by John Avedon
One year after the Panchen Lama’s trial, elections from the county level up—the rules for which had been announced in March 1963—were finally completed in Tibet. Three hundred and one delegates were chosen in an electoral process that, according to Chinese periodicals, was conducted much like a festival. Tibetans had flocked to polling places beating drums and gongs, dressed in their finest clothes, adorned with flowers and scarves; cripples, maimed by the old feudal lords, hobbled on crutches to cast their ballots “in high excitement.” As the New China News Agency reported in August 1965, candidates were nominated “after lively discussions by the electorate who chose those they believed would act as real representatives of the poor peasants and herdsmen in this first free expression of the voice of the Tibetan people.”
In reality, free elections simply did not exist. At the grass-roots level, villages were broken into small discussion groups, each one led by an “activist” from the subdistrict office. Presented with a prepared list of acceptable candidates from the lower middle class or “non-reactionary” poor, villagers had only to discuss the merits of their prospective candidates. Anyone nominating someone else was severely criticized. The cadre then made a speech announcing the Party’s choices. The groups could not disband until each one had unanimously voted for the favored candidate—a result guaranteed by the fact that the ballots were marked in full view of the chairing cadre.
General Zhang Guohua was elected. So was Ngabo Ngawang Jigme, chosen by the Party to fill the Panchen Lama’s place as chief figurehead of Tibetan self-rule. A year earlier, Ngabo had assumed the title of PCART’s Acting Chairman, having risen from Secretary-General to Vice-Chairman following the revolt. His merit now lay not so much in his title, as in the fact that he represented the sole surviving link to the old government of Tibet. As such, he was indispensable. Ensconced in a modern home with Western furniture on the northeastern side of Lhasa, surrounded by a large flower garden and staffed by two servants, he took nominal charge, as its elected chairman, of the newly founded Tibet Autonomous Region’s leading body—The People’s Council—three quarters of which was Tibetan, the rest either Chinese or members of other “minority groups” in Tibet. Simultaneously the name of the central committee of Tibet’s CCP was changed from Work Committee to Party Committee, indicating that the highest organ of the Communist Party in Tibet was now fully operational with General Zhang Guohua as First Secretary.
On September 1, 1965, the first session of the First People’s Council of the Tibet Autonomous Region convened in Lhasa. China Reconstructs recorded the entrance of the elected delegates: “With the bright red ribbons identifying them as people’s deputies fluttering on their breasts, they walked into the meeting hall with heads held high, representatives of their emancipated people. During the nine-day session, with tears of emotion in their eyes and smiles of triumph on their faces, they spoke of their past misery and present happiness and expressed the deep love of Tibet’s million emancipated serfs and slaves for the Chinese Communist Party and Chairman Mao.” On the closing day, 30,000 Lhasans, including a Vice-Premier and 76 delegates from 27 other provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions were flown in for the ceremonies, assembled in the city’s newly built “stadium”—an open field surrounded by banners and flags to celebrate the inauguration of the Tibet Autonomous Region. For internal and external consumption alike the event marked a propaganda threshold. For those who had been in Tibet since 1950, it represented the culmination of a decade and a half of work. Moreover, it had come a decade to the month after the last autonomous region, Xinjiang, had been formed, a fact which could not but have reminded the Chinese in Tibet of the immense amount of difficulty they had experienced in carrying out the Party’s work on “the Roof of the World.” Unknown to them, however, a period even more difficult than that of the past six years waited just ahead. For eleven months off lay the most tumultous upheaval in China since the Civil War itself—the start of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
10
The Long Night
1966–1977
Under the new situation of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and amidst the sound of the war drum for repudiating the bourgeois reactionary line, the Lhasa Revolutionary Rebel General Headquarters is born!
What is this Rebel Headquarters of ours doing? It is to hold high the great red banner of Mao Zedong’s thought, and to rebel by applying Mao Zedong’s thought. We will rebel against the handful of persons in authority in the Party taking the capitalist road. We will rebel against persons stubbornly persisting in the bourgeois reactionary line! We will rebel against all the monsters and freaks! We will rebel against the bourgeois Royalists! We, a group of lawless revolutionary rebels, will wield the iron sweepers and swing the mighty cudgels to sweep the old world into a mess and bash people into complete confusion. We fear no gales and storms, nor flying sand and