In Exile From the Land of Snows (44 page)

Golmo, taken over in 1964 by the Public Security Bureau for Tibet, had already been in service as a prison camp for Chinese and Tibetans from Amdo. It represented one of China’s most important mass-labor enterprises—a railroad linking Tibet and the far northwest with the mainland. Much of the Communists’ success in absorbing Xinjiang had depended on the railroad connecting it to Langzhou. Tibet’s own railroad was viewed as the key to defending China’s southwestern frontier against India, as well as to stabilizing the country and eventually exploiting its natural resources. The landscape though, 10,000 feet above sea level at the heart of Asia, was cold and arid, with gale-force winds blowing up to seventy days of the year, vast stretches without water, and six months of full winter. At the eastern end of the region was the immense Kokonor or Blue Lake, favorite camping spot of Mongol tribes for centuries and considered by Tibetans as the northern boundary of Amdo.

Hundreds of prisoners from the Norbulingka were transported in convoys 600 miles northeast to Golmo in September and October 1959. Within two years, they were joined by thousands more. Though it was in the Communists’ interests to keep them alive, they apparently lacked the ability to do so. Worked twelve hours a day on starvation rations, with no medical treatment and insufficient clothing against the cold, huge numbers died in the first few years alone.

At the same time, in Tsala Karpo, a dry lake bed at the heart of the
changthang
northwest of Lhasa, other prisoners were set to work digging for borax. Here, as in the Golmo region, water had to be trucked in daily; the ground was so barren there weren’t even stones for cooking fires—iron tripods were used to support the pots—and the climate was scarcely tolerable. Prisoners shoveled borax, found in white, red, blue and yellow lumps, out of the lake bed. Sometimes deposits were a yard down; at other times holes the height of a house had to be opened. The original 500 Chinese guards informed the prisoners that a truckful of borax was more precious than one of silver dollars; accordingly, they worked hundreds to death, by forcing labor from dawn to sunset daily and providing only the worst grade of barley flour mixed with sawdust as rations. On Sundays, contingents were sent on a six-hour trek to a grassy region where sticks could often be found. Each group was to gather seven and a half pounds of firewood before returning at dusk. These trips afforded the sole opportunity for escape. With a small supply of food, some borrowed clothes and the assistance of nomads, it was possible to reach southwestern Tibet and, from there, Nepal. After a rash of escapes, the Chinese temporarily relaxed
their policies, suspended
thamzing
and the indoctrination meetings in which it was conducted, held each night till midnight. When this had no result, though, the meetings were resumed, and a stricter watch was kept on the wood-collecting trips. There was, however, an added risk to the security of Tsala Karpo, that of the organized guerrilla forces under Chushi Gangdruk, still—a full year after March 1959—fighting the Chinese deep in the interior.

Hundreds of guerrilla bands remained active in Tibet long after the suppression of the Lhasa revolt. While the number of major battles decreased as the guerrillas were isolated from the villages they used for support, ambushes of PLA convoys continued intermittently. Besides Lhoka, the main theater of combat lay in a zone above Lhasa where southern Amdo, northwestern Kham and the
changthang
met. Here, large groups, cut off from escape routes through Central Tibet, fought major battles for a full three years following the revolt. The Goloks, a nomadic warrior tribe from Amdo numbering over 100,000, were particularly stubborn. Their name meant “Backwards Heads,” or rebel—which they had always been, mainly against the central government in Lhasa. They had fought fiercely from as early as 1952, waging guerrilla campaigns in which large numbers of Chinese had died. By the time the revolt erupted in Central Tibet, they still had not been crushed. Though both they and the other “wild men” of Tibet, the Khampas, were hampered by limited supplies, catching them, in the rugged and trackless countryside, was not so simple. Once a guerrilla band was located, the Chinese, equipped with machine guns, mortars and field artillery, would attack its camp in the middle of the night, or at dawn, and the massacres that resulted were characteristic of the fighting all across Tibet, just as the stand at the Norbulingka had been. But despite the Tibetans’ massive losses, combat continued. In December 1964, almost five years after the uprising’s official suppression, General Zhang Guohua noted publicly that “the feudal lords have not been eliminated; they are resentful of their defeat and attempt to regain power by all means.” Almost a year later, he again referred to internal turmoil by stating: “The people can thoroughly smash the reactionary administration of the feudal lords only by carrying out resolute struggle, especially armed struggle.”

