five yuan (or roughly $12.50), a half pound of butter and a full pound of meat. When no Tibetans volunteered, however, large numbers were forcibly subjected to blood donations. As a result, many already on the verge of death from starvation perished. Only token Tibetan cadres received the promised gifts. Both human and animal blood was stored in Lhasa at a newly built blood bank at Dohdun, northeast of the Potala, to which many of the more serious Chinese casualties were eventually transported from the front.
While blood extraction was one of the grimmer campaigns of the early 1960s, sterilization and the forced marriage of Tibetan women to Chinese soldiers were considered by many to be even more threatening. As the “leading elements of the masses,” Tibetan cadres were the first to be sterilized, at the Lhasa Municipal People’s Hospital, constructed in 1952 as a “research and training center for medical science and medical cadres of minorities nationalities.” To sterilize as many people as possible, novice Chinese still in medical training routinely operated on Tibetan patients. Many cadres, both male and female, who underwent the operations emerged paralyzed below the waist or having lost control of their bladder. A number, admitted to the hospital for unrelated conditions, discovered that during surgery they had also been sterilized. Witnessing such results, Tibetans henceforth resisted sterilization. But while this method of population control was gradually phased out, the considerably more widespread practice of inducing Tibetan women to marry Chinese soldiers was launched. (Tibetan men were strictly barred from marrying Chinese women.) In the early 1960s almost all of China’s occupation troops continued to be those soldiers who had arrived with the original invasion force in 1950. Young men at the time, they had been granted no leave in over a decade and were now approaching middle age without families. It was convenient to bolster the troops’ morale by encouraging them to marry Tibetan women, but it was also an obvious boon to Peking’s overall policy of assimilation, as any offspring would be raised as Chinese. Broad inducements—including cooking utensils, extra food and clothing rations—were offered to all Sino-Tibetan couples, and under the desperate circumstances, quite a few such marriages occurred. In secret many Tibetans condemned those who had collaborated in what appeared to be a blatant attempt to dilute the race. Publicly, though, the stigma went the other way. A common Chinese expression, often said on hearing of the birth of a Tibetan child, was: “The crows in the sky are all black. There are no white ones,” meaning that only Chinese babies would be “white” crows, or good signs.
Following the 1962 war the Indian-Tibetan border, together with its support zones, remained on constant alert. In Mustang, Chushi Gangdruk had regrouped and accelerated the pace of its attacks. The PLA, faced with a hostile, if temporarily cowed, Indian army, was deeply concerned about the guerrillas. In addition, despite the tightly sealed border, hundreds of Tibetans continued to escape during the summer months bringing with them tales of suffering under the Chinese. In July of 1964 PCART formulated a policy, announced in large posters hung in Tibet’s major towns, to cope with the problem: Tibetans who returned from India, and those guerrillas who gave themselves up, were to be richly rewarded; cash prizes specified for each type of weapon as well as the number of extra people brought in. Radio Lhasa continually broadcast pleas delivered by the families of those who had escaped, begging them to return to the “socialist paradise.” Agents filtered through the Tibetan communities in Kalimpong, Darjeeling and Nepal, wooing the destitute refugees with promises of prosperity at home. A few did return. The most prominent of these was Dorje Phagmo, Tibet’s highest female tulku, or incarnate lama, who was immediately conscripted into the “upper strata” United Front. But there were not many others. Meanwhile, concerned families in Tibet were informed that they were responsible for inducing their relatives to return and would be punished unless they succeeded. A newly coined Chinese proverb was often quoted to bring the point home: “The lama might escape, but his monastery cannot.”
