10

The Long Night

1966–1977

Under the new situation of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and amidst the sound of the war drum for repudiating the bourgeois reactionary line, the Lhasa Revolutionary Rebel General Headquarters is born!

What is this Rebel Headquarters of ours doing? It is to hold high the great red banner of Mao Zedong’s thought, and to rebel by applying Mao Zedong’s thought. We will rebel against the handful of persons in authority in the Party taking the capitalist road. We will rebel against persons stubbornly persisting in the bourgeois reactionary line! We will rebel against all the monsters and freaks! We will rebel against the bourgeois Royalists! We, a group of lawless revolutionary rebels, will wield the iron sweepers and swing the mighty cudgels to sweep the old world into a mess and bash people into complete confusion. We fear no gales and storms, nor flying sand and moving rocks … To rebel, to rebel and to rebel through to the end in order to create a brightly red new world of the proletariat!

—Inaugural Declaration of the Lhasa Revolutionary Rebel General Headquarters,
December 22, 1966

BY THE LAST WEEK of December 1966, Red Guards in Lhasa stood poised to seize power from Tibet’s CCP Central Committee. Four months before, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution had officially been proclaimed. Far more than a “cultural” revolution, as its name implied, the policy signaled the most severe outbreak to date of the decades-old power struggle between the left and the right dividing the allegiance of Chinese Communists across both personal and ideological lines. Despite the debacle of the Great Leap Forward, the left’s first attempt to push China toward pure Communism by radical means, Mao Zedong had continued to call for class warfare as the best method for leveling Chinese society to a homogeneous, proletarian whole. For much of the early sixties, Liu Shaoqi, China’s President, had led a renewal of the moderate line. By the autumn of 1965, however, Mao, undaunted by his earlier failure, had set the left back on par with the right. Having done so, he determined to wipe out once and for all the conservative opposition. With the army’s support under Lin Biao he succeeded by June 1966 in purging his opponents from the powerful Peking Party Committee; in August, at the nth Plenum of the CCP Central Committee he announced the Cultural Revolution. Every organ of the Party and the government bureaucracy throughout China was ordered to subject itself to upheaval, summarized by the slogan “to bombard the headquarters,” a euphemism for eliminating the right. While the ideology of the Great Leap had emphasized increasing production, the left line now stressed violent “cleansing” of China’s “rotten core,” which was held accountable for the country’s slow political and economic progress.

Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were targeted—at first privately and later publicly—as the main “capitalist-roaders,” and a Cultural Revolution Group was established in Peking to oversee the nationwide purge. Members of the army, Maoist cadres and representatives of mass organizations, a synonym for the newly created Red Guards, were called on to join together, seize power from their local Party organizations and establish Revolutionary Committees whose task it would be to perform the duties of both Party and government until the two could be separated once more, with the left firmly in control. The “three-in-one” groups were bequeathed an eight-point program by which to implement the radical policies held in abeyance till now: the destruction of “Four Olds” and the creation of “Four News.” The “Four Olds” were old ideology, culture, habits and customs; the “Four News,” their inverse, Mao’s new ideology, proletarian culture, Communist habits and customs. China’s vast number of disaffected youth seized the opportunity to rebel against the status quo, and were encouraged to do so by Mao’s wife, Jiang Jing, who oversaw Red Guard activities. Licensed to travel anywhere in China to “exchange revolutionary experience,” they were given free rein overnight to vent their frustrations channeled by Mao against his enemies.

Of all regions in the People’s Republic, minorities areas proved the most vulnerable to the new directives. Compared to the mainland, they had maintained the “Four Olds” in fulsome dimensions; the very fact that their people possessed separate languages, much less culture, was regarded as reactionary. Chinese administrators in autonomous regions, districts and counties were singled out as responsible for having failed to obliterate vestiges of “decadent” societies under their tutelage. The much-vaunted United Front policy of working with the minorities’ “patriotic upper strata” was cast aside; the people everywhere were urged to generate new activists, directly from their own ranks, to wage this, China’s second revolution.

On August 25, 1966, the Cultural Revolution began in Tibet. Following a rally held to celebrate its inauguration by the nth Plenum, the Central Cathedral was invaded by Red Guards. Hundreds of priceless frescoes and images, dating to the time of Songtsen Gampo, the temple’s founder and Tibet’s 33rd king, were defaced or destroyed. Its two courtyards were filled for five days with mobs burning scriptures. The destruction was particularly devastating as the Tsuglakhang had, under the Panchen Lama’s direction, become a warehouse for countless invaluable artifacts brought from neighboring monasteries. With the height of the rampage past, Tibet’s holiest shrine, equivalent, for its people, to the Vatican, was dubbed Guest House #5, its yards used to keep pigs, and its catacombs of old government offices, storage rooms and chapels taken over as headquarters for the most radical of the burgeoning Red Guard groups. Within the next few days the Norbulingka was opened to an orgy of destruction, following which the entire city, given over to the Red Guards, was again renamed. Street plaques were smashed to the ground and replaced with new revolutionary titles such as Foster the New Street and Great Leap Forward Path. As the first week of September got underway, 40,000 prints of Chairman Mao’s portrait were distributed in Lhasa, draped with red ribbons and placed over every gate and in every home, office and factory in the capital. Giant red posters on the Potala and elsewhere heralded the Cultural Revolution; others, supporting the North Vietnamese, condemned U.S. imperialism or offered quotes from China’s Great Helmsman, Mao.

As early as July, a small number of revolutionary youth had arrived in Lhasa to instigate a Red Guard movement in the TAR. Progressing slowly at first, by mid-September their work had produced enough Red Guard groups in the city to mount the first open attack on the establishment. Their initial handbill called for “burning the capitalist-roaders in authority in the Party.” In practice, such an undertaking gave rise to a complex power struggle, just then being reduplicated throughout China. Because the Central Committee of the CCP had itself issued orders to commence the Cultural Revolution, those in authority at every level of the bureaucracy were paradoxically compelled to attack themselves. Failing to carry out a facsimile, at least, of the Central Committee’s dictum would immediately mark them for genuine destruction by “the masses.” However, almost all were marked to begin with, the assumption being that whoever held office was—until proven innocent by the people themselves—guilty of revisionism. Accordingly, General Zhang Guohua and Comrade Wang Jimei, Secretary of the Secretariat of the region’s CCP Committee and a Deputy Political Commissar of the PLA, quickly organized Lhasa’s own Cultural Revolution Group to oversee the work of rebellion and hopefully deflect its “spearhead” away from themselves. In the beginning, they emphasized “study” and “discussion” over violent “exposure,” discouraged—until it appeared counter to the trend of the times—the hanging of big-character posters and, most importantly, dispatched observation teams of loyal cadres into every office and factory in Lhasa in an attempt to check any spontaneous organization of Red Guards. Their efforts were successful through the end of October, despite Lin Biao’s clarion call, announced from the rostrum of Tienanmen Square, to wage a “mass campaign of repudiating the bourgeois reactionary line.” But as more and more Red Guard groups organized and pressed their sanctioned attacks, the establishment’s attempt to save itself began to falter. By mid-November, four Red Guard groups, bolstered by more than a thousand Red Guards from beyond the region, began to gain the upper hand by demanding, directly from the broadcasting studios of Radio Lhasa, an open repudiation of those in power. They accused both Zhang Guohua and Wang Jimei—who headed Tibet’s Cultural Revolution Group—of suppressing the revolution while pretending to support it. The two tried to profess their innocence but continued to come under increasing pressure over the next month. Finally, on December 22, the first coalition of Revolutionary Rebels—representing fifty Red Guard groups—announced its inception and prepared to “seize power.”

The affiliation could hardly help but instill terror in the hearts of Tibet’s middle-aged Communist bureaucrats. Like Revolutionary Rebels all over the country, Tibet’s Red Guards were mainly in their late adolescence and early twenties. Having matured under one dogmatic campaign after another, their thinking was governed by absolutes which now, abetted by their age and the regime’s failure to incorporate them into the mainstream of the Party, justified attacking the power structure. The language of their inaugural proclamation summarized their philosophy:

To rebel! To rebel! We are a group of Revolutionary Rebels combined through our own free will under the banner of Mao Zedong’s thought.… This organization of ours has no cumbersome rules and regulations. All can join us so long as they are Revolutionary Rebels who share our viewpoints.… We will persist in the struggle by reasoning, not by violence. However, when we do rebel, we will certainly not measure our steps and act with feminine tenderness, and will certainly not be so gentle, and so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous.

Among the dozens of groups signing the document, a huge variety of officers in Lhasa’s civil administration were represented, among whom were a bevy of Red Rebel combat squads such as the “Prairie Spark Combat Contingent,” the “Fiery Fire Combat Group” and the “Municipal Trade Headquarters Dog Hunting Corps.” “To make revolution is innocent, and to rebel is justified!” they opined. “Long live the Revolutionary Rebel spirit of the proletariat, and a long life, and a long, long life to Chairman Mao, our supreme commander and the most reddest red sun in our hearts!”

On the evening of January 10, the Revolutionary Rebels staged their first assault by seizing power in Lhasa’s north zone at the Tibet Daily, the official paper of the TAR, read by all the Chinese colonists. They had been inspired by the momentous seizure of two newspapers in Shanghai a day earlier, which, in its challenge to the city’s municipal Party committee, had received prompt public support from Chairman Mao himself. The following night, twenty cadres of the Public Security Bureau formed a Red Guard group of their own at the reception center of the Lhasa Cultural Palace, a pillared hall in the city’s new Chinese suburbs. Here they received approval from a regional CCP secretary for a big-character poster denouncing the takeover of the paper. Sanctioned to “encircle”—for thamzing—all Revolutionary Rebels, they were told to label them counterrevolutionary, a particularly charged term in Tibet’s case. In a deceptive show of support for the takeover, Tibet’s CCP Central Committee arrested two leading cadres of the paper while at the same time stating that under no circumstances would it relinquish its power, as the rebels had demanded. Again behind the scenes, party officials successfully induced much of the paper’s staff to go on an undeclared “no show” strike. None of their efforts worked. Three days after the takeover of the paper, a hundred or so Revolutionary Rebel groups staged a mass “oath-taking rally” pledged to “smashing the new counterattack”—a far more provocative and potentially explosive gathering than the establishment’s rally two weeks before, at which 20,000 Tibetans were convened to sing Mao’s quotations. And as the Red News Rebel Corps, in charge now of the Tibet Daily, tauntingly editorialized in its January 22 edition: “You squires, wield all your weapons, including the ‘nuclear device,’ nothing extraordinary, only so and so. Judging from your crimes of suppressing our Revolutionary Rebels, don’t we know who should wear this ‘all-powerful’ dunce’s cap of ‘counterrevolution’? Be vigilant, revolutionary comrades! Diehards persisting in the bourgeois reactionary line are again inciting the hoodwinked comrades to go on strike.”

