In Exile From the Land of Snows (53 page)

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:

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.