In Exile From the Land of Snows (50 page)

By the autumn of 1962, only 300 inmates remained in Jiuzhen. A rumor began to spread that some men had arrived from Lhasa. On September 28, the announcement was officially made: “Now you have been well educated,” a Chinese official said to the twenty-one Tibetan survivors lined up before him. “So we have decided to let you return to your home. And look,” he continued, holding up a rubberized oxygen pillow of the kind used by the Chinese in Tibet, “we have gone to great effort on your account and spent a good deal of money. We’ve bought five such bags at twenty yuan each so that you will not die on the high passes on the road. You will be given a holiday until your departure. Now wash yourselves and clean up,” he advised. “But don’t damage your bedding. Don’t tear it or burn it. It has to stay here.”

For the entire week excitement and doubt gripped the prisoners until, the night before their announced departure, an officer arrived with new suits for them to wear, sewn together from the clothing of prisoners who had died. The cotton padding had been redistributed smoothly, then covered over with a fresh piece of rough linen. Jiuzhen’s authorities, it seemed, cared a good deal about the Tibetans’ appearance now that they were to be released into the custody of other guards.

At eight o’clock in the morning of October 5, 1962, a canvas-covered army truck was driven into the prison yard. Carrying small bundles, the Tibetans marched to the truck, where the weakest were helped up by the stronger. As they left, the prison staff bade them farewell: “Now that you’re finally going home,” they called out, waving vigorously, “look after your health and take good care of yourselves.” Incredulous, the Tibetans replied through their translator, “Thank you so much. And we promise to do as you say.” Then, as the engine started, they cursed under their breath, and with that, waving and cursing, they were driven through the gate, on their way out of China.

F
IFTEEN DAYS AFTER
Dr. Choedrak’s release from Jiuzhen Prison, the 1962 Sino-Indian border war broke out. For China it represented the greatest dividend to date from the years of effort expended in Tibet. Following 1959 the PLA had hurried to consolidate its position for an eventual strike on India, a move Peking viewed as essential to its drive to
assert military and thereby political dominance over Central Asia. Accomplished exclusively with forced Tibetan labor, a network of roads was created linking the PLA’s three forward headquarters in Chamdo, Shigatse and Rudok, in the Himalayan border regions. Once the roads were in place, observation posts, airfields, bases and supply dumps all had to be carefully built at night and with the utmost secrecy. As readiness for the attack was stepped up, thousands of Tibetans from southern and western Tibet were conscripted to supplement local workers by carrying supplies. Simultaneously, those left behind were told in nightly meetings that India had occupied the very best regions in Tibet making it the PLA’s sacred duty to regain them for the people. Reinforcements of men and ammunition now arrived from China, and with them came a further drain on the Tibetan economy, the greater portion of the harvest being diverted to feed the newly arrived troops. But the most ruthless aspect of the war occurred for Tibetans after the fighting started. Blood donations became compulsory and though 3,000 or so Indian prisoners were captured, it was soon obvious from the extent of the blood drive that the Chinese themselves had not been immune from losses. In as many areas as it could be mounted, the policy required Tibetans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five to give one and a half times the amount of blood normally taken. Chief donors were those labeled as “class enemies”; the Chinese themselves were exempted. At the start, it had been claimed that all who voluntarily came forward would receive twenty-five yuan (or roughly $12.50), a half pound of butter and a full pound of meat. When no Tibetans volunteered, however, large numbers were forcibly subjected to blood donations. As a result, many already on the verge of death from starvation perished. Only token Tibetan cadres received the promised gifts. Both human and animal blood was stored in Lhasa at a newly built blood bank at Dohdun, northeast of the Potala, to which many of the more serious Chinese casualties were eventually transported from the front.