Covert resistance as well hampered China’s assimilation of Tibet. Peking claimed that both the Democratic Reforms and the “rechecking” of those reforms (a euphemism for a second wave of mass arrests) had in the main been completed by the end of 1961, but they had not. On April 2, 1961, Radio Lhasa assured Tibetans that they would remain at the stage of “democratic revolution” for a further five years before socialization began
in earnest. Completing the Democratic Reforms—as well as all the other policies on which the rudiments of civil administration depended—was relegated to a non-military bureaucracy comprised of Tibetan and Han cadres alike. As the hierarchy came into place, reforms could often be carried out only at gunpoint, with PLA support. Yet the army was primarily engaged initially in destroying the remaining groups of freedom fighters and later in the 1962 border war with India. Furthermore, the universal social leveling sought by the reforms was only the first of two steps necessary before the Tibet Autonomous Region could be inaugurated. While the population was reduced to a classless state, it also had to be organized in collectives. This first stage in socialization—beginning around Lhasa with the Mutual Aid Teams (MATs) in mid-1959—was crucial to stabilizing the region. Without it, higher degrees of collectivization—including centralized control and increased production for the state—could not be achieved. It was a time-consuming task, matched only by that of creating the veneer of self-government, a cardinal component of Chinese policy pursued to demonstrate that Tibet had attained political emancipation. But though general elections were officially discussed by PCART in August 1961, the actual Election Committee could not be installed until a year later, the rules for the election were not passed for another several months, and once they were enacted it took more than two and a half years to carry them out, the longest election period of any region in the People’s Republic.

Meanwhile, as the
People’s Daily
and the New China News Agency heralded the “new socialist paradise on the Roof of the World,” Lhasa found itself glossed over with new names to create in illusion what could not as yet be produced in reality. The city’s thoroughfares became Great Leap Forward Street, Liberation Street, Victory Street, Happy Street. In reality, the more than three hundred shops that surrounded the Central Cathedral in the Barkhor were now all closed. The marketplace was empty and even the best-kept buildings showed signs of the decay—peeling mortar, chronically leaking roofs, and rotting woodwork—which would, within a few years, reduce the Tibetan quarter of Lhasa to a slum. Just outside town, Chokpori Hill, where the medical college had been razed during the fighting in March 1959, sprouted radio antennas and artillery emplacements as it grew into an important military installation and ammunition dump linked by underground tunnel to the Yuthok Bridge more than a mile distant. At the Panchen Lama’s insistence, those portions of the Tsuglakhang, Ramoché, Potala and Norbulingka that had been damaged in the 1959 shelling had their facades repaired, while according to Chinese needs, many of their interiors were put to a new use as granaries,
meeting halls and military barracks guarded by detachments of PLA. With most monks imprisoned in labor camps or returned to the countryside, the “three seats” of Drepung, Sera and Ganden maintained only skeleton crews of aged caretakers. The Tsuglakhang remained open until 1966, and on Wednesdays—considered an auspicious day—Lhasans rose before dawn to offer incense and prayers at the Central Cathedral and at Bhumpari Hill across the river. Prayer flags were still made and displayed but except for these small reminders of the old life, the daily routine of the capital’s citizens was unremittent labor. Building the “new town,” the administrative center for the new rule, was the order of the day. To this end, the whole city was marshaled into labor gangs. For lifting rocks and dirt, women and able-bodied men—many of whom were released from prison a few months following the uprising—were paid between 1.2 and 1.7 yuan daily, or roughly 60 to 85 cents. People with “bad” class designations received a maximum of 40 cents a day. But more often, work was denied them and their children. “In short,” as the Panchen Lama stated in his report to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress in December 1960, “a wonderful situation prevails in Tibet today. Prosperous scenes of labor and production are found in every corner of the vast countryside and the towns. This is the main trend of our work in Tibet.”

“Prosperous scenes” did indeed exist in the countryside, though the Tibetans were hardly the beneficiaries. In the first years after the revolt, agricultural production increased dramatically—the result of the Mutual Aid Teams, the embryonic form of collectivization from which full-fledged communes would be built. The teams themselves were of two kinds, seasonal and permanent, with the latter gradually supplanting the former. Seasonal teams were generally comprised of from seven to ten families who shared for a season the work of sowing, cultivation and harvesting on one another’s land and then disbanded. Permanent teams pooled labor and land, but held property, tools and draft animals in common as well. The seasonal teams were in many ways typical of perennial village farming methods in Tibet, and thus represented no implicit threat to traditional Tibetan society. But again, in no case were “class enemies” permitted to join. They were generally issued the worst bit of land in the neighborhood, occasionally given a single draft animal for plowing and told to till it on their own.