Four more policies covering the years 1962-1964 led up to the founding of the Tibet Autonomous Region. The first, “Rechecking the Democratic Reforms,” began as early as 1960 and continued for years throughout the countryside. “Rechecking” amounted to ascertaining whether or not all reactionaries and “class enemies” had indeed been ferreted out in the reforms themselves. The natural corollary was the creation of a separate prison and labor camp system for Tibet, comprised of four levels, under the jurisdiction of the Public Security Bureau in Lhasa. So many reactionaries were found that quotas were established though, according to Tibetan sources, never carried out, limiting the number of arrests to no more than 5 percent of the local population. Concerned about Tibetans fleeing abroad, a second policy, commonly known as “Go Easy,” was adopted. This included a ninety-six-point program issued in 1962-63 for all of Tibet, ten points of which applied especially to the sensitive border area, where greater personal freedom, tax exemption and higher rations were all instituted. In 1963-64 came the third and fourth policies, entitled the “Three Big Educations” and the “Four Cleanlinesses.” The first Big Education was “Class-Consciousness Education.” The middle class was now divided into “upper” and “lower” middle class. Being placed in the “upper” category was tantamount to receiving a bad class designation. It brought thamzing and frequently imprisonment. Concurrently, the “lower” middle class and the poor were given “thought classification”—all those having old or reactionary thoughts receiving the same treatment as class enemies. As a result, every strata of Tibetan society was found to be rife with logchoepas, or reactionaries—there being scarcely any group left intact save the Chinese and their collaborators, to represent the “broad masses serving as the revolutionary vanguard.” The second Big Education was called “Socialist Transformation Education.” In theory, this meant “destroying selfishness to establish unselfishness.” It was aimed at breaking down the last resistance to MATs and increased collectivization. The third one, “Scientific Technical Education,” was a propaganda drive designed to introduce communes. It consisted of creating a few prototype showpiece communes supplied with modern equipment, fertilizer, seeds and tools. The final campaign, the Four Cleanlinesses—of Thought, History, Politics and Economics—set forth the party line on correct interpretations of Tibet’s history—arguing, for instance, that Tibet had always been an integral part of China.
Tibetan cadres were responsible for implementing this turbulent stream of policies on the grass-roots level. During the early to mid-sixties, the number of the best-trained workers stood between 6,000 and 10,000; by the end of the eighties, approximately 80,000 Tibetans were working for the Chinese, 30,000 having been trained in China itself. These were the cream of the crop—Tibetan children who had often voluntarily left their homes in the mid-fifties, lured by the modern world in its Chinese manifestation, eager to see a land where “no one had to walk” and the roads “shone like mirrors.” Brought into the burgeoning network of China’s Nationalities Institutes, they were trained as a fifth column to eventually replace the “upper strata” indigenous leaders who had to be used for the time being. On them, China placed its greatest hope.
Throughout the 1950s, the Peking Institute of National Minorities, located on the western side of the city led sixteen other academies attended by Tibetans, most of which were located in western China. Constructed on an ancient graveyard, its monolithic dormitories, auditorium and class buildings, brightly fringed with flower gardens, pine and willow trees, offered a curriculum which, though including science, mathematics and, in the early days, painting and music, concentrated largely on learning Chinese language and Marxist ideology. Local folk songs and dances were encouraged. Caucasian students from Xinjiang were permitted to wear their native garb, and on special occasions Tibetan students, too, were provided with new chubas. Social life at the Institute was active and varied, punctuated by frequent field trips around Peking, visits to the planetarium, the zoo and the Forbidden City; on Saturday evenings, films were shown, and a wide variety of novel sports were offered, including soccer, basketball and track and field. So, for a while, these young Tibetans found pride in their roles and looked forward to their eventual return home as leaders under the new order in Tibet.
Following the reversal in 1957 of the liberal Hundred Flowers Movement—in which Mao had encouraged intellectuals to openly criticize the Party—the CCP itself destroyed its own best hope for a successful minorities policy. The “anti-rightist” campaign which ensued saw every vestige of liberality at the Peking Institute crushed. With the radical left line in ascendancy, the first wave of thamzing fell on the students. The principal of the Institute, Phi Shadong, was singled out as a “capitalist-roader”; posters were hung in the dining halls, classrooms and dormitories denouncing the liberal methods of his “petty-bourgeois administration” and accusing its adherents, in a new and frighteningly vehement tone, of being “pigs fed by the people,” having “human bodies but a snake’s head” and being “divorced from the masses.” Excursions, dancing and the practice of religion were forbidden. To create a proletarian lifestyle, monthly stipends were cut by three quarters, new clothes were no longer issued, food was strictly rationed and the students were forced by “activist” cadres of the Communist Youth League to criticize themselves for everything from wearing pointed shoes and pants that fit too tightly to having gone to movies or plays in the past. As the repression worsened, whatever sympathies young Tibetans had for Communism were destroyed, and replaced by their antithesis: underground organizations. Using sports teams and the bands as their cover, groups such as the “Ear” and “Nose” Society hung posters denouncing the administration with its own Marxist terminology. In other minority schools as well, similar groups took shape—sometimes not even in secret—as in the case of the Gansu Nationalities Institute, where fifty-two Chinese and eighteen Tibetans died in open clashes during the early sixties. In Peking, though, members of the underground were soon uncovered and subjected to a bloody round of thamzing held in the Institute’s dining hall. As the Great Leap Forward got underway in 1958, fleshed out by a campaign to oppose “local nationalism” among the minority students, an estimated 60 percent of the Tibetans at the Institute were given thamzing—a number of them dying at the hands of their friends in the process.
In the middle of the night of March 20, 1959, the 1,000 Tibetan students studying at the Peking Institute of National Minorities were awakened by Chinese instructors and made to assemble in their classrooms. There they heard for the first time of the revolt in Lhasa. Ordered to write letters home dissuading their families and friends from taking part in the rebellion, they were shortly divided into three groups according to readiness. By the middle of May the first two hundred were returned to Tibet as the vanguard of a hasty effort to create a new bureaucracy. During the summer of 1959 almost 3,500 Tibetans were transferred home from nationalities institutes in China. Before leaving they were issued new boiler suits, hats, canvas shoes and blankets—items of great value under prevailing conditions. They returned to their country, after many years’ absence, wearing the emblems of the ruling elite.
In reality, the majority of China’s new workers were virulently anti-Han. Thus, while required to rely on Tibetans to administer the country, China was in fact putting in place those who would soon lead Tibet’s burgeoning underground. Well versed in both Marxist ideology and Chinese administrative procedure, the cadres learned to carry out orders while seeking promotion to higher office from which they could more effectively undermine policy. Over the next twenty-five years, those trained in China joined two other cadre groups working in Tibet. The first was comprised entirely of wholehearted collaborators—local “activists” of poor background selected during the implementation of the Democratic Reforms and subsequent policies. By 1965 there were 20,000 of them. Due to their genuine allegiance, they received choice positions in factories, schools, the army and government offices. They were, however, despised by the Tibetan people, and derisively labeled “Lions with a Dog’s Bite.” The second type of home-grown cadre represented the opposite of the first. Loosely selected, they were trained in two- to six-month crash courses beginning in the early sixties. Their studies consisted almost exclusively of the revolutionary ideology they were to implement. Many had been forcefully taken from their villages, and their open hatred for the Chinese often landed them in prison. But it was the elite, China-trained group that continued to cause the greatest trouble. Employed as teachers, nurses, reporters for Radio Lhasa and the Tibet Daily, they remained a constant problem for the Chinese, who, in spite of their suspicions, remained dependent on them. By 1962, almost 3,000 of the new cadres had to be dismissed as unreliable. Nonetheless, by 1965 there were between 30,000 and 40,000 Tibetans employed by the Chinese in administration. But none of them, from the highest collaborators to the lowest activists, had a say in governing Tibet: each reported directly to a Chinese party member from whom he or she took orders. After six years in the making, as shaky as the system was, it did manage to function as a feasible bureaucracy. Based on it and on the so-called election process—whereby its members were automatically placed in “office” at various administrative levels—the Tibet Autonomous Region approached its long-awaited inauguration. Only one obstacle remained—“a big rock on the road to socialism,” as both Generals Dan Guansan and Zhang Jinwu described him—an impediment, ironically enough, at the very pinnacle of the dummy Tibetan infrastructure, the supreme collaborator himself: the Panchen Lama.