They were doing a lot more than that. Within a few weeks those in power brought out the PLA itself to forcibly suppress the rebels throughout the city. Subsequently known as the “February adverse current,” this bloody reprisal—the first in a series of violent clashes over the next two years—was paralleled all across China, as Mao directed the army to intervene, hoping that it would restore order while accelerating, through its role in the three-in-one formula, the creation of Revolutionary Committees. Instead, the majority of garrisons, often under the command of the very men who were being threatened, forcibly suppressed Red Guard groups. Prior to the suppression or “white terror,” as it was called by Red Guards, the rebels’ efforts in Tibet were so effective that Zhang Guohua himself had been forced to flee on January 21, securing from friendly superiors in Peking a transfer to Sichuan, where he eventually reemerged as head of the Revolutionary Committee. Before his flight, Zhang had lost almost everything. The rebels openly accused him of an assortment of crimes, dubbing him the “Overlord of Tibet” and maintaining that since his arrival at the head of the invasion troops in 1950, he had worked to set himself up as the “Emperor” of an “independent kingdom” on “the Roof of the World.”

While Zhang fled for his life, the emboldened rebels formed a new umbrella organization, the “Attacking Local Overlords Liaison Committee.” In a storm of leaflets dropped over Lhasa on January 25, they proclaimed that they had seized power from the Central Committee of the Tibet Autonomous Region itself: “Beneath the sky all is ours. The country is ours. The masses are ours.” Eleven top members of the Committee were paraded from beating to beating through the streets, while more leaflets, detailing their reactionary crimes, were distributed.

Having displaced those in civil authority, the rebels turned their attention to the army, without whose support they could not secure control of the city. An attempt was made to engineer a coup in the PLA command. The coup, though, was swiftly put down, and the army stabilized in time for its massive attack on the rebels, whose seizure of power had come so close to victory. Before his departure General Zhang had personally helped lay plans for the “adverse current” subsequently carried out by Ren Rong, Deputy Commissar of the Tibet Military Region and Zhang’s close subordinate, supported by three new divisions loyal to Lin Biao—one sent all the way from Peking. On March 3, the Tibet Daily, back in the hands of the authorities, reported that the army had directly taken over everything from the functioning of the Public Security Bureau to the radio station and banks. With the PLA in control of Lhasa, martial rule was established. It was backed by the “Great Alliance,” a new coalition of Red Guard groups formed by the establishment to counter the Revolutionary Rebels and their now banned Attacking Local Overlords Liaison Committee.

The Great Alliance, like its counterparts across China, faced the inexorable dilemma of having to prove itself more Maoist than its opponents, by outdoing them in attacking the very order it represented. To skirt the problem entirely, it attempted to recast the equation of struggle by launching an assault on the rebels, who, it claimed, as functionaries of foreign imperialists, were attempting to destabilize the region under the guise of the Cultural Revolution. The Whirlwind Emergency Battling Newspaper was created, and on March 10, the eighth anniversary of the Tibetan uprising, it delivered a scathing attack on the rebels, by identifying them with the Tibetan freedom fighters: “At the present critical moment when the proletariat is engaged in a decisive battle against the bourgeoisie, all the monsters and freaks have also come out of hiding. Under their camouflage they have sneaked into the revolutionary ranks.” This has entirely revealed that it is an out-and-out topsy-turvy big hodgepodge and a stinking cesspit.” So saying, the Great Alliance stood firm, backed, temporarily, by the army, whose standing orders, despite the various factional affiliations of its troops and offices, were to keep Tibet stable. Apparently, they had triumphed.

But in April more than 8,000 new Red Guards began arriving from China. Sanctioned by the Cultural Revolution Group in Peking, which, on April 6, ordered the PLA to cease “repressing” the left, they were part of a nationwide counterassault by Party radicals against the “adverse current” of bureaucrats attempting to save their posts and their lives. By April 16, Red Guards in Tibet had mounted a 20,000-person mass rally supporting the rebels and denouncing the Great Alliance. They were buoyed in their “counterattack” by the success of a rebel seizure of power, publicly supported by Peking two months earlier at the Kongpo Nyitri textile mill, the most developed industrial complex in the TAR, located near the Tsangpo River at the juncture of Kham and Central Tibet.

With the capital against it, the Great Alliance lost control. On June 8, the Red Rebel News announced the Revolutionary Rebels’ official reemergence on the scene: “With red banners fluttering, the morale of the troops is high, ten thousand horses are galloping amidst urgent calls for fighting. Amidst calls for fighting, the Lhasa Revolutionary Rebel General Headquarters has been formally reinstated.” It wasn’t long before the “calls” were answered in the form of street battles all over Lhasa, raging from house to house, stronghold to stronghold, between rebel and Great Alliance groups. The rebels’ strength was such that the Great Alliance found itself compelled to sacrifice one of its chief leaders, Deputy Commissar Wang Jimei, pretending to have exposed him and thus, as always, attempting to claim the true revolutionary zeal. (Wang, who had been the original PLA commander of Chamdo following the invasion, was later reported to have committed suicide in a prison in China.) Things got so out of hand—despite incidents on July 9 and 14 in which Great Alliance gangs successfully encircled and trounced large groups of rebels—that by the end of July even Ren Rong and his adjutant, Yin Fatang, found it preferable to be in Chengdu, Sichuan, with their erstwhile boss, General Zhang Guohua, rather than remain in their own army headquarters in Tibet. While Zhang eagerly professed allegiance to representatives of the rebels who came after them, back in Lhasa, their supporters had a full-scale war on their hands, street fights giving way to frontal assaults on strategically critical locations.

In September, the PLA, supported by a five-point directive from Peking ordering both factions to “join ranks” and cease “armed struggle,” reasserted its position. But while heavier arms such as machine guns and mortars were confiscated, the fighting did not cease. Dismantling large portions of the Tsuglakhang’s roof, Revolutionary Rebels fashioned knives, spears, axes and clubs to supplement the pistols and other light arms they had retained—and with these they continued to attack the Great Alliance. Moreover, the fighting now spread from Lhasa to Shigatse, Gyantse, Nagchuka and elsewhere, groups on both sides having established rival headquarters in touch with those in the capital—from where all attacks were carefully coordinated. While these clashes included raids on military convoys they were, during the autumn of 1967, primarily confined to assaults on factional strongholds. Prominent buildings in Lhasa such as the cement factory and the transport center sometimes were taken and retaken; prisoners on both sides, with one of their ears cut off to mark them, were forced to join their captors. As the autumn progressed and the two factions rearmed with heavier weapons, Lhasa’s rebel groups managed to secure control of the city’s four hospitals, thereby preventing wounded Alliance members from receiving treatment. To enlist support from the Tibetans themselves, the rebels released all of the chief Tibetan collaborators, whom they had apprehended and publicly tortured the previous January in their bid at a seizure of power. No sooner was Tibet’s “patriotic upper strata” released, however, than the Great Alliance rearrested them, beat them brutally as “counterrevolutionaries” and reimprisoned them.

January 1968 saw the greatest outbreak of fighting to date. Hundreds died in Lhasa alone, where, with the city’s electricity cut off, the rebels, now headquartered in Yabshi House, forced the Great Alliance, based in the TAR building in front of the Potala, to flee to the Chinese sections in the outskirts. By the end of the month all transportation, construction and communication in Tibet had come to a halt as disarray in the army, free of trouble itself since February 1967, broke out. Entire units were reported to have joined one faction or the other, bringing with them automatic rifles and grenades. The weapons, in turn, were responsible for pushing casualty figures far beyond what they had been. Furthermore, as it was no longer possible adequately to define the army’s allegiance, a clear distinction between pro-Maoists and pro-Liuists was problematical in any sector of the Chinese community in Tibet. Thus the “topsy-turvy big hodgepodge,” as the Great Alliance had labeled the Revolutionary Rebels, could now safely be said to be all-pervasive. Chen Mingyi, the officer in charge of all occupation troops, desperately tried to keep border posts stable but could do little more. Concurrently, the large, heavily guarded grain warehouse at Charong, east of Drapchi prison, was cut off from Lhasa and the most devastating result of the disruptions occurred as Tibet’s delicate system of food distribution abruptly fell apart. By the end of January, subsistence conditions—which had prevailed since the easing of the famine in 1963—gave way; once more, starvation reappeared. This time, it was not to depart for a full five years—until 1973—with isolated regions thereafter continuing to experience famine until 1980.

On September 5, 1968, two years after the Cultural Revolution’s inception, a Cultural Revolution Committee was finally formed in Tibet. Along with Xinjiang—announced on the same day—Tibet was the last of China’s twenty-nine provinces and municipalities to be officially brought under the control of Peking, though both factions, despite being disarmed, once more continued fighting. The Committee represented a bargain of sorts, worked out in China’s capital between radicals and those in the army responsible for maintaining order. Zeng Yongya, a Deputy Commander of the Tibet Military Region closely aligned with Lin Biao was made Chairman, thereby satisfying the left, while Ren Rong, mistrusted by ardent Maoists for his part in the February 1967 “adverse current,” took a high but subordinate position as first Vice-Chairman. Chen Mingyi, who had ruled briefly as Zhang Guohua’s successor received an even lower post and was clearly out of power. With a flock of new Tibetan collaborators instated, among whom only Ngabo’s name was familiar, the job began of instituting subregional committees at lower administrative levels. Elsewhere in the PRC Red Guard, clashes had come to a halt following a directive from Mao, issued in July of 1968, empowering the army to disband the various groups by dispersing their members to the countryside. In Tibet, however, it took to the Ninth Party Congress, held in April 1969, before even six of the necessary seventy-seven district, municipality and county level Revolutionary Committees could be established, attesting to the region’s continued instability. In December, almost a year and a half after the fighting in the TAR had been officially quelled with the formation of Revolutionary Committees, Radio Lhasa was still referring to “bourgeois factionalism,” making it clear just how deeply rooted Tibet’s civil strife had become.

For all of its fury, the political contest of the Cultural Revolution in Tibet was limited, in the main, to the Chinese themselves. The bulk of the suffering it produced was endured by the Tibetan people. While a few thousand Chinese died or were arrested and tortured, Tibetan casualties—including fatalities and those imprisoned—ran into the tens of thousands, with millions experiencing extreme abuse. Worse, for the legacy of subsequent generations, Tibetan culture suffered what would have been—were it not for the refugees in India—nothing less than a fatal blow. Everything Tibetan was destroyed; everything Chinese and Communist adopted. The practice of religion was officially outlawed. Folk festivals and fairs were banned, traditional dances and songs, incense burning and all Tibetan art forms and customs prohibited. A large outdoor exhibit was erected at Tromsikhang, near the Barkhor in Lhasa, in which all forbidden religious and ornamental items were displayed under a banner ordering their immediate remission to work committees and the “Offices to Suppress the Uprising,” which had been reinstituted for the duration of the upheaval. All over Tibet people with bad class designations, who had not as yet been imprisoned, were dragged into the street and paraded in paper dunce caps—beaten and spat upon as they passed, tags listing their crimes pinned to their naked chest—in processions led by Red Guards beating drums, cymbals and gongs. Lashed to heavy religious statues lamas were bent double while ex-aristocrats and merchants had large empty vessels, once used for storing grain, roped to their backs. Loudspeakers, which had previously broadcast for only three to six hours daily, now emitted a nonstop stream of propaganda songs and paeans to Mao, their shrill whine permeating the streets and penetrating to within every household.

Between parades Red Guard factions vied for preeminence in the work of demolishing every vestige of Tibetan culture. The few remaining prayer flags were ripped down and replaced with red banners. The religious landscape of Tibet—lines of chortens gracing valleys and ridges, piles of mani stones before towns and mantras fashioned across hillsides out of whitewashed rocks were demolished and replaced by colossal slogans of Mao. The distinctive black borders framing Tibetan windows, as well as the bands of bright color decorating the interiors of most rooms, were chiseled out or painted over. In Kham and Amdo, the second floors of homes were decreed to be “bourgeois excesses”; their inhabitants were forced to raze them and live in the damp, windowless stables on the first floor. Long plaits of hair worn by both men and women were labeled “the dirty black tails of serfdom” and, if not cut by the individual, were slashed off by roving gangs of Red Guards. Others had their heads half shaved, to mark them as backward. By March 1967, tens of thousands of copies of Mao’s Little Red Book—issued with a red purse, inscribed with the slogan “Long Live Chairman Mao”—were given out. Tibetans were required to memorize passages from the book. They were tested both in nightly meetings and on the street—randomly waylaid by Red Guards who demanded flawless recitation on pain of violence. Boiler suits had to be worn, bracelets, earrings and rings discarded; even the traditional Tibetan greeting—equivalent to shaking hands—of sticking out one’s tongue, while sucking in the breath, was forbidden. Private pets were exterminated by Red Guards moving from home to home, where they forced the inhabitants to hang portraits of Mao in every room and wrote slogans on the walls. Tibetan youths—members of the Communist Youth League and schoolchildren—were also marshaled into pet and insect extermination campaigns in an effort to counter the Tibetans’ abhorrence of taking life. Tibetan writing and even the language itself were targeted for destruction, replaced by a bizarre, mainly Chinese patois called “the Tibetan-Chinese Friendship language”—the grammar and vocabulary of which were incomprehensible to most Tibetans. Great numbers of Tibetans—particularly cadres and others employed directly by the Chinese—were forced to change their names to Chinese equivalents, each with one syllable of Mao’s name included. When parents resisted naming their offspring for Mao, the children were officially called by either their date of or weight at birth—so that, as far as Chinese administrators were concerned, many of Tibet’s upcoming generation were literally no more than numbers. As a new expression describing the dementia that had gripped the Chinese stated, “First they make us laugh, and then they make us cry.”

As preposterous as the fanaticism of the Cultural Revolution seemed to most Tibetans, they had reason to fear it far more than the Democratic Reforms and their attendant campaigns of class cleansing. During these there had been a strict adherence to authority in the administration of various punishments; the Cultural Revolution was pure mob violence. The early parades through Lhasa soon gave way to branding with hot irons, executions and impromptu thamzing on the street—so much so that for years Tibetans feared to leave their homes, venturing out only to and from work and even then refusing to acknowledge friends, as it was the duty of watchers on every corner to report suspicious behavior. Then, as early as August 1966, gang rapes began. The female children of four hundred Tibetan families engaged in lumbering at Po Tramo were marched naked in public by Red Guards, submitted to thamzing and then raped. Appeals were made to the authorities in Lhasa, but they refused to intervene out of fear for their positions. In the winter of 1966-67, Revolutionary Rebels traveled to Nagchuka, north of Lhasa. Here they subjected vast numbers of nomads, gathered at the town during the cold months, to similar atrocities. Women were stripped, bound and made to stand on frozen lakes under guard. A man and his daughter, Karma Sherab and Tsering Tsomo, were compelled to copulate in public. Throughout Lhoka similar wanton acts took place, as classed Tibetans were left tied in gunnysacks for days at a time. At the Ngyang-chu River (a tributary of the Tsangpo) outside Gyantse, families, including the women and children of classed men, were made to stand in freezing water for five hours, wearing dunce caps, heavy stones strapped to their legs. More rapes and public beatings occurred in Shigatse. A wave of suicides swept over the country as many Tibetans, sometimes in family groups, chose to kill themselves by leaping from cliffs or drowning rather than die at the hands of Chinese gangs. In Lhasa, suicide attempts became so common that PLA guards patrolled the shores of the Kyichu River night and day.

As the fighting between the Red Guard factions intensified, so did the atrocities—committed not only by civilian bands, but by the PLA as well. Rapes and beatings turned into executions in which victims were forced to dig their own graves before being shot. The bloodletting re-created the worst of the crimes that followed the suppression of the 1959 revolt. According to a new influx of refugees escaping, in the confusion, to India, Tibetans were routinely mutilated, their ears, tongues, noses, fingers and arms cut off, genitals and eyes burned. Boiling water was poured on victims hung by the thumbs to extract information they were thought to possess concerning rival factions. Crucifixion was also employed: on June 9, 1968, the bodies of two men were dumped in the street in front of Ngyentseshar—the old Lhasan jail—riddled with nail marks, not just through the hands, but hammered into the head and the major joints of the torso. As late as 1970 a group of ex-monks near the Nepal border were required to stand on pedestals in public and read Mao’s Little Red Book aloud for three consecutive days. Those who refused were shot on the spot by the PLA. Their corpses were dragged through the streets, where the people were forced to spit and throw dust on them. Two who would not were also summarily executed. Finally the bodies were prominently displayed beneath signs proclaiming their lot to be the natural end of all reactionaries.

The fate of the Tibetan people was duplicated in the country’s 6,254 monasteries. But while so much Red Guard behavior was uncontrolled, the destruction of the monasteries was the result of a carefully planned campaign inaugurated prior to the Cultural Revolution. Beginning in 1959, it had been the ongoing task of the Cultural Articles Preservation Commission to catalogue, according to specified grades of value, every item in every monastery in Tibet for eventual shipment to China. Metallurgy teams were sent from Peking. Nevertheless, it was a massive task, and the work had progressed slowly. The large monasteries around Lhasa, Shigatse, Gyantse and the main cities of Kham and Amdo alone contained so much that few in the countryside had been thoroughly examined prior to 1966. By September 1967, however, a year after the first Revolutionary Rebel group had formed in Lhasa, widespread destruction began in earnest. Older Red Guards supervised the operation equipped with booklets in which each article’s designation, either to be saved or destroyed, was noted. Images of gold, silver and bronze, expensive brocades and ancient thankas were packed and sealed. Intricately carved pillars and beams were dismantled for use in the construction of Chinese compounds. Then, under red flags—with drums, trumpets and cymbals providing a fanfare—local Tibetans were forced to demolish each monastery. Giant bonfires were lit to burn thousands of scriptures, while those not incinerated were desecrated—used as wrapping in Chinese shops, as toilet paper or as padding in shoes. The wooden blocks in which they were bound were made into floorboards, chairs and handles for farm tools. Clay images were ground to dust, thrown into the street for people to walk on and mixed with fertilizer. Others were remade into bricks for the specific purpose of building public lavatories. Mani stones, once among the most common expressions of prayer, were turned into pavement. Frescoes were defaced, the eyes of their images gouged out in a manner reminiscent of the twelfth-century Moslem destruction of Buddhist monasteries in India. Bronze and gold pinnacles crowning every temple’s roof were pulled down and—along with other metals—resmelted.

When the pillaging was done, dynamite was placed in the gutted buildings and their walls blown up. Field artillery was also used, so that within a three-year period the entire landscape of Tibet stood scarred by ruins resembling bombed cities. Because the buildings’ walls were so thick, virtually none, not even Ganden—slated for total obliteration as the Gelugpa sect’s most sacred monastery—could be completely razed, but stood as ghostly ever-present reminders of what had been. The destruction of Tibet’s monasteries came as a collective shock that all but the youngest Tibetans found incomprehensible. Whatever personal tragedy Tibetans had experienced paled in the face of what now seemed to be the end of civilization as they knew it.