While blood extraction was one of the grimmer campaigns of the early 1960s, sterilization and the forced marriage of Tibetan women to Chinese soldiers were considered by many to be even more threatening. As the “leading elements of the masses,” Tibetan cadres were the first to be sterilized, at the Lhasa Municipal People’s Hospital, constructed in 1952 as a “research and training center for medical science and medical cadres of minorities nationalities.” To sterilize as many people as possible, novice Chinese still in medical training routinely operated on Tibetan patients. Many cadres, both male and female, who underwent the operations emerged paralyzed below the waist or having lost control of their bladder.
A number, admitted to the hospital for unrelated conditions, discovered that during surgery they had also been sterilized. Witnessing such results, Tibetans henceforth resisted sterilization. But while this method of population control was gradually phased out, the considerably more widespread practice of inducing Tibetan women to marry Chinese soldiers was launched. (Tibetan men were strictly barred from marrying Chinese women.) In the early 1960s almost all of China’s occupation troops continued to be those soldiers who had arrived with the original invasion force in 1950. Young men at the time, they had been granted no leave in over a decade and were now approaching middle age without families. It was convenient to bolster the troops’ morale by encouraging them to marry Tibetan women, but it was also an obvious boon to Peking’s overall policy of assimilation, as any offspring would be raised as Chinese. Broad inducements—including cooking utensils, extra food and clothing rations—were offered to all Sino-Tibetan couples, and under the desperate circumstances, quite a few such marriages occurred. In secret many Tibetans condemned those who had collaborated in what appeared to be a blatant attempt to dilute the race. Publicly, though, the stigma went the other way. A common Chinese expression, often said on hearing of the birth of a Tibetan child, was: “The crows in the sky are all black. There are no white ones,” meaning that only Chinese babies would be “white” crows, or good signs.

Following the 1962 war the Indian-Tibetan border, together with its support zones, remained on constant alert. In Mustang, Chushi Gangdruk had regrouped and accelerated the pace of its attacks. The PLA, faced with a hostile, if temporarily cowed, Indian army, was deeply concerned about the guerrillas. In addition, despite the tightly sealed border, hundreds of Tibetans continued to escape during the summer months bringing with them tales of suffering under the Chinese. In July of 1964 PCART formulated a policy, announced in large posters hung in Tibet’s major towns, to cope with the problem: Tibetans who returned from India, and those guerrillas who gave themselves up, were to be richly rewarded; cash prizes specified for each type of weapon as well as the number of extra people brought in. Radio Lhasa continually broadcast pleas delivered by the families of those who had escaped, begging them to return to the “socialist paradise.” Agents filtered through the Tibetan communities in Kalimpong, Darjeeling and Nepal, wooing the destitute refugees with promises of prosperity at home. A few did return. The most prominent of these was Dorje Phagmo, Tibet’s highest female
tulku
, or incarnate lama, who was immediately conscripted into the “upper strata” United Front. But there
were not many others. Meanwhile, concerned families in Tibet were informed that they were responsible for inducing their relatives to return and would be punished unless they succeeded. A newly coined Chinese proverb was often quoted to bring the point home: “The lama might escape, but his monastery cannot.”

Four more policies covering the years 1962-1964 led up to the founding of the Tibet Autonomous Region. The first, “Rechecking the Democratic Reforms,” began as early as 1960 and continued for years throughout the countryside. “Rechecking” amounted to ascertaining whether or not all reactionaries and “class enemies” had indeed been ferreted out in the reforms themselves. The natural corollary was the creation of a separate prison and labor camp system for Tibet, comprised of four levels, under the jurisdiction of the Public Security Bureau in Lhasa. So many reactionaries were found that quotas were established though, according to Tibetan sources, never carried out, limiting the number of arrests to no more than 5 percent of the local population. Concerned about Tibetans fleeing abroad, a second policy, commonly known as “Go Easy,” was adopted. This included a ninety-six-point program issued in 1962-63 for all of Tibet, ten points of which applied especially to the sensitive border area, where greater personal freedom, tax exemption and higher rations were all instituted. In 1963-64 came the third and fourth policies, entitled the “Three Big Educations” and the “Four Cleanlinesses.” The first Big Education was “Class-Consciousness Education.” The middle class was now divided into “upper” and “lower” middle class. Being placed in the “upper” category was tantamount to receiving a bad class designation. It brought
thamzing
and frequently imprisonment. Concurrently, the “lower” middle class and the poor were given “thought classification”—all those having old or reactionary thoughts receiving the same treatment as class enemies. As a result, every strata of Tibetan society was found to be rife with
logchoepas
, or reactionaries—there being scarcely any group left intact save the Chinese and their collaborators, to represent the “broad masses serving as the revolutionary vanguard.” The second Big Education was called “Socialist Transformation Education.” In theory, this meant “destroying selfishness to establish unselfishness.” It was aimed at breaking down the last resistance to MATs and increased collectivization. The third one, “Scientific Technical Education,” was a propaganda drive designed to introduce communes. It consisted of creating a few prototype showpiece communes supplied with modern equipment, fertilizer, seeds and tools. The final campaign, the Four Cleanlinesses—of Thought, History, Politics and Economics—set forth the party line on correct interpretations
of Tibet’s history—arguing, for instance, that Tibet had always been an integral part of China.

Tibetan cadres were responsible for implementing this turbulent stream of policies on the grass-roots level. During the early to mid-sixties, the number of the best-trained workers stood between 6,000 and 10,000; by the end of the eighties, approximately 80,000 Tibetans were working for the Chinese, 30,000 having been trained in China itself. These were the cream of the crop—Tibetan children who had often voluntarily left their homes in the mid-fifties, lured by the modern world in its Chinese manifestation, eager to see a land where “no one had to walk” and the roads “shone like mirrors.” Brought into the burgeoning network of China’s Nationalities Institutes, they were trained as a fifth column to eventually replace the “upper strata” indigenous leaders who had to be used for the time being. On them, China placed its greatest hope.

Throughout the 1950s, the Peking Institute of National Minorities, located on the western side of the city led sixteen other academies attended by Tibetans, most of which were located in western China. Constructed on an ancient graveyard, its monolithic dormitories, auditorium and class buildings, brightly fringed with flower gardens, pine and willow trees, offered a curriculum which, though including science, mathematics and, in the early days, painting and music, concentrated largely on learning Chinese language and Marxist ideology. Local folk songs and dances were encouraged. Caucasian students from Xinjiang were permitted to wear their native garb, and on special occasions Tibetan students, too, were provided with new
chubas.
Social life at the Institute was active and varied, punctuated by frequent field trips around Peking, visits to the planetarium, the zoo and the Forbidden City; on Saturday evenings, films were shown, and a wide variety of novel sports were offered, including soccer, basketball and track and field. So, for a while, these young Tibetans found pride in their roles and looked forward to their eventual return home as leaders under the new order in Tibet.

Following the reversal in 1957 of the liberal Hundred Flowers Movement—in which Mao had encouraged intellectuals to openly criticize the Party—the CCP itself destroyed its own best hope for a successful minorities policy. The “anti-rightist” campaign which ensued saw every vestige of liberality at the Peking Institute crushed. With the radical left line in ascendancy, the first wave of
thamzing
fell on the students. The principal of the Institute, Phi Shadong, was singled out as a “capitalist-roader”; posters were hung in the dining halls, classrooms and dormitories denouncing the liberal methods of his “petty-bourgeois administration” and
accusing its adherents, in a new and frighteningly vehement tone, of being “pigs fed by the people,” having “human bodies but a snake’s head” and being “divorced from the masses.” Excursions, dancing and the practice of religion were forbidden. To create a proletarian lifestyle, monthly stipends were cut by three quarters, new clothes were no longer issued, food was strictly rationed and the students were forced by “activist” cadres of the Communist Youth League to criticize themselves for everything from wearing pointed shoes and pants that fit too tightly to having gone to movies or plays in the past. As the repression worsened, whatever sympathies young Tibetans had for Communism were destroyed, and replaced by their antithesis: underground organizations. Using sports teams and the bands as their cover, groups such as the “Ear” and “Nose” Society hung posters denouncing the administration with its own Marxist terminology. In other minority schools as well, similar groups took shape—sometimes not even in secret—as in the case of the Gansu Nationalities Institute, where fifty-two Chinese and eighteen Tibetans died in open clashes during the early sixties. In Peking, though, members of the underground were soon uncovered and subjected to a bloody round of
thamzing
held in the Institute’s dining hall. As the Great Leap Forward got underway in 1958, fleshed out by a campaign to oppose “local nationalism” among the minority students, an estimated 60 percent of the Tibetans at the Institute were given
thamzing
—a number of them dying at the hands of their friends in the process.