Despite the veneer of the Panchen Lama’s unquestioned complicity with China, signs of trouble had appeared as early as 1958. At that time, even though it was rumored that the Panchen Lama’s father had supplied arms and horses to Chushi Gangdruk, no reprisal was forthcoming. Two years later, however, at the end of December 1960, while the Panchen Lama was in Peking delivering a “Report on Work in Tibet in the Past Year,” the PLA surrounded his monastery—Tashilhunpo, in Shigatse, the only one to have escaped the Democratic Reforms—and seized all of its 4,000 monks. Accused of complicity in the revolt, some were among ten Tibetans publicly executed three months later, on March 21. From fear of a similar or worse fate, others—including a few of the monastery’s most respected scholars and incarnate lamas—committed suicide. The remaining monks were then deported to Golmo and Tsala Karpo for forced labor.
The destruction of Tashilhunpo had a profound effect on the Panchen Lama. His collaboration appeared to falter even further in the second week of July 1960, when the Panchen Kanpo Lija Committee in PCART was disbanded. The committee had controlled the civil administration of Shigatse, thereby securing some degree of self-rule for the city unavailable elsewhere. Though few facts emerged to explain why these moves were taken, it was known among Tibetan cadres that following 1959 the Panchen Lama became increasingly recalcitrant toward the Chinese generals who were running Tibet. Besides demanding the restoration of all religious monuments damaged during the fighting in Lhasa (he personally financed the refurbishing of frescoes in the Potala and the Norbulingka), he arranged for the removal of images in the Potala to the Tsuglakhang, where they stood a better chance of protection by Tibetans. Moreover, his support of religion was not limited to the preservation of sacred objects. From his new residence at Shuktri Lingka, the Panchen Lama continued to receive pilgrims and offer discourses. During his sermons—which were attended by thousands—he never failed to mention that the Dalai Lama was Tibet’s true leader. He repeatedly stated that the development of Tibet must be led by Tibetans, as the Chinese were only there to help—a comment which was particularly galling, as it was taken from Mao himself and thus unassailable.
At the close of 1961, the Panchen Lama openly defied China. Late in September he and his entourage were invited to Peking to attend the 12th National Day Celebration. In Tibet, thousands were dying from starvation. Lhasa and Shigatse were dead cities, without stores, goods or commerce. Monasteries were gutted. Work gangs covered the countryside, prisoners and free alike toiling over dirt roads lined by dull green PLA convoys carting the harvest and religious wealth of Tibet to the People’s Republic. With nothing left to lose, Lhasans abandoned their labor and converged on the Panchen Lama as he made his way out of Lhasa, petitioning him to plead with China for food and medical care. Their appeals galvanized him to act. Once in Peking he delivered a 70,000-character memorandum to Mao Zedong describing conditions in Tibet, included in which were demands for more grain for farmers, care for the aged and infirm, a genuine acceptance of religious freedom and a cessation of mass arrests. Mao assured the Panchen Lama that the proposals would be heeded. To demonstrate good intent, pamphlets were printed and distributed throughout Tibet announcing that Mao had personally acceded to the Panchen Lama’s requests and that improvements were forthcoming.