An essential corollary to the attack on Tibetan culture took the form of a reinvigorated propaganda campaign vilifying the old Tibet. The chief scapegoats were the Dalai and Panchen Lamas. In December 1968, Radio Peking delivered its most scathing attack yet on the Dalai Lama, portraying him as a “political corpse, bandit and traitor.” In Tibet itself he was condemned as a “red-handed butcher who subsisted on people’s flesh with a red mark on his hand to prove it.” It was alleged that whenever the Dalai Lama recited scripture, a human heart, liver or arm was sacrificed. He was said to be too frightened to return home, lest these facts be proved to the Tibetan people, who would then take retribution for his having lived on their “flesh and blood.” The stock questions of the nightly meeting were now: “Tell us who masterminded the revolt?” The answer: “The Dalai Lama.” The next question: “What type of life did he lead?” Answer: “He was a pleasure-loving lama who loved women, gold and silver and sold our country to imperialists.”

China’s ultimate portrait of the old Tibet was constructed, toward the close of the Cultural Revolution, in the Tibetan Revolutionary Museum, situated in the village of Shöl below the Potala. It was a mandatory stop for all foreign visitors allowed into Lhasa in carefully screened groups, from the mid-seventies on. In the museum’s first room documents were displayed purporting to prove that Tibet had been an inalienable part of China since the thirteenth century. These were followed by what a reporter for the Washington Post, accompanying George Bush (then U.S. liaison to China), on a three-day visit in 1977, termed a “revolting depiction of the alleged atrocities of the old regime.” The exhibit featured hands, arms and legs severed as punishment for minor crimes, the skins of two children said to have been flayed alive during a religious ceremony and an assortment of whips, knives and manacles used by the “feudal lords” to torture their “slaves.” “Pushing aside the black curtains at the exhibition room door, one enters the living hell which was old Tibet,” recounted China Reconstructs in a 1976 piece regaling the museum’s dramatically lit dioramas of 106 figures. Orchestrated by tape-recorded music and explanations, the dioramas were arranged in four groups entitled: The Feudal Manor—Hell on Earth; The Lamasery—Wicked Den for Devouring Serfs; The Kashag—Reactionary Local Government; and the Serfs Struggle for Liberation. The scenes included a “serf” forced to carry his “master” up a steep cliff in a snowstorm, “hatred flashing from his eyes”; a boy bartered by a feudal lord for a donkey; a leering monk standing over a debtor about to be dragged to death by a horse; another monk, enclosing a screaming child in a box as a sacrifice; and a woman, said to have led a people’s uprising, tied to a stake and sentenced to have her heart gouged out. In the final scene the “slaves” rise up and slaughter their masters, and a dying girl, scrawling a red star in her own blood on a boulder, expresses “her longing for the serfs’ delivery, Chairman Mao and the Communist Party.”

The chaos and destruction of the Cultural Revolution lasted for three years. Its political aftermath lasted another seven—until the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. In Tibet’s case, though, there was a more durable legacy—communes. Central Tibet was the sole region in China to have thus far avoided communization, a fact Maoists viewed as the most flagrant example of the local party’s “revisionist” policies. No matter how pressing other duties were, all Red Guards considered it their sacred task to communize Tibet. But it was not so easy, as their predecessors could have testified.

The drive to communize had actually begun as early as 1962. At that time, communes were introduced on an experimental basis around Lhasa, Shigatse and Lhoka. They were not developed, however, owing to the shaky state of the Democratic Reforms, the same difficulties which delayed the founding of the TAR. Tibetans viewed communes as nothing less than mass imprisonment: the ultimate means of social control in which the modicum of freedom they had maintained—including ownership of land, farm tools, animals and the few possessions remaining to them—would be lost to a final leveling of society by the state. Their fears stemmed from the awareness of the effects of enforced collectivization in Kham and Amdo both before and after 1959. Though production goals had risen annually, harvests had been systematically appropriated and famine was now endemic in the once bountiful east. The people of Kham—in the main women and children after years of fighting—were said to be yoked to plows like beasts of burden, toiling year round to meet state quotas.

As with the Democratic Reforms, the desire for communes had to appear as if it emanated from the people. Hence, Tibetans were compelled to sign documents requesting communes, whereupon the Tang or CCP promised to “grant” them. In addition to its propaganda value, this technique had long been recognized by Chinese cadres as a valuable tool for forestalling criticism of daily work. Complaints were easily dismissed with the simple observation that the people themselves had requested that the policy be implemented—so how, then, could they now claim to oppose it? In Central Tibet’s case, the stage in socialization following Mutual Aid Teams, cooperatives, was bypassed altogether. Where others had walked, the Tibetans were thus to “leap” to communes—and they needed the Party’s help to do so.

The Chinese began by galvanizing the “leading element” of people’s activists. Meetings were called in 1964 at which it was promised that, if communes were successfully established, they would be allowed to govern them, holding the ranks of turing and dbutang—chairman and overseer—a promotion over their usual position of tsoutang or group leader. Their methods were to be twofold. On the harsh side, commune formation would constitute the key topic for three to four months at the nightly meeting; whoever opposed it would be made an example of by thamzing and imprisonment. The burtsun chenpos or “diligent ones” carried this out so eagerly that—acquainted now with the requisite behavior for survival—people all over Tibet, as refugees recounted, were soon saying, “Even if the communes cannot be established today, please set them up tomorrow!” On the soft side, the Chinese promised that communes were none other than “the Golden Bridge to the Socialist Paradise.” A few model communes, amply supplied with yaks, sheep, horses, pigs, carts, tools and fertilizer—all of which were promised to every burgeoning commune—were established to serve as inspiring examples. Immediately following the inauguration of the TAR in 1965, some 130 communes had been formed. Then, with the advent of the Cultural Revolution, the “soft sell” was abandoned and communization was implemented across the country. By the summer of 1970, more than one thousand communes had been set up; by December 1975, the drive had been completed in 93 percent of the TAR’s 71 chou, or districts—some 1,925 communes having been established.

Getting people to relinquish their possessions—the first stage in communization—proved the greatest obstacle. A compensation rate was set—far below the actual worth of the given item: 150 yuan or roughly $75 was to be paid for the best horse; 70 yuan or $35 for a yak (the usual value being $250); $15 for a donkey and plow; $2.50 for a hammer; $4.00 for a long knife; $3.00 for a shovel and saddle; $2.00 for a rope. In most cases reimbursement was to be made over a three- to five-year period. Tibetans, however, never received the promised money. Payment would begin, the Chinese said, only when the commune produced a surplus—a stipulation which made a mockery of the entire premise of “compensation,” as the Tibetans’ own labor was to “pay back” what they had given to begin with. Thus, the state expended nothing at all on communes—its propaganda claiming, all the while, vast contributions of materials and seeds. To add insult to the injury, each person over sixteen years of age had immediately to contribute up to 11 yuan toward his commune’s starting capital. As no one had this money, the Chinese were compelled to lend it—bringing the entire nation into their debt and thereby justifying a regular raising of taxes through interest at each harvest. Short of bringing in the PLA, it was difficult to get Tibetans to voluntarily impose such devastating conditions on themselves. Eventually, though, the army was dispatched to many regions, mass arrests were carried out, and to those who remained intransigent it was soon made clear that while survival inside the commune structure might be distasteful, existence outside meant certain doom—the communes having confiscated all water sources and the best land in each area. Only a few classed families, purposely not permitted to join, henceforth remained beyond the fringe of the new society.

An average commune comprised from 100 to 200 families, or 1,000 people. It was organized in production teams (but not, due to the low population, in brigades as in the rest of China) usually encompassing a single village, with a bank and general store shared by up to seven communes in the local subdistrict. As the 1970s progressed, the limited facilities, including health care and primary schools, were spread even thinner, as communes were conglomerated into groups of four while still being treated as a single unit. The communes were run by a staff of officers under a leader who issued work orders based on demands received from the local party office. In the administration of certain communes there were as many as fifty different ranks. These positions were held exclusively by Tibetans, who were required to carry out their duties over and above their daily burden of farm labor. Under them, the Tibetan people’s remaining freedoms were lost. Movement beyond one’s house and field, not just the surrounding area, was forbidden. Even trips to collect firewood required prior permission. To take a day’s leave for illness or to tend to a sick relative, often necessitated signatures from as many as twelve officials.

The day began with the dirgelike, monochromatic notes of China’s favorite anthem, “The East Is Red,” played from loudspeakers on Peking time—two hours before sunrise in Tibet. After roll call in one’s production team, work commenced at 5:00 a.m. Labor then continued until 8:00 or 10:00 at night, depending on the season, followed by the two- to three-hour political meeting that ended about midnight. Though many people took one Sunday every fortnight off from work, there were only seven sanctioned holidays a year—three days for Communist celebrations, three for Chinese New Year’s and one for Western New Year’s. Mothers with new babies were granted the special dispensation of a half hour in the morning and another in the evening for breast feeding. Though the old, the infirm and children below school age were officially exempt from labor, without work points they received no grain ration. Thus every man, woman and child in Tibet from the age of six or seven to that of eighty or more was compelled, if physically able, to work. Exhaustion was so common and the rules so strictly enforced that frequently the corpses of those who died went unburied for days at a time. As Tibetans commented, in a new expression, on their lot: “In Tibet there are only three things left to see. In the morning you see the stars, during the day the locks on the houses and at night, returning from work, the moon.”

In addition to farming, miles of canals were dug, dams, roads and water tanks built. Breaking new land became an obsession with the communes—as was, by the early seventies, planting winter wheat. The Chinese preferred wheat to barley, so 80 percent of the arable land was sown with it. When the shoots were five inches high, local officials took inventory of the expected crop, and the harvest was scrupulously checked against their figures to make sure there was no pilfering. Acreage, though, was not allowed to lie fallow on alternate years, a practice which, in Tibet’s fragile environment, leached the soil and resulted in massive crop failures. This abuse of the land, not rectified until the end of the 1970s, accounted for ongoing pockets of famine throughout the country.

Tibet’s nomads, many of whom had delayed for long periods of time in Mutual Aid Teams, were by no means excluded from communization. Their possessions and herds were collectivized and a strict breeding requirement with 90 percent of a given herd’s mature females having to reproduce annually—was enforced. Accidental casualties of up to 2 percent of the animals were permitted; any beyond had to be turned over to the authorities with a full explanation—whereafter, if the herder was found responsible, he was punished. The staple nomad diet of meat, cheese and butter was replaced, in the main, by state-issued barley. In Central Tibet, meat was appropriated for the PLA; in Amdo and Kham, it was shipped, along with hides, directly to China.

Within a year of their founding the economic oppression of the communes drastically altered life in Tibet once again. An intricate system of work points and taxation combined to reduce the population to below subsistence level, with grain rations running out, unless further apportioned by individuals—from now until the late seventies—on average, three to four months before year’s end. The work-point system had been originated in Dazhai, China’s leading commune (whose astronomical production figures, it was later revealed, had all been falsified), and represented the ultimate in collectivization. In Tibet, the people were rewarded with karmas or stars, recorded in a small booklet called a kardeb. Every three days, group leaders took their charges’ books and noted how many stars they had earned; at two-week intervals the numbers were totaled. In a day, the best worker earned eight toten stars, the worst earned five and children earned four. Though varying in worth when translated into currency, the average karma was valued at around 1 motse or 5 cents. Thus, the maximum earned by top-ranked Tibetan cadres was 50 cents a day, $14 a month, $168 a year. The general per capita income, taking into account both dependents and the average wage earned, fell in the vicinity of $60 a year, making Tibet at this time the poorest nation on Earth, below even Bhutan, whose people earned $10 more each, annually. However, with all goods obtained by rationing only, monetary value was secondary. Where work points or stars mattered was at the end of the year. At this time, a full twelve months’ labor was assessed and translated into grain rations. Not, though, prior to taxation.

Before work points were tallied and the grain ration for each production team determined, up to eight different kinds of taxes were levied on the harvest: these included 6 percent State Grain (called either Loving the Nation Tax or Voluntary Tax—as Tibetans were supposed to give it voluntarily out of their love for the party), Seed Grain, Fodder Grain, Famine Prevention Grain, War Preparation Grain, Grain for Commune Expenses and two categories of so-called Surplus Grain, the last of which, though not strictly a tax, would be “voluntarily” sold to the state at incredibly low prices—1 khel (or 28 pounds) generally going for a little more than 3 yuan, or $1.50—the price of three packs of cigarettes. In addition, the money was then placed in commune banks, to which individuals had no access. After all of these taxes were subtracted, workers, depending on their performance, would be awarded rations for the year. Under this system each person’s normal annual intake of grain amounted to 8 to 12 khels, or 224 to 336 pounds, for most far less than a pound a day. Meat, vegetables, butter, milk, yogurt and tea, all previously staples, continued to be absent from the diet. Families with aged or infant dependents suffered the most. Their food, insufficient for two adults, often had to be shared among five people. A new beggar or “loitering” class was thus created. And while the commune would extend an initial loan to some of these unfortunates, it would never do so twice. As there was no means of paying back the loan, people continued to beg, and the party announced that it was not its responsibility but that of the “better off” members of the community to support them. Produced by the system itself, the new class became a millstone overnight, increasing in weight as children were born and more families fell into debt. Tibetans now said among themselves, “Liberation is like having a wet leather cap put on one’s head. The quicker it dries, the tighter it gets, until it kills you.”

The truth of the aphorism turned increasingly clear under a new wave of famine which, despite increased cultivation, was the sole result Tibetans experienced from the communes. To add to the Cultural Revolution’s disruptions, a slew of natural disasters befell Tibet—the worst drought in a hundred years, the heaviest snowfall in fifty and, in 1972, severe earthquakes. All produced widespread crop failures. Where small pockets of famine had occurred in the lull between 1963 and 1968, the Chinese had occasionally agreed to loan grain from state stores. In 1969, however, in the midst of a nationwide war preparation campaign, they ceased doing this, and retained all reserve stocks for the PLA alone. Furthermore, when harvests were poor the Chinese refused to reduce taxes, creating a devastating drop in the already subsistence-level rations. Even when hundreds of starving people poured into Gyantse and Shigatse in 1972, grain rations having descended from 7 to 5 and then an incredible 4 khels or 112 pounds a year—thereby running out after only four or five months—nothing was forthcoming from the well-stocked army granaries. Unwilling to arrest the demonstrators—because they would have to be fed—the PLA dispersed them back to the countryside. Here, they subsisted by foraging for wild herbs, roots, mushrooms, scorpion plants in particular and a plant called chung, used in the past for making green dye. Previously such foraging had been the only means of survival for many old people who could neither work nor receive support from their families. Now almost the entire population of Tibet took, often with fatal results, to living off the land, returning, as they had in the early sixties, to picking undigested grain from the manure of PLA horses, stealing discarded food thrown by the Chinese to their pigs and chickens and digging for worms. The plight of the city dwellers, though, remained even worse than that of the country folk. From early in 1968, both Shigatse and Lhasa ceased to receive supplies. Stores remained empty—devoid even of matches, kerosene, candles and cigarettes, much less sugar and tea. For years nightly meetings were held by the light of a single candle or two—a boon, ironically, for Tibetans, who no longer had to strain to stay awake for fear of being caught inattentive. When the chaos of the Cultural Revolution began to ease, commodities returned to Tibet; yet through the end of the famine in 1973, they remained in such short supply that only cadres and Chinese settlers had consistent access to them. For Tibetans a box of matches a month was considered a luxury. A tin of cooking oil cost more than the average laborer earned in two months. The four yards of cloth issued a year, insufficient in itself to make even a single new chuba, was in many cases forgone, people’s clothes now becoming so reworked that the original material could no longer be seen for the patches. As Tibetans were barred from such necessities as soap, mud was used instead. Chinese, however, were rationed a single cake of bathing soap every three months, and half a cake for washing clothes every two months. There were so many instances of looting and robbery that those who were caught had to be released after making a simple confession.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One incident in particular galvanized Tibetans into revolt. On the morning of June 7, 1968, a group of teen-agers became embroiled with a PLA unit in the courtyard of Yuthok House in Lhasa. Two Chinese were killed. Frightened, the youngsters fled to the hallowed interior of the Jokhang, the Central Cathedral’s inner sanctum, where they were soon surrounded by three hundred military police. The PLA commander informed them that, unless they returned weapons and ammunition stolen in the fight, he would open fire within five minutes. The youths insisted that they had taken no weapons; moreover, they claimed that they all came from poor and middle-class backgrounds. With no further word they held up their copies of Mao’s Little Red Book and began to chant a Communist slogan, hoping to defuse the confrontation: “The army and people are one; beneath the sky none can separate them.” When the time elapsed, the PLA fired directly into the crowd, killing twelve and wounding forty-nine, many of whom were bayoneted and beaten with rifle butts following the fusillade. The Chinese commanders then denied those wounded medical attention until a team of Tibetan doctors from Mendzekhang arrived to take them away. In the interim, the large crowds gathered outside heard the survivors within singing a well-known underground song:

“Do not mourn, people of Tibet,

Independence will surely be ours.

Remember our sun,

Remember His Holiness.”

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Choedrak was placed in a fourteen-man cell on the east side of the prison’s outer courtyard. Only sixteen by twelve feet, it was so small that when the men slept head to head in two rows, their feet hit the walls, forcing them to bend their knees. The diet at Drapchi consisted mainly of tsampa gruel and boiled greens with hot water. Fifteen days after their arrival, however, Dr. Choedrak’s group were given their first taste of butter tea in years, which they continued to receive once every other day. Over the next two weeks, relatives were allowed to visit, bringing gifts of meat, roasted beans and barley. Dr. Choedrak’s brother Topgyal came, bearing with him the head of a yak—all he could obtain. The gifts, though, were a mixed blessing. As the prisoners devoured the new food, divided carefully into daily portions, they experienced excruciating stomach pain followed by diarrhea. Long before the day’s three toilet runs began, the small wooden box kept in the cell as a night toilet would overflow, feces and urine spreading onto the floor. The foul odor made the already claustrophobic conditions unbearable. During this period, the first signs of flesh began to appear around Dr. Choedrak’s emaciated torso. Miraculously, it seemed, hair and eyebrows returned, giving him and his comrades a more human look. Still, they remained creatures of such fragility that, with their senses reviving, the slightest stimulation brought sharp pain. When the kitchen staff, almost two dozen yards away, began boiling tea and cooking food, the odor produced devastating hunger pangs. Hunger itself, which long ago had disappeared beneath a haze of enervation, now returned with such force that no matter how much they ate, the men continually felt famished. Between a ravenous appetite and its resulting diarrhea, the return to life was made, and the legacy of Jiuzhen slowly faded.

Led by a group leader chosen amongst themselves, “reeducation” got underway. Supplied with a current issue of the Tibet Daily, which served as a starting point for discussion, the leader was required to take copious notes of the proceedings. Thamzing also continued, the less intelligent men still falling victim, unable to shade their answers with the required nuances. Then, for reasons never explained to them, it was announced by the Chinese that Dr. Choedrak’s group required more severe punishment. In the autumn of 1963, a year after their arrival in Drapchi, the men were transferred into the maximum-security block. The walls of their new cell, just as small as the old, contained only a few holes, each the size of two bricks, to let in light and air. Belts and bootlaces were confiscated by the guards to prevent suicide. As the Tibetans later learned, prisoners throughout the camp were hanging themselves from planks beneath the smoke hole in each cell’s roof. Few could cope with the confinement, inactivity and continual prying into the core of their thoughts.

One day Dr. Choedrak and his cellmates heard shouts followed by gunfire in the yard outside their room. Brought out on a toilet break sometime later, they saw the bullet-torn body of a peasant farmer from Phenbo, left in the dirt where it had fallen. The man had been confined in the cell behind theirs and on being taken to the toilet had run amok. In a later incident Dr. Choedrak heard a prisoner outside his cell defiantly shout, “I don’t want Marxism, I want religion!” After returning to his cell, the man was overcome by rage and tying a piece of cloth to a twig from a broomstick—all he could find—started yelling at the top of his voice, “Tibet is independent!” Taken away, he was never seen again. Dr. Choedrak himself remained extremely depressed through this third stage of his confinement.

In May 1965, a guard came to Tenzin Choedrak’s cell and told him to pack his few belongings. Once more without explanation, he was moved. This time a jeep waited in the prison’s outer yard. Dr. Choedrak was driven northeast up the Lhasan Valley. Here, built into a canyon between two spurs of a mountain, stood the prison of Sangyip. Two compounds, Sangyip proper and its slightly less severe branch, Yidutu, lay at the front of the gap inside three walls crowned by periodic guard towers, the rear wall being formed by the cliff itself. The prison’s third and least severe branch, Utitu, lay surrounded by its own wall five hundred feet south of the canyon near a compound for the Chinese staff, also separately enclosed. It had been six years since Dr. Choedrak’s imprisonment. He had yet to be formally charged with a specific crime, brought to trial or even given a sentence. Deposited in a maximum-security cell for thirteen men, bisected by a concrete path, on either side of which sand was scattered for sleeping, he once more took up the endless task of placement “reeducation.”

With his removal from the dungeon of Drapchi and among new men, Dr. Choedrak’s perspective began to shift. He now found that somehow the worst of prison life had been overcome. From his first series of thamzing in the maximum-security prison at Silingpu, Lhasa’s PLA headquarters, when he had lost his teeth and suffered damage to his eye, through subsequent ordeals in Jiuzhen and Drapchi, he had learned to enact a pretense of “self-improvement” while remaining inwardly beyond the reach of indoctrination. Above all, faith in religion had preserved his equanimity. Each night he continued his Tum-mo exercises, augmented, since his last year in China, by silent recitation of mantras. Now, in Sangyip, he took a major risk. Tying 108 knots into a piece of string, he fashioned a rosary with which to say prayers. Before going to sleep, he recited four to five hundred mantras: half those of Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Infinite Compassion, the other half of Manjusri, the Bodhisattva of Infinite Wisdom. The same idea, in fact, had occurred to a number of inmates, all of whom, as they grew to trust the new man, revealed their practices to him. Whereas Dr. Choedrak managed to recite three million mantras in Sangyip, he knew others who recited almost double that number.

One morning a little more than a year after Tenzin Choedrak’s arrival in Sangyip, the men placed their mugs, as usual, outside the cell window to receive tea. When the kitchen workers came by, however, they learnt that its rationing had been discontinued. Drinking butter tea was henceforth labeled a habit of the “old, rotten system, indulged in only by reactionaries.” From now on, only “proletarian” boiled water would be served. Vegetable gruel was discontinued as well, so that the entire diet now consisted of small portions of tsampa given three times a day. When a few weeks later copies of Mao’s Little Red Book were handed out, the prisoners surmised that great changes were occurring beyond the prison walls. For the next ten years, the book’s contents were to be the principal topic of study, the Cultural Revolution having penetrated the prison as well. But though the return to conditions of near famine was distressful, the political shift which accompanied them came, ironically, as a blessing. The book, it turned out, provided a perfect vehicle for further recitation of prayers. By saying a mantra for every letter in a line and calculating the number of mantras at day’s end, the entire cell was infused with a new spirit of hope. No matter how often they looked in, the unwary guards beheld all thirteen men poring over their books, apparently deeply engrossed. Even the slight movement of the lips—enough to have earned many prisoners thamzing in the past—now appeared to be a sign of concentration on Mao’s aphorisms.

In 1972, Dr. Choedrak finally received his sentence, based on a penal code adopted four years earlier. The code specified four categories of prisoners who would never be released: those from border regions; major “reactionaries,” such as guerrillas and members of the underground; prisoners without families; and the worst group—to which Tenzin Choedrak belonged—upper-class intelligentsia associated with the former Tibetan government. Along with the other grades of prisoners, they received one of six types of sentences, ranging in length from twelve to thirty years. Some were eligible for review, others not. There were also death sentences, delayed for one to two years, after which they could be commuted to life imprisonment if the culprit was deemed sufficiently reformed. Dr. Choedrak was given a seventeen-year sentence, thirteen years of which he had already served. He could not, though, look forward to release in four years’ time. Even if no new charges were placed against him, at best his status would be upgraded to that of a lemirukha, or “free laborer.” As in Jiuzhen, such workers lived in unguarded cellblocks outside the prison, from which they reported to work on their own recognizance. Once every two weeks, in groups of three, they were permitted to visit their families in Lhasa. Receiving work points like the rest of the population, they purchased their rations and were given nothing by the prison. Because of this institution, inmates had little hope of ever becoming free. The need for labor brigades was made evident each year in the annual winter accounting. At this time, Sangyip’s profit—how many hundreds of thousands of yuan each work section had brought in—was posted. This figure determined the production targets for the coming year. Without the army of “free laborers,” topping the previous year’s work would have been impossible. Thus the prison depended on a steady, if not increasing, population of workers. On the other hand, the moment either a prisoner or a laborer became too ill or old to work, he was discharged and told to return home. Dr. Choedrak witnessed numerous examples of aged prison mates who, though they requested not to be sent home, where there was no one to support them, were turned down and forcibly evicted, left to beg or die on their own.

Following sentencing, Dr. Choedrak was transferred from Sangyip to Yidutu, the milder branch located next to it. Here his decade of inactive confinement finally came to an end. His “reeducation” deemed complete, he was assigned to hard labor in the prison’s quarry, a job, along with brickmaking, reserved for Tibetans. While Chinese prisoners repaired automobile parts or held other factory jobs, he now had to chisel ninety twelve-by-eight-inch stone blocks a day from boulders blasted out of the mountainside behind the camp. Working with five other inmates, he could barely perform his share of labor, his muscles having atrophied from lack of use. While two men hammered boulders to produce smaller rocks, the remaining four hurriedly fashioned blocks from these, having to fill their own quotas as well as those of the first two. It was dangerous work. The prisoners were often struck in the eyes and face by flying chips of rock. Wedges and sledgehammers were used and the man holding the wedge was frequently hit, due to the accelerated pace of the labor. A blackboard, hung under a tin canopy on one of the prison walls, kept the daily tally of each group. And as with all work in Chinese prisons, anyone falling below his assigned number was subjected to struggle session to improve his performance.

As Tenzin Choedrak adjusted to his new life, the fresh air and exercise combined to gradually improve his health. In the following year, he experienced a relative sense of contentment, above and beyond the mere detachment he had already learned to cultivate. Then one day he was summoned away from his work. Brought into the presence of a Chinese prison physician named Dr. Li, Dr. Choedrak listened in astonishment as the man spoke to him in a pleasant, even ingratiating tone. The doctor explained that he had discovered Tenzin Choedrak’s name among Sangyip’s records and had thought it advisable to consult him about an ailment he had been suffering from for many years. He then asked Dr. Choedrak to diagnose his case. The request was particularly surprising because, though Mendzekhang had remained open after 1959, Tibetan medicine had never been given credence by the Chinese. Dr. Choedrak read the physician’s pulse. His hands were rough, the skin so thick and bruised that it was difficult to make a clear diagnosis. Nonetheless, he detected—correctly—a liver ailment. Impressed, the doctor explained that his illness was severe enough to have warranted two trips to the mainland. He had tried both Western and traditional Chinese medicine, but both had failed. Dr. Choedrak prescribed Tibetan medicines, and predicted that a cure would not be difficult to effect. Soon after he obtained the pills from Mendzekhang, the physician became well and with his recovery came a remarkable improvement for Dr. Choedrak as well. Holding a high rank in the Public Security Bureau, the doctor took it upon himself to discuss Tenzin Choedrak’s case with its chief officers at their headquarters in Lhasa. There he pointed out that Dr. Choedrak’s skills might be of value to the state, which had just announced a brief liberalization called “the Four Freedoms,” designed to rehabilitate “local culture.” Three security officers, all suffering from chronic ailments, went to Yidutu, where Dr. Choedrak was called upon to diagnose and treat them. All were cured. As a result, Dr. Choedrak was removed from his cell and, to his utter disbelief, sent to work as a doctor in Sangyip’s hospital. Then, in 1976, having served his full seventeen-year sentence, he was transferred outside the walls to Utitu, the mildest of Sangyip’s prisons. Here he lived as a “free laborer,” although he was officially still considered an “enemy of the people,” his identity papers marked by a “black hat.”

Dr. Choedrak’s sudden elevation in life seemed to him like an ascent from hell. He was excited by the chance to practice medicine once more, but he knew that, on a moment’s notice, from either a stray remark or the whim of a disgruntled bureaucrat, he could be hurled below again. The improved circumstances themselves provided a constant reminder of his vulnerability.

A Chinese woman physician named Dr. Liu, whom he described as “very rough, very crude, very bad,” had been sent to Tibet for a three-year tour of duty and was among the four doctors at Sangyip’s hospital, where Tenzin Choedrak and another physician were to practice Tibetan medicine. With the Party’s blessings, the female physician made it her business to discredit the Tibetan doctors and their practice, hoping to prove that Tibet’s culture held nothing of value. In the summer she insisted that the Tibetan doctors receive their patients in a corner of the hospital porch. While the Chinese physicians occupied heated offices during the winter, the Tibetans were relegated to an unheated storage room, empty save for their one table and a few chairs.