In the summer of 1959, 4,741 MAT teams were reported to have been formed in four secure regions. By the next summer, more than 15,000 had been founded; by 1964, there were 22,000 for farmers and 4,000 for nomads. Besides leaving “no arable land idle,” the teams embarked on massive irrigation projects, built dams and reservoirs, collected human and animal
waste as fertilizer and planted a second and even third crop where only one had been sown before. Bumper harvests were reaped. That of 1959 showed a 10 to 20 percent increase over the previous year. A further 15 to 20 percent increase was set as the production target for 1960. By 1961, cultivated land had expanded by 22.5 percent. By 1964, grain output was claimed to be 45 percent above that prior to the Democratic Reforms, and the number of livestock had increased by 36 percent. The Tibetan people’s reaction to these miraculous increases in producton was described as one of pure ecstasy, the “million serfs who stood up” now “celebrating with songs and dances” their “enthusiasm for production” being “unprecedentedly high.” But in reality, in every corner of Tibet, save perhaps Ngari in the far west—still beyond stringent Chinese influence—Tibetans were starving to death by the thousands.

The source of the famine lay not in Tibet but in China. Harvests had been poor, and the Great Leap Forward had led to a schism with the Soviet Union, which had cut off its shipments of grain. As a result, 1959 was the first of the three “lean years” in which millions all across China perished from hunger. To feed them, Tibet’s crop was no sooner harvested than it was taken from the Tibetans and either consumed by the PLA or shipped to the mother country. This was the most immediate and pressing purpose of Tibet’s socialization: to create a bread basket for the starving People’s Republic.

Given the situation in China, the compulsory formation of MATs in Tibet was tantamount to the creation of forced-labor gangs. Ration cards were distributed to one and all—on which were recorded vital statistics for the Public Security Bureau, such as the number of people in each household, their age, sex and relation—and the monthly grain ration was set at 22 pounds per person. This represented a decrease by two thirds in the average Tibetan’s diet. With travel almost completely banned, the population in the countryside hoarded wild vegetables; those in the cities—deprived now of the free markets on which they had subsisted—were even worse off, receiving as little as 18 pounds of grain per month. Horror stories abounded. People ate cats, dogs, and insects. Parents fed dying children their own blood mixed with hot water and
tsampa
. Other children were forced to leave home to beg on the roads and old people went off to die alone in the hills. Thousands of Tibetans took to eating the refuse thrown by the Chinese to the pigs each Han compound kept, while those around PLA outposts daily pieced apart manure from the soldiers’ horses, looking for undigested grain. Even for Tibetan cadres, normally better fed than the population at large, meat and butter were unavailable, salt and black tea being the sole supplement to barley grain.

The famine lasted through 1963. By then tens of thousands had died from starvation all across Tibet. When it lifted, it did so only to the extent that the meanest conditions necessary for survival could be maintained. Until the next severe famine—which struck in 1968 and lasted through 1973—every available commodity was scrupulously rationed. In Lhasa, one of the worst-hit areas in Central Tibet, each family was issued a single candle per month, 250 grams of tea and 10.8 grams of sugar. Phari, one of Tibet’s most prosperous towns—a center for trade with India, Sikkim and Bhutan—remained, owing to its delicate position close to the border, at the opposite end of the scale. Here, a man classified as a “strong worker” could draw as much as 30 pounds of barley a month; weak workers drew 26 pounds; old and infirm, 20 pounds; children from eleven to seventeen years old, 15 pounds; children under six, 5 pounds. When they were available, butter, oil, sugar, tea, gasoline, five packs of cigarettes a month, up to six boxes of matches and 10.5 meters of cloth rounded out the list of goods available to these most prosperous Tibetans. Even in Phari though, the dearth of goods reduced the norm by two thirds, resulting in numerous cases of starvation. Each day scores of families could be seen going from house to house with
tsamba
bags, either borrowing or repaying grain. Soon this flow of empty-handed people took on a melancholy name, “the tide of emptiness.” Conscripted into labor gangs, in this case without pay, the people of Phari vented their sufferings in songs, one of which concerned a water mill constructed to grind grain for the Chinese: