In Exile From the Land of Snows (59 page)

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.

1977–1984

O
N
J
ANUARY 8, 1976,
Zhou Enlai died. His demise was followed early in July by that of Chu The and on September 9, Mao Zedong himself passed away, completing, in nine months, a clean sweep of the triumvirate that had ruled China’s Communist Party for almost four decades. Three and a half weeks later, the Peking garrison, led by two of the PLA’s most venerable marshals, moved into the old imperial quarters at night and arrested what was soon to be known as the Gang of Four: the leaders of the extreme left wing of the Party who, under Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, had run the country from behind the mask of an ill and aging Chairman since the death of Lin Biao in 1971. Despite the initial visibility of Mao’s designated successor, Hua Guofeng, within two years Deng Xiaoping, leader of the Party moderates, had effectively assumed power.

To many observers the shift appeared to be merely the inevitable swing of the pendulum—this time from the left back to the right wing of the party—that had pulled China through internal upheaval for thirty years. But to Tibetans, it constituted a far more significant threshold. In the early seventies the Nechung Oracle had predicted a decline in China. A second prophecy stated that Mao’s death would be followed by the rapid dissolution of all that he had built. The successive deaths of the PRC’s top leaders, complemented by the Tangshan earthquake occurring at the end of July less than a hundred miles from Peking and claiming from 150,000 to 800,000 lives (depending on the estimate), signaled to the Tibetans an irrevocable turn in the fate of nations, one, they believed, presaged the end
of an era in China and with it the possibility of a new beginning for Tibet.

The first political indication came the following spring. At the end of April 1977, in a meeting with a Japanese delegation in Peking, Ngabo Ngawang Jigme stated that China “would welcome the return of the Dalai Lama and his followers who fled to India.…” Within little more than a week, Peking permitted older Tibetans in Lhasa to circumambulate both the Lingkhor and the Barkhor on Saka Dawa—the anniversary of Buddha’s birth, enlightenment and death. Soon after, families with relatives abroad were told to invite them home “now that conditions are so good.” The “good conditions” were formalized by Hua Guofeng himself, who in mid-1977 called for a full-fledged revival of Tibetan customs. Local cadres, either unaware of the new policy or simply unwilling to grant such freedoms, introduced instead a new “three antis,” entailing a nationwide wave of mass executions. Before other mixed signals could occur, the Dalai Lama replied to China’s confused but clearly concilatory moves. In comments made to the Indian press during a trip to greet the newly elected Janata Party in New Delhi, he stated that the problem of Tibet was not that of his or the exiles’ cause alone, but the happiness of all the Tibetan people. If they did not feel “happy and satisfied,” he pointed out, there was no possibility of his returning. If he were to venture home before his country’s plight was remedied, he added humorously, “the Tibetans themselves might push me out.”