Dr. Choedrak received 28 yuan or $14 a month as salary and only 500 yuan, or $250, with which to purchase the year’s medicines from Mendzekhang. Patients who visited him were afterwards summoned to the woman physician—whether they wished to be or not. Asking for his diagnosis, she then offered her own, whereupon she would bring the patient back to Dr. Choedrak and then to prison officials to denounce his methods. In the meantime, the battle became so heated that the authorities intervened to conduct a systematic survey of the conflicting diagnoses. After months of investigation, they reached a consensus which bestowed an unexpected blessing this time upon both Tenzin Choedrak and Tibetan medicine itself. In a public pronouncement, Chinese officials stated that although Tibetan medicine’s worth had long been doubted by the government, its value was now clear. Mendzekhang, it was decided, was worthy of state funding. Furthermore, under its auspices, a large-scale search for medical texts not destroyed during the Cultural Revolution was to be initiated. Plans for a modern building were drawn up, and a research project in Tibetan medicine, based at Drepung Monastery and headed by Dr. Choedrak, was begun. Dr. Choedrak himself was given the public title “Master Teacher of Tibetan Doctors.” His salary was raised to 53 and then 63 yuan. Moreover, by 1979, his persistence won the right for all Tibetan doctors to issue, on their own authority, work release permits to their patients. Though still based in Utitu, Dr. Choedrak felt that he had crossed a threshold in life. While the Chinese gave no sign that his designation as a class enemy was to be removed, their recognition of his skills was now beyond doubt. A modicum of freedom, at least, was finally his.

AFTER TWELVE YEARS of Chinese rule, Tibet seemed broken: a poverty-ridden police state in which the land, people and even their captors all suffered from a pervasive loss of will. To the Chinese in Tibet, it was plain that the Cultural Revolution had failed. Rather than acting as a magic path to pure Communism, it had destroyed much of the six-year effort to create the TAR. The shining trophy of a socialist paradise seemed further off than ever. To recoup their losses, party planners looked to the 1970s as a period of entrenchment. Tibet would no longer serve as a forge for the creation of the new man; it would simply be required to produce grain and support the army. These now were the unglamorous goals of occupation, and as with all new policies, their implementation began with a reworking of the existing party structure, one tied to similar changes in China proper.

In the summer of 1971, the fourth shift in Communist rule took place in Tibet. This time it was the result of a struggle between Mao Zedong and his designated successor, China’s Minister of Defense, Lin Biao. In an attempt to undercut the power base of the very man he had raised, Mao replaced the military chiefs of the three most important of China’s five autonomous regions: Tibet, Mongolia and Xinjiang. The majority of those involved belonged to Lin Biao’s Fourth Field Army. In Tibet, Zeng Yongya was transferred to the Shenyang Military Region. Ren Rong, who had waited in the wings among thirteen vice-chairmen of the Revolutionary Committee, regained the leading role he had briefly exercised in the 1967 “February adverse current.” Though Ren Rong himself was a Fourth Field Army man, his conservative reputation gained him the spot. To restrict his power, however, another loyal Maoist and ex-leader in Tibet, Chen Mingyi, reappeared for a short while as the commander of the Tibet Military Region. Ren Rong was designated Chairman of the Revolutionary Committee, as well as First Secretary of the TAR’s Party Committee when, in August 1971, five years after the Cultural Revolution had begun, a Communist Party structure was reinstated in Tibet, one of the last to be formed in China. As they had in 1959-65, the Chinese once more had to build a regional Communist Party apparatus to govern Tibet. Four subregional committees were established in 1972. Of 66 seats in the Lhasa Municipality Committee only two were held by Tibetans at the level of secretary; among the 293 office bearers in remaining committees, only 6 were Tibetan. Besides the virtually uneducated people’s activists, the only Tibetan of repute in the country’s administration was Sangay Yeshi, better known by his Chinese name, Tien Bao. Appointed as a secretary of the new regional CCP committee as well as second political commissar of the Tibet Military Command, he eventually succeeded Ren Rong himself in August 1979 as the head of the TAR’s government, if not of its party. His ascendancy was meant finally to convince the world that Tibetans indeed ruled their own affairs. In reality, although he was born in eastern Tibet, he had been a Communist since joining the Long March at the age of eighteen. His wife was Chinese, and he did not even speak Tibetan.

On May 8, 1972, Radio Lhasa announced that a “grand picnic” of Communist youth had been held in the Norbulingka, now called People’s Park. Singing, dancing and games had taken place, signaling a liberalization policy which was intended to assure Tibetan cooperation with the new administration. Two months later, “Four Freedoms,” unheard of since 1959, were officially proclaimed: the freedom to worship, to buy and sell privately, to lend and borrow with interest and to hire laborers or servants. The ban on wearing chubas was lifted, upper-strata collaborators, such as Phakpala Gelek Namgyal, were rehabilitated from the disgrace of the Cultural Revolution and a program to repair the much damaged Tsuglakhang and a few other temples got underway. By the end of the year, a more familiar campaign was being conducted at nightly meetings, entitled “one struggle and three antis.” The struggle was against “counterrevolutionaries”; the three antis excised the very freedoms the liberalization had encouraged, now titled “bourgeois extravagance, capitalistic profit motive and economic waste.”

The year 1974 opened in Tibet with a renewed attack on the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama. While Lin Biao was being vilified in China (following his attempted coup and assassination), a high official arrived in Lhasa shortly after Tibetan New Year’s to address key party members at PLA headquarters. He stated that two dangers still confronted Chinese rule in Tibet: externally, the Dalai Lama in exile, backed by India, and internally, the Tibetan people’s continued admiration of the Panchen Lama for defying Peking. “Jackals of the same lair,” the two Lamas were to be freshly denounced at meetings, traveling dramas and exhibits displaying items such as a rosary of 108 cranial bones, purportedly made from “victims” sacrificed to the Dalai Lama, as well as grenades and machine guns collected by the Panchen Lama for his attempted uprising. The campaign continued into 1975, supplemented by a new effort to woo Tibetan refugees home. Broadcasts on Radio Lhasa, sometimes played sixty times or more, were particularly painful for those relatives who heard them. In a typical case, on June 5, 1976, a Mrs. Youdon of Chamdo read a letter to her brother Jampa in exile. “My dear brother Jampa,” it began.

I am your younger sister, Youdon. We have been separated from each other for eighteen years. You might still remember me as the girl who was fond of singing and dancing. Of all our sisters, I was the one you loved most. We are leading a happy life with good living standards. The whole city has come up with huge buildings, hospitals, general stores, schools, banks, post offices, restaurants and cinema theaters.… In the evening when the bulbs are lighted, long and sweet melodies are played over the loudspeakers.… Brother, you used to be very fond of tongue. I still remember your sending me to buy tongues for you. With the coming of many food industries, many food articles, including tongue, are on sale in the market. If you would like to taste all these once again, you must come back.… Oh, how glad we shall be if you come back to share all our happiness! As our proverb goes, as they grow older birds miss their nests and men their native country.… Brother, believe me, if you want to leave darkness and come to light, then please return and join us. Your family relations, the Communist Party of China and the People’s Government would welcome you and respect you.

Replying to the broadcast in an open letter published in the Tibetan Review, Jampa described his almost trance-like experience on hearing her voice again and remembering the faces of his father and other relatives. He expressed outrage, however, at her being forced to read such a message, a sentiment apparently shared by other exiles, as by 1975—after fifteen years of attempts to lure the refugees back—Radio Lhasa had announced the return of only a handful of Tibetans from abroad.

In 1975, the six-part class division of Tibetan society was revised in yet another attempt to stabilize the country. For four months the nightly meetings, renamed “special meeting on social reforms,” pursued individual interrogation, conducted by special committees, into every Tibetan’s past, from the age of eight. Once compiled, the accounts were read to the meeting for “criticism and evaluation.” Following this, the people were required to classify themselves—a momentous decision, as a poor class designation affected every aspect of life. Anxiety ran high among all, parents in particular worried about the class category given to their children. Eventually eight classes were defined, the two new ones being “those who work hard but not in the country,” that is, city dwellers, and “those who roam around,” prostitutes and pickpockets. “I’ve never been a prostitute or thief in my life,” young people, classed by their parents’ acts, joked among themselves. “But now that I’m officially in the prostitute class, I consider it my duty to go out and be one.”

September 1975 marked the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Tibet Autonomous Region. Given Tibet’s continued instability, it was perhaps no accident that Hua Guofeng, then Minister of Public Security for all China, led the delegation from Peking. For the first time in seven years, Ngabo Ngawang Jigme returned to Tibet. Having flown in just ahead of the delegation, he greeted them for the cameras on their September 6 arrival at the newly built Gonkar Airport south of Lhasa. Three days later 50,000 people assembled on the Lhasa sports ground to hear speeches praising the ten years of the TAR’s existence while condemning the “Dalai cliques’ counterrevolutionary aim of restoring feudalism.” According to Tien Bao, there were indeed many triumphs to extol. Although the region was still rife with “class enemies,” it was alleged that 90 percent of its communes had, from their inception, experienced consecutive years of increased production. In the past decade, grain production had grown by almost 50 percent, livestock by 25 percent. Tibet, it was claimed, had become self-sufficient in 1974—an assertion disputed by a 1979 CIA report as well as refugee accounts. Despite the cultivation of some 46,000 hectares of winter wheat, Tibetans were amply aware that there were still large pockets of famine in the countryside. Nevertheless, the reality of the nation’s poverty had little bearing on the need to show progress in the aftermath of the TAR’s anniversary. As Ngabo Ngawang Jigme commented for a 1976 interview in China Reconstructs, “I am over sixty now, and I have never seen the Tibetan people so happy, in such high spirits, so firm in their determination.… Even our enemies have to admit it. It’s a rare thing in the world for a people to move from an extremely backward feudal serf society to an advanced socialist one in only a quarter of a century, as it has in Tibet.”

