Tibet's Forgotten History

The Dalai Lama as reformer

All the serfs and slaves take with them is their shadow. Their only legacy is their footprints. Tibetan saying.

Chou en Lai, the Panchen Lama, Mao and the Dalai Lama. Beijing, 1952

When the Mongols arrived in Tibet in 1271 AD, Buddhism had split into warring sects that united only to massacre members of the native Bon religion. In 1672, when the fifth Dalai Lama faced a rebellion from the Tsang province, he ordered a Mongolian army under his control to exact retribution:

For the band of enemies who have despoiled the duties entrusted to them: Make the male lines like trees that have had their roots cut; Make the female lines like brooks that have dried in up winter; make the children and grandchildren like eggs smashed against rocks, make the servants and followers like heaps of grass consumed by fire, make their dominion like a lamp whose oil has been exhausted. In short, annihilate any traces of them, even their names.

The even more bloodthirsty British arrived in 1903, wrote Lieutenant Arthur Hadow, “The machine gunners slaughtered the Tibetan soldiers; thirteen hundred died in the massacre. I got so sick of the slaughter that I ceased fire, though the general’s order was to make as big a bag as possible. I hope I shall never again have to shoot down men walking away”.

A journalist on the expedition, Perceval Landon¹, described the Thirteenth Dalai Lama’s rule as ‘an engine of oppression’ and Captain W.F.T. O’Connor concurred, “The great landowners and the priests … exercise each in their own dominion a despotic power from which there is no appeal, while the people are oppressed by the most monstrous growth of monasticism and priest-craft”. Wrote Spencer Chapman², “Tibet’s rulers invented degrading legends and stimulated a spirit of superstition among the common people. The Lamaist monk does not spend his time ministering to the people or educating them. The beggar beside the road is nothing to the monk. Knowledge is the jealously guarded prerogative of the monasteries and is used to increase their influence and wealth”.

After acknowledging China’s suzerainty, the British departed in 1904 and the Buddhists resumed their wars until 1950, when the PRC returned and ejected the warlords, Nazis, and spies who had fled there during the war, and negotiated the Agreement for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet:

The local government of Tibet will drive imperialist forces out of Tibet; China will not alter the existing political system, all government officials will maintain their positions, and the status, functions, and powers of the Dalai Lama will remain unchanged. Tibet will carry out reforms following the wishes of its people, through consultation with its leaders rather than by compulsion; the Tibetan people will exercise autonomy under their government, and Tibetan religious beliefs, customs and habits, monasteries, and their incomes will be respected; Tibet will remain a theocracy and retain its autonomy in most military and diplomatic matters; Tibetan troops will be trained and integrated into the PLA and Beijing will guarantee peace with bordering countries.

American diplomat Robert Ford³ wrote, “There was no sacking of monasteries. On the contrary, the Chinese took great care not to cause offense through ignorance. They soon had the monks thanking the gods for their deliverance. The Chinese had made it clear they had no quarrel with the Tibetan religion”. The government allocated $500,000 to renovate the Buddhist temple in Beijing and granted additional funds to Tibetan Muslims for a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1957.

But China’s intervention triggered a violent reaction amongst Tibet’s elite, many of whom terrorized peasants who ‘collaborated’ with the PLA, but Mao⁴ urged patience, “Although the establishment of the military and administrative committee and the reorganization of the Tibetan troops were stipulated in the Agreement you had fears, and so I instructed the comrades working in Tibet to slow their implementation. The Agreement must be carried out but, because of your fears, it has to be postponed. If you are scared this year, it can wait until next year. If you still have fears next year, it can wait until the year after that”. Then, with Mao’s approval⁵, a fifteen-year-old Chinese-born boy was installed as the fourteenth Dalai Lama⁶.

Four years later, The Dalai and Panchen Lamas traveled to Beijing where they were greeted as Heads of State by Premier Zhou Enlai and Chief of General Staff Zhu De. Mao hosted dinners in their honor and the National People’s Congress elected the Dalai Lama Vice-Chairman of the Standing Committee⁷. In a speech to Congress, the Dalai Lama championed regional autonomy for all minorities, “Tibet’s Agreement has enabled the Tibetan people to fully enjoy all rights of ethnic equality and embark on a bright road of freedom and happiness”. He was frank about conditions in his country⁸ and enthusiastic about China,

Outside the monasteries, our system was feudal… The more I looked at Marxism, the more I liked it. Here was a system based on equality and justice for everyone which claimed to be a panacea for all the world’s ills. From a theoretical standpoint, its only drawback was its insistence on a purely materialist view of human existence. This I could not agree with. I was also concerned at the methods used by the Chinese in pursuit of their ideals. I received a strong impression of rigidity. But I expressed a wish to become a Party member all the same. I felt sure, as I still do, that it would be possible to work out a synthesis of Buddhist and pure Marxist doctrines that really would be an effective way of conducting politics”.

In 1998, Professor Dongping Han⁹ met the Dalai Lama when he visited Brandeis University:

He agreed to meet Chinese scholars and China scholars in the Boston area behind closed doors. He said that in 1950, on his way to Beijing for talks with the Chinese central government, he was filled with doubt about Tibet’s future. But on his way back, he was filled with hope for Tibet and China’s future because he saw with his own eyes how Chairman Mao and other Chinese leaders were working hard for the Chinese people. He also said that Chairman Mao treated him like a younger brother, and he was able to talk with Chairman Mao freely and candidly for three days with the help of an interpreter. No Chinese leader, he said, ever treated him like Chairman Mao did. It seemed that behind closed doors and in the absence of reporters, the Dalai Lama could be disarmingly candid and persuasive.

