In Exile From the Land of Snows (58 page)

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.

A
FTER 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.

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.