The Chinese had, though, experienced some success during the second decade of their rule in Tibet. It lay exclusively in the economic and military spheres. Economically, Peking’s exploitation of the plateau concentrated on forestry and animal husbandry—both of which increased during the seventies. Entire mountainsides in Kham and the low-lying districts of Poyul, Dakpo and Kongpo were denuded, sending what seemed to be an unlimited supply of timber down the great rivers running into Sichuan and Yunnan. Only when devastating floods swept over the mainland in 1981 and 1982 did China realize how foolhardy the wholesale deforestation had been. The slaughter of livestock for hides and meat in Amdo proceeded at an equal pace, though more soberly planned. Expeditions to search for geothermal, mineral and oil wealth were mounted by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which, from 1973 on, dispatched over four hundred specialists to Tibet. Coal and borax, already being mined, were joined by iron, copper, chromium, lithium, tungsten, lead, gold, silver, oil and salt—all, despite their amounting to some 40 percent of China’s verified mineral reserves, taken in minor quantities, due to the difficulty of shipment from remote deposits. By 1980, roughly two hundred factories, double the number of the mid-sixties, were said to be in operation. Small-scale enterprises staffed primarily by Chinese immigrants, they produced sugar, fertilizer, matches, toothpaste, soap, ink, biscuits, blankets, flashlight batteries and agricultural tools. Though hydroelectric stations and road-maintenance crews, stationed every five miles or so, existed across much of the TAR, the Tibetan quarters of large towns received electricity late at night only, after Chinese sections no longer drew heavily on the current; and save for select Tibetan cadres, the newly installed bus system remained exclusively for the use of Han civil and military personnel. Next to Lhasa, with its large cement plant (completed in 1964) and motor repair workshops, Kongpo Nyitri remained the sole industrial area. As with Tibet’s other factories, both its employment opportunities and its products were solely for the use of Chinese settlers, who, for the first time, began arriving in significant numbers.

In 1952 Mao Zedong had stated that 10 million Chinese would eventually settle in Tibet. Before the influx could begin the country had to be stabilized. Until 1966, Tibet was governed by the PLA and a limited number of cadres and technicians. Early Red Guard arrivals brought the first large groups of Chinese civilians to “the Roof of the World,” and these were augmented by the Hsia Fang movement in 1968. On May 16, 1975, Radio Lhasa began announcing the systematic arrival of Chinese settlers. Seven years later, according to the PRC’s 1982 census, their numbers had grown to 96,000. Nonetheless, Tibetan cadres estimated that, including dependents, there were as many as 600,000 in Central Tibet alone—one third of the region’s population. Whatever the precise figure, they were still below Mao’s original hopes.

The most visible effect of Chinese immigration appeared in the “new towns”; cement and corrugated-roofed compounds combining offices and residences that literally surrounded every Tibetan city. From 1970 on, Lhasa’s new town expanded the old city by up to eight square miles, ninety-one new roads bringing the development beyond Sera in the east and Drepung in the west. Though built exclusively by Tibetan labor, only those Tibetan cadres closely associated with the Chinese were permitted access to the new neighborhoods. Here they witnessed a lifestyle far superior to their own. Brought in through the “back door” by pulling strings, the families of officials in Tibet received, in a matter of days, jobs sought after for years by Tibetan workers. With all business, from store receipts to government reports, conducted in Chinese, the newcomers found themselves socially as well as physically insulated. While Tibetans received medical treatment either from “barefoot doctors,” trained for six months in first aid, or, in the case of severe illness, by gaining admittance to Chinese hospitals through bribery, Han settlers received free medical care and medicines. Their children attended special schools, while Tibetan schools were virtually nonexistent. Closed during spring and autumn so that the children could help with field work, those few students who could attend—their parents not requiring the extra work points earned from their labor—were often marshaled during the rest of the year to undertake road repair, cut grass, collect manure and exterminate birds and insects. The only topics studied were the Chinese language, Marxist doctrine and mathematics. But the crucial difference in the living standards of the immigrants was their greater access to rations. Even when supplies were scarce, the Chinese received thirty to thirty-five pounds of rice and flour per month, twice as much as the Tibetans. Furthermore, they had priority in the purchase of all consumer goods, the best item a high-ranking Tibetan cadre could hope to buy being a “Red Flag” transistor radio manufactured in Hupei especially for the Tibetans. To make a three- to four-year tour of duty more acceptable to Chinese technicians, winter leaves were routinely granted, the mainland community in Lhasa visibly depleting at autumn’s end, every plane and bus serving the region arriving empty and departing full.

A side effect of Chinese immigration was the decimation of Tibet’s heretofore strictly protected wildlife. In mass slaughters—reminiscent of the nineteenth-century buffalo hunts in the American West—PLA machine-gunners exterminated, for both food and sport, vast herds of wild ass or kiang. At the same time, Chinese settlers, who were always armed when they traveled in the countryside, hunted to the brink of extinction numerous rare species—including snow leopards, Himalayan monkeys, gazelles, and drongs or wild yaks. When a group of over sixty Western scientists from seventeen nations was finally allowed to tour the region, in May 1980, they saw no large mammals and very few birds. Not even the once endless flocks of bar-headed geese and Brahmani ducks remained.

China’s one unqualified success in Tibet lay with its military. Building roads capable of bearing seven-ton loads had been the army’s major task during the fifties and the first half of the sixties. By 1965, 90 percent of the districts in the TAR were linked; by the early seventies, almost all were joined. Two roads of great strategic value led southward out of Tibet, one to Nepal, the other to Pakistan. Numerous bridges—all-important in Tibet’s many river valleys—complemented the road network.

Its road building completed, the PLA concentrated on transforming Tibet into an impregnable fortress. While the original three provinces were divided among four of the PRC’s eleven military zones, each of the TAR’s seventy-one districts saw the construction of many minor bases and a single major base. They in turn took orders from six regional headquarters, each commanding a 40,000-man division. Lhasa remained the general headquarters for the 500,000 troops in the autonomous region alone, roughly half of whom were deployed on the Himalayan border. Fourteen major airfields, augmented by twenty airstrips, were built exclusively for the military, with only one, Gonkar Airport, south of Lhasa, used for civilians.

The Himalayan front was most critical. Nicknamed “Mao’s Underground Great Wall” by Tibetan refugees, it comprised scores of secret bases, subterranean troop positions and supply depots joined by tunnels, stretching 932 miles all the way across Tibet. At their core lay the all-important Chumbi Valley. Following the 1962 war at least 40,000 troops—one bri—occupied the valley, each village receiving its complement of soldiers, with major installations planned for about twenty of the towns. East of the Chumbi Valley, China’s line of bases faced the NEFA, their rear command located in Chamdo. Westward they stretched 638 miles to Rudok, with the command center for the whole Himalayan front based at Shigatse.

A key unit lay on the northern slope of Mount Everest, near the district headquarters of Dhingri. Early in 1967, a high-ranking team of military officers escorted six scientists to the mountains. After their departure eight days later, a twenty-square-mile zone was sealed off, even Tibetan road workers in the area being replaced by Chinese soldiers. In company with twenty-six PLA officers, half the scientists returned, followed in May 1968 by convoys carrying equipment to Rongbuk Monastery, 15,000 feet up the mountainside. By September large caves in the surrounding hills, their outlets carefully camouflaged from aerial reconnaissance, were reported to be linked by tunnels wide enough for jeeps and trucks to pass one another. Their dimensions were such that whole regiments, according to refugees and Sherpas from Nepal, could be quartered within. More camps were set up on the surface, and by 1970 high ridges in the area began sprouting radar dishes. In 1973 a major radar complex was constructed in Rudok in western Tibet. Indian intelligence confirmed that the technology was designed not just for detecting incoming flights but, more critically, was capable of functioning as tracking stations for both satellites and missiles. The stations were further proof of what India had suspected since 1968: Peking’s decision to locate its major nuclear facility at the very heart of Tibet.

The first report that China was shifting its principal nuclear base from Lop Nor in Xinjiang to Tibet was leaked to the press by Indian intelligence sources in the summer of 1969. In the previous year a gaseous diffusion plant, warhead assembly plant and research labs were said to have been moved to an undisclosed area in Tibet. Lop Nor, despite China’s great manpower in Xinjiang, had apparently been deemed vulnerable to a Soviet assault. Besides Tibet’s added security and protected supply lines, two natural factors combined to work in its favor: the sparse population on the changthang or northern plains made it an ideal test site, and the extensive cloud cover for much of the year would hamper detection by spy planes and observation satellites. In 1970, the French air force periodical Forces Aériennes Francaises confirmed the Indian report, stating that the move had been detected by American satellites, though facilities had been left functioning at Lop Nor, it surmised, to confuse observers. By 1976, the actual site of the transfer was revealed: Nagchuka, 165 miles north of Lhasa on the southern border of Amdo, already a major truck stop on the Xining-Lhasa highway.

Refugee reports soon brought further details to light. The entire county of Amdo Hsien, in which Nagchuka lay, had been declared off limits to both Tibetans and civilian Chinese, with only a few select PLA units permitted to remain. A way-stop called Changthang Kormo, three days by horseback from Nagchuka and previously containing only a single nomad’s dwelling, was turned into a “new town” filled with Chinese workers. Further reports detailed extensive underground work. With the tracking station in Dhingri completed, now clearly in place to support Nagchuka, the western base at Rudok received a number of missiles, whether IRBM or MRBM (the former with a range of 1,500 to 2,500 miles, the latter with one of 400 to 600 miles) was not known. By 1978, Nagchuka was believed to be ready for its own complement of warheads, intelligence experts in India predicting that it would “come to occupy a place of importance rivaled only by the Nevada testing range in the United States.” While the Dalai Lama appealed for Tibet to be left a “nuclear-free zone,” it was not conclusively known whether the new installation had actually tested a weapon (though there was one eyewitness report of a mushroom cloud). By 1980, however, the Hong Kong Times reported the stockpiling of seventy medium-range and twenty intermediate-range missiles at the facility. Thus, New Delhi and twenty major Indian cities, as well as Irkutsk and Soviet population centers in both Central Asia and Siberia, came within range of the nuclear weapons. With Tibet high and secure at 14,000 feet, far above its neighbors, it seemed that the PRC’s dream of transforming the region into its ultimate redoubt had finally been realized. Yet at this very moment, in many ways the climax of all of China’s efforts in Tibet, the country’s fate was once more to be opened to question—this time, ironically, by the Chinese leaders themselves.