When the Panchen Lama returned to Tibet early in 1962, he found the situation unchanged. General Zhang Jinwu informed him that what had been said in Peking and what was done in Tibet were entirely different matters. Not only were the demands not to be carried out, said General Zhang; as the ranking party member in Tibet, he had a request of his own to make of the Panchen Lama. It had been decided, he related, that, in light of the Dalai Lama’s appeals to the United Nations and re-forming of the Tibetan government abroad, the assertion that he had been abducted by reactionaries was finally to be abandoned. The Panchen Lama himself was to publicly condemn Tibet’s exiled ruler, after which the word “Acting” would be dropped from his own title, he would become Chairman of PCART, and would move into the Potala as the head of the country. The Panchen Lama refused outright, stating that an attempt to take the Dalai Lama’s place would only infuriate Tibetans and thus undermine the very purpose of the act. Immediately thereafter, the Panchen Lama was denied permission to speak in public and was henceforth seen only among large groups at official events. To further signal the change in his status, the remaining crew of caretaker monks at Tashilhunpo was accused of five crimes—including keeping a portrait of the Dalai Lama—and subjected to thamzing before the people of Shigatse.
Two years later, in 1964, the Panchen Lama made a brief, but substantial reappearance. As a result of his acts he now enjoyed extensive support among the Tibetan people, and General Zhang Guohua was forced, before inaugurating the Tibet Autonomous Region, to clarify his position. Accordingly, the Panchen Lama was offered a final chance to rectify his obdurate stance. Once more he was to denounce the Dalai Lama, this time during a celebration of the Great Prayer Festival or Monlam Chenmo, traditionally lasting three weeks, permitted now for a single day for this express purpose.
The gathering occurred in March and was attended by more than 10,000 people. From a high throne overlooking Lhasa’s main square on the south side of the Central Cathedral, the Panchen Lama once more advocated, as he had in the past, freedom of religion and the need for Tibet to be developed by its own people. Then, at the moment he had been expected to denounce the Dalai Lama as a reactionary, he paused and looked for a long while over the crowd. After audibly sighing, he stated: “His Holiness the Dalai Lama was abducted from his country to a foreign land. During this period it is in every Tibetan’s interest that His Holiness should come to no harm. For if the Dalai Lama comes to no harm, then the Tibetan people’s stock of good fortune is not exhausted. Today, while we are gathered here, I must pronounce my firm belief that Tibet will soon regain her independence and that his Holiness the Dalai Lama will return to the Golden Throne. Long Live His Holiness the Dalai Lama!”
Stung by the magnitude of this display of defiance, almost five years to the day after the March revolt, the Chinese placed the Panchen Lama under house arrest. Generals Zhang Guohua and Zhang Jinwu flew to Peking to consult directly with Mao and Zhou Enlai. They returned in July to initiate a campaign called “Thoroughly Smash the Panchen Reactionary Clique.” In its first stages, the drive assembled evidence of the Panchen Lama’s “crimes against the people.” Bulky dossiers were compiled from witnesses who testified to a broad range of crimes. When the files were completed, three hundred Tibetan cadres—including the ranking members of the patriotic upper strata such as Ngabo Ngawang Jigme and Dorje Phagmo were assembled in Lhasa. Before reaching the capital, they were told that they had been brought together to denounce certain “leading reactionaries” who had recently been discovered plotting against the motherland. Their chief was the “big rock on the road to socialism,” the Panchen Lama, who, the collaborators were subsequently told by General Zhang Guohua, had organized a secret guerrilla army to fight China. The cadres were enjoined to remove the rock from the road.
The Panchen Lama’s trial, convened in August 1964 in the auditorium of a new PCART building (the old one having been burned to the ground by saboteurs), lasted seventeen days. Generals Zhang Guohua and Zhang Jinwu sat at the center of a table on the stage, with the Panchen Lama between them. Zhang Guohua opened the proceedings with a long speech in which he alluded to the Panchen Lama’s wrongdoing and listed the traitorous activities of the as yet unspecified “reactionary clique.” He concluded by saying, “If you squeeze a snake its insides will come out”—the signal for beginning a prearranged skit of thamzing. Phakpala Gelek Namgyal, a member of the patriotic upper strata from Chamdo, having long nursed a personal grudge against the Panchen Lama, was the first to openly denounce him. “Big mistakes have been made,” he said. “And the responsibility for this lies on the Panchen. Because of this, I therefore criticize the Panchen, Chairman of the PCART.” “These are serious charges against the Panchen,” said General Zhang Guohua, standing up on cue. “It is necessary to expose these faults at this meeting.” Thereupon the meeting broke into subcommittees, each headed by a prepared cadre who, during the group’s deliberations, “discovered” crimes committed by the “big rock.”
