In Exile From the Land of Snows (63 page)

Recalling the wreckage in the Kalsang Phodrang, Lobsang Samten left the official reception and contrary to an understanding with the Chinese—never to make a public speech—strode to the palace’s front steps to address the crowd.

Thousands of Tibetans had jammed into the flagstone yard in front of the building. A single line of police, their arms interlocked, held them back, while plainclothes cadres filmed and took notes. The moment Lobsang Samten appeared, the crowd started to chant, “Long live the Dalai Lama!” A man waving a stick with a white scarf tied to its end pushed
forward crying, “This scarf is for you from the people of Tibet.” On accepting it, Samten gestured for silence and then began to speak. “His Holiness the Dalai Lama misses you,” he said. “And he knows how you have suffered. We hope that one day he will come to see you. In the meantime, we are here to view the progress that has been made as well as the mistakes. Whatever we do, when we return to His Holiness we will report the truth.”

Lobsang Samten walked inside, and as he did, hundreds of Tibetans broke through the police cordon and stormed the building. Seeing them, he ignored the Chinese officials within who, terrified, forbade him to go back out, and immediately rejoined the gathering. Ten young men linked arms to protect him from the commotion. In their midst he spent the next five hours walking back and forth across the Jewel Park. Several times, the whole group was inadvertently pushed over, once waist-deep into a pond. “It was so chaotic that I only managed to sit down and picnic with people in a few spots,” Lobsang Samten remembered. “When I did, after only a few minutes of polite conversation, the people’s real feelings would pour out and they would start to cry uncontrollably. I’d try to get up to move on, and they would beg me to stay. Then they’d insist that we all have just one dance. So, for a little while, everyone, old men, women and children would join arms and try to do a few of our own Tibetan steps, laughing, singing, crying and dancing all at once.”

Halfway through the afternoon, a voice in the crowd called out, “Lobsang! Dr. Tenzin Choedrak is here. He’s looking for you.” In the next moment Dr. Choedrak appeared and the two men met each other for the first time since the mid-fifties. “You must be very tired” is all Dr. Choedrak said. It was he, though, as Lobsang Samten recalled, who looked “half dead.” Having asked the Chinese to find the doctor, Lobsang Samten now resolved to test their sincerity by requesting that Tenzin Choedrak be permitted to leave Tibet and come to India.

A few days after October 1, the delegates were informed of something else that had happened that day. Carried away by the excitement, a fifty-six-year-old woman named Tsering Lhamo, the wife of one of the Norbulingka’s gardeners and a mother of seven, had yelled, “Tibet is independent!” Arrested on the spot, she had been taken to a commune hall in southern Lhasa and held for three days. Between interrogation sessions, she was brought before the six hundred people in her neighborhood and given
thamzing.
Despite the beatings, she persistently said that her words were not an act of defiance but merely a simple mistake. Seeing Lobsang Samten standing on the steps of the Takten Mingyur, she was sure that he would soon be followed by the Dalai Lama and with him would come
Tibet’s independence. She had only called out what she believed was obvious to all. Her account failed to satisfy the Chinese. Determined to make an example of Tsering Lhamo, the Public Security Bureau threw her in prison, where, according to many accounts, she was tortured with electric shock. “As soon as we heard this,” related Lobsang Samten, “we decided that there was no point in going on with our trip. We realized that our presence could only bring trouble for these poor people. That day, we did not go out. We canceled all our plans and told Mr. Kao that we wished to return as soon as possible to Peking and from there to India.” Fearful of the consequences of cutting the trip short, Mr. Kao swiftly secured the woman’s release. By way of explanation he stated that hers was a “very serious case”; her arrest had occurred “because the people themselves demanded it.”