During his years in Beijing the young man had forgotten Tibet’s political realities, where the nobles and abbots had murdered the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth Dalai Lamas for reformist tendencies. Drepung Monastery, the seat of fierce resistance to the Chinese, owned one-hundred-eighty-five manors and twenty-five-thousand serfs, and employed sixteen-thousand herdsmen. Its lamas forced boys into monastic slavery, pilfered the country’s wealth, and sold serfs along with the land. American journalist Anna Louise Strong¹⁰ found handcuffs of all sizes at Drepung, including small ones for children, and instruments for cutting off noses and ears, gouging out eyes, breaking off hands, and hamstringing legs, hot brands, whips, and disemboweling implements.

Resentment

By the time the Dalai Lama reached Lhasa from his Beijing sojourn, PRC reforms had stirred deep resentment among the elite. Public schools threatened their monopoly of education, training serfs as technicians upset the social hierarchy, and paying wages for road construction challenged the ulag tradition: in 1957 a lord beat his serf almost to death in Shann’an for failing to perform his unpaid ulag. Like Virginian plantation owners a century earlier, the nobles saw emancipation as a threat and turned for help to Washington. Says US Ambassador Chas W. Freeman¹¹

I don’t see why Tibet being part of China should be any more controversial than Wales being part of the United Kingdom. The periods when they were put into that position were about the same … but the Central Intelligence Agency, with assistance from some of China’s neighbors, put $30 million into the destabilization of Tibet and financed and trained the participants in the Khampa rebellion and ultimately sought to remove the Dalai Lama from Tibet–which they did. They escorted him out of Tibet to Dharamsala. The CIA programs were very effective in destabilizing Tibet, but did not succeed in Xinjiang”.

The CIA persuaded Kashag¹² officials and Khampa¹³ tribesmen to rebel, and the ensuing riot killed eighty-thousand people. It took the PLA twenty hours to hoist the Red Flag over the Potala Palace, and, when the smoke cleared the nobles, along with the Dalai Lama and the country’s gold reserves were in India, though Mao¹⁴ had told the local PLA commander, “If the Dalai Lama and his entourage flee Lhasa, our troops should not try to stop them. Whether they are heading to southern Tibet or India, just let them go.”

Later, Mao said, “If the Dalai Lama is willing to return home and is able to get rid of the reactionaries, then we hope he will. But is it possible for him to change his own world outlook? If he wants to return, he can do so tomorrow… Indian newspaper stories say he plans to return but the two statements he made thoroughly oppose the Central Government and the big family of the motherland and advocate Tibetan independence. As a result, he has blocked his own way back. Even so, we must leave leeway for him by electing him Vice-Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress and Chairman of the Preparatory Committee of the Founding of the Tibet Autonomous Region”.

When the Dalai Lama declined to return, Beijing terminated the Tibetan government, separated Church and State, abolished slavery, serfdom, ulag labor and debt peonage, concluding, “The fundamental improvement of national relations, in the final analysis, depends on the complete emancipation of the working classes within each nationality: class struggle, aimed directly at the overthrow of the local elite”.

1. The opening of Tibet, an account of Lhasa and the country and people of central Tibet, and the progress of the mission sent there by the English government in the year 1903-4. (1905). Landon was one of the first Europeans to describe the holy city of Lhasa in detail.

2. The Timely Rain, Gelder and Gelder,123-125.

3. The Making of Modern Tibet By A. Tom Grunfeld

4. Xinhua Monthly, February 1952, p. 11.

5. All Dalai Lamas have required Chinese Government approval before they are installed.

6. Freedom in Exile: Autobiography of His Holiness the Dalai Lama of Tibet by Dalai Lama XIV Bstan-‘Dzin-Rgya-Mtsho. Harpercollins 1990. (The title ‘Dalai’ means ‘ocean’ in Mongolian, and ‘Lama’ means ‘Living Buddha’ in Tibetan. In the 1950s, the US State Department titled him ‘God-King of Tibet’.

7. My Land and My People. The Fourteenth Dalai Lama.

8. The Socialist Legacy Underlies the Rise of Today’s China in the World–by Dongping Han. Aspects of India’s Economy Nos. 59-60 (Oct 2014)

9. The Socialist Legacy Underlies the Rise of Today’s China in the World–by Dongping Han. Aspects of India’s Economy Nos. 59-60 (Oct 2014)

10. Tibetan Interviews, A.L. Strong (1885-1970), pp 91-96

11. US Ambassador Chas. H. Freeman, Director for Chinese Affairs at the US Department of State from 1979-1981.

12. The CIA persuaded Kashag the governing council of Tibet during the rule of the Qing dynasty and post-Qing period until the 1959 rebellion.

13. The Khampa of Kham Province are the most hostile and violent of Tibetans, “Tall and well-built men, fearless and open of countenance, they resemble Apache Indians, with plaited hair hanging from each side of well modeled heads.” In 1950, the Chinese captured the town of Chamdo without firing a shot when they set off a huge fireworks display on the outskirts of the town, and the Khampa fled.

14. Beijing’s Power and China’s Borders: Twenty Neighbors in Asia. By Bruce Elleman, Stephen Kotkin, Clive Schofield.