On the third day, the proceedings turned violent. Repeating his metaphor of the snake, General Zhang Guohua observed, “If you squeeze a snake its intestines come out. But to kill a snake it is necessary to crush its head. If we squeeze the Panchen by thamzing, many hidden reactionaries and enemies of the state will be forced into the open. If we kill the Panchen, the whole reactionary clique will collapse like a house whose foundations have been destroyed.” Cadres sprang from their seats and began to slap, punch and kick the Panchen Lama, who was pulled from his chair and brought to the center of the stage. The spectacle of seeing one of Tibet’s highest lamas beaten by his own people deeply disturbed the majority of delegates. No matter how often they were urged, they could not bring themselves to join in. Having anticipated this, a select group of sympathizers cited ten major crimes as evidence against the Panchen Lama and conducted more beatings to induce a confession to each crime. The list included murder, cohabitation with his brother’s wife, participation in orgies and stealing images from monasteries. The most serious charges, however, were those which claimed that the Panchen Lama had raised a guerrilla army trained in the use of machine guns and augmented by a force of twenty cavalrymen. The basis upon which the charge was made centered on a school in Shigatse, originally established by the Chinese themselves, to train cadres for the Panchen Kanpo Lija. In 1959 it had been converted to an industrial training school where carpentry, auto mechanics and blacksmithing were taught. Now it was described as an “underground factory” in which students manufactured arms and ammunition to be used in a future uprising. For evidence, two foreign cars, fitted with extra gas tanks (a not uncommon aid to driving in Tibet), were exhibited to the delegates as proof that, at the very least, the Panchen Lama was planning to escape (once more less than convincing, as there were large convoys and periodic checkpoints on all roads). As for the cavalry: years before, the Panchen Lama had received twenty Mongolian ponies as a gift. He was fond of the horses, and in his spare time often helped his grooms to exercise them. It was with this cavalry that he was to have attacked the motherland.
The Panchen Lama denied every charge brought against him. He repeatedly stated that though he might have erred in his work at PCART, he had received Zhang Guohua’s approval for every decision—an observation which further incensed the general. In the meantime, the Panchen Lama’s aged tutor, Ngulchu Tulku, attempted to take the blame for the “crimes” by stating that he had personally taught his charge from an early age that “Communists were devils.” The Panchen Lama pointedly dismissed these remarks during the trial. Nevertheless, both his tutor and his steward were subsequently taken to Golmo, where they died.
With the conclusion of thamzing, General Zhang asked for suggestions regarding punishment. Execution, deportation and imprisonment were all proposed, but in reality the sentence had been determined long before. Eulogizing the magnanimity of the Communist Party in the face of the Panchen Lama’s dire provocations, the general informed the delegates that he would not be executed. After the trial, the Panchen Lama, his parents and the remaining members of his entourage were chained, thrown in closed trucks and driven out of Lhasa under heavy guard—their destination unknown. The next word came from Peking on December 17—four months later—during the 151st Plenary Session of the State Council. Here, for the first time, the Dalai Lama was publicly denounced as a traitor to the People’s Republic, stripped of his title as Chairman of PCART and accused of having “staged the traitorous armed counterrevolution of 1959, set up an unlawful government abroad, proclaimed an illegal constitution, supported the Indian reactionaries in their intrusion into our country, organized and trained the remnant bandits and alienated himself from the motherland.” Four days later, Zhou Enlai informed the First Session of the Third National People’s Congress that the Panchen Lama likewise had fallen from grace, having “led the reactionaries against the people, against our country and against socialism in a well-planned manner.” In retribution, he also was deprived of his title in PCART, but, as an indication that he might again be of use at some future date, his name was left on the roster as a common member. Following Zhou’s speech and a brief mention a few months later, nothing more was heard of the Panchen Lama, then twenty-seven years old. He simply disappeared.