On October 6, the delegation arrived at Shigatse, Tibet’s second largest city. Shigatse, however, was empty. The entire city, save for a few frightened and infirm old people, had been sent to the fields before dawn. The same held true for Sakya, the next stop, and then Gyantse as well. It was only as the delegates were making their way out of the country, through the less closely administered mountainous areas of Kham, that they were able to meet people freely once more. Lobsang Samten recalled one incident in particular on this final stage of the journey. “One day we stopped in a small village for lunch,” he related. “A crowd gathered before the guest house, but Chinese guards kept them out. We were waiting to eat when a young Tibetan man somehow got in the door. He was very young, about twenty, and very strongly built. A great robust fellow—a real Khampa—bare-chested, in a sheepskin robe, with long hair. He didn’t give a damn about the Chinese. He walked right past them up to our table, stopped and just stared at me. He was trembling violently all over. Then he burst into tears. Tears, I mean, were just rolling out of his eyes. I tried to console him. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I know how you feel.’ He didn’t say a word. He squeezed my hands tightly, stared at me, then just turned around and walked out.”

Leaving Tibet in the first week of November, the delegation flew from Chengdu to Peking, where they spent ten days meeting with high-ranking officials in both the Great Hall of the People and the Minority People’s Hall. During the discussions, those in charge of the new relations with the Tibetan exiles candidly asked the delegates what they thought of conditions in Tibet. “We decided beforehand that there was no use in antagonizing the situation by telling the whole truth,” recalled Lobsang Samten. “But we did say that Tibet was much poorer now than it had ever been in the past. ‘Education, health care, decent housing and employment, these
things don’t exist,’ we told them. ‘Your people don’t even speak the language—and they treat the Tibetans very badly,’ ‘Yes, yes,’ they replied. ‘It’s all true. We are sorry. In the future we promise to improve conditions.’ I couldn’t believe it. I was so angry. They have done such terrible things in our country. So many atrocities for so many years. What could the Chinese possibly do to compensate for our tragedy? Finally I said, ‘We have been very upset by what we saw but now it’s finished. In the future, these things will be discussed directly between His Holiness and Peking. We will wait and see what happens.’ ”

Flying to New Delhi via Hong Kong, the delegation returned to Dharamsala on December 21, 1979. They brought with them eleven hours of film, seven thousand letters written to relatives in exile, countless requests for the Dalai Lama to mention personal names in his prayers and a number of rare scriptures and relics secretly preserved during the destruction of the monasteries. They were met, though, by a somewhat confused, if expectant mood. To forestall a potentially divisive debate, their departure five months before had been kept strictly secret. The highest policy-making organ of the exile government, the National Working Committee, had been informed of the journey only a day before the group left Dharamsala. Two days later, on August 3, the Cabinet released a carefully worded circular, stating that, other than assessing “true conditions in Tibet,” the delegation had no “authority to decide any issue.” Despite this, fears of a sellout to China, mixed with indignation at the undisclosed departure, resulted in hundreds of letters pouring into Thekchen Chöling, most begging the Dalai Lama himself not to go to Peking.

The Tibetan leader, however, had already left India late in July on a trip to Europe and the United States, having visited the U.S.S.R. and Mongolia a month before. Undoubtedly, the specter of a Soviet-backed pan-nationalities front, led by the Dalai Lama, troubled Peking, just as did the renewed publicity Tibet received as the Dalai Lama toured Asia and the West. Yet, while applying pressure in this manner, Tenzin Gyatso, on receiving the delegation’s report after their return, refused to release its condemnatory findings to the world press, believing that to do so would only cause Peking to curtail its liberalization and harm the Tibetans themselves. Instead, the Dalai Lama, on March 10, 1980, called for China to accept exile youth as teachers in Tibet, a step designed to broaden the growing contact. Though no response was forthcoming, it was announced in April that a second delegation would visit Tibet. It was to leave in May, to be followed by a third group a month later. Meanwhile, as a two-hour film showing crowds of destitute people, destroyed monasteries, and small children working in labor gangs circulated refugee settlements, the controversy
over the value of “delegation diplomacy” paled, even the Youth Congress declaring its support for the government so long as it settled for nothing less than full independence in future negotiations.

In Tibet, the Chinese spent the winter of 1980 busily preparing for the next delegation’s visit. On April 15, meetings were held identifying members of the second delegation as “agents of the Dalai’s false government” whose mission it was to advocate Tibetan independence. Tibetans were forbidden to meet with them. If they were encountered by accident, the people were not to smile, cry, shake hands, stand up if seated, remove their hats, offer scarves or invite them to their homes. The
logchoepas
, it was said, would hand out “independence badges,” small medals bearing the Tibetan flag. These should be thrown on the ground and stamped on. Pamphlets were then issued, outlining approved answers to questions the visitors might ask, while party cadres were given a crash course in Tibet’s history as an integral part of China.