One year after the Panchen Lama’s trial, elections from the county level up—the rules for which had been announced in March 1963—were finally completed in Tibet. Three hundred and one delegates were chosen in an electoral process that, according to Chinese periodicals, was conducted much like a festival. Tibetans had flocked to polling places beating drums and gongs, dressed in their finest clothes, adorned with flowers and scarves; cripples, maimed by the old feudal lords, hobbled on crutches to cast their ballots “in high excitement.” As the New China News Agency reported in August 1965, candidates were nominated “after lively discussions by the electorate who chose those they believed would act as real representatives of the poor peasants and herdsmen in this first free expression of the voice of the Tibetan people.”
In reality, free elections simply did not exist. At the grass-roots level, villages were broken into small discussion groups, each one led by an “activist” from the subdistrict office. Presented with a prepared list of acceptable candidates from the lower middle class or “non-reactionary” poor, villagers had only to discuss the merits of their prospective candidates. Anyone nominating someone else was severely criticized. The cadre then made a speech announcing the Party’s choices. The groups could not disband until each one had unanimously voted for the favored candidate—a result guaranteed by the fact that the ballots were marked in full view of the chairing cadre.
General Zhang Guohua was elected. So was Ngabo Ngawang Jigme, chosen by the Party to fill the Panchen Lama’s place as chief figurehead of Tibetan self-rule. A year earlier, Ngabo had assumed the title of PCART’s Acting Chairman, having risen from Secretary-General to Vice-Chairman following the revolt. His merit now lay not so much in his title, as in the fact that he represented the sole surviving link to the old government of Tibet. As such, he was indispensable. Ensconced in a modern home with Western furniture on the northeastern side of Lhasa, surrounded by a large flower garden and staffed by two servants, he took nominal charge, as its elected chairman, of the newly founded Tibet Autonomous Region’s leading body—The People’s Council—three quarters of which was Tibetan, the rest either Chinese or members of other “minority groups” in Tibet. Simultaneously the name of the central committee of Tibet’s CCP was changed from Work Committee to Party Committee, indicating that the highest organ of the Communist Party in Tibet was now fully operational with General Zhang Guohua as First Secretary.
On September 1, 1965, the first session of the First People’s Council of the Tibet Autonomous Region convened in Lhasa. China Reconstructs recorded the entrance of the elected delegates: “With the bright red ribbons identifying them as people’s deputies fluttering on their breasts, they walked into the meeting hall with heads held high, representatives of their emancipated people. During the nine-day session, with tears of emotion in their eyes and smiles of triumph on their faces, they spoke of their past misery and present happiness and expressed the deep love of Tibet’s million emancipated serfs and slaves for the Chinese Communist Party and Chairman Mao.” On the closing day, 30,000 Lhasans, including a Vice-Premier and 76 delegates from 27 other provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions were flown in for the ceremonies, assembled in the city’s newly built “stadium”—an open field surrounded by banners and flags to celebrate the inauguration of the Tibet Autonomous Region. For internal and external consumption alike the event marked a propaganda threshold. For those who had been in Tibet since 1950, it represented the culmination of a decade and a half of work. Moreover, it had come a decade to the month after the last autonomous region, Xinjiang, had been formed, a fact which could not but have reminded the Chinese in Tibet of the immense amount of difficulty they had experienced in carrying out the Party’s work on “the Roof of the World.” Unknown to them, however, a period even more difficult than that of the past six years waited just ahead. For eleven months off lay the most tumultous upheaval in China since the Civil War itself—the start of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.