On May 22, CCP General Secretary Hu Yaobang, accompanied by Vice-Premier Wan Li, paid a visit to Tibet, the highest-ranking officials ever to come there in thirty years of Chinese occupation. During an inspection tour, Hu publicly expressed shock at the Tibetans’ living conditions. As a result, Ren Rong lost his post as the regional CCP’s First Secretary and was replaced by Yin Fatang, another military man who had been in Tibet since the arrival of the first occupation forces in 1950. A two-year six-point plan, intended to revitalize the area, was then announced. In it, withdrawal of 85 percent of the Chinese settlers was promised, as well as tax exemption, the right to engage in private enterprise and the lifting of the requirement to plant winter wheat instead of the more successful but, for the Chinese, unappetizing native barley.

In contrast to these conciliatory gestures, last-minute preparations to discourage public displays were carried out. Police in Lhasa and other major cities received shipments of arms, manacles and electric stunning equipment. Tibetan collaborators, posing as Khampas, attempted to rekindle regional animosities in a series of brawls staged in the Barkhor. Permission to consume alcohol was granted for the first time since 1959, it apparently being a local party officer’s hope that the Tibetans would become too inebriated to care about the visit. Finally, on the eve of the second delegation’s arrival, the case of Tsering Lhamo, the woman who had advocated Tibetan independence at the Norbulingka, was brought up at nightly meetings. As soon as the first delegation had departed, she had been thrown back in prison, where, it was now disseminated, she had been turned into “a vegetable” from electric shock. The names of those who had greeted the first delegation were on file, it was said; if they appeared again,
they could expect a similar fate after the delegations had left. “The clouds of summer float by,” stated Han cadres—quoting an old Tibetan proverb—“but the sky stays where it is forever.” “The frog lives in the well all year round while the white crane comes briefly and then flies away.”

In the first week of May the second delegation arrived in Peking. Unlike the first delegation, they were lodged in civilian quarters. Nonetheless, on their first major outing they were taken to a large field in the capital’s suburbs to witness a military parade. For an hour and a half tanks rolled in formation past the reviewing stand, wheeled around and engaged in mock battle. The point was not missed. As Tenzin Tethong, head of the Office of Tibet in New York and the group’s leader, put it, “It was obvious that the Chinese wanted to intimidate us, but in reality, I think we threatened them.” Comprised of the Dalai Lama’s representatives in the United States, Japan and Switzerland, the head of the Tibetan community in Great Britain and the president of the Tibetan Youth Congress, the five delegates—all in their early thirties—had been chosen to demonstrate that the question of Tibetan independence would not pass with time. “The Chinese took one look at us and realized we were not the type of Tibetans they were used to dealing with,” explained Tenzin Tethong. “We were very outspoken. We challenged every statement they made, pointed out all their lies and mistakes. On top of that, they couldn’t understand us. The fact that we were so well educated yet still had faith in our religion and traditional culture was incomprehensible to them. It didn’t fit in with their dogma. Because of all this, there was a lot of tension between us.”

On May 17 the delegation left Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, for southern Amdo. As they entered the Tibetan highlands, people defiantly greeted them all along their route. In the next weeks, blockades of carts and bicycles pulled across roads deep in the countryside and continually forced their eight-car convoy to stop. When the Chinese attempted to clear the way, hundreds of people, collected from remote villages, appeared out of hiding to mob the party. Smaller groups prostrated in the road, bringing the speeding cars to a sudden halt. Everywhere the delegation was asked for “independence badges,” which they did not have, while, as emissaries of the Dalai Lama, their own persons were treated as though sacred. Both they and the third delegation repeatedly saw people collect dirt from the roads over which their cars passed. In Chamdo, where hair cuttings from the first delegation had been scooped up for blessings from a barbershop floor, they were met with scores of requests to name babies, an act normally performed only by a high lama. Even seven- and eight-year-old children sought their blessings, begging to be touched by the friends of “Chairman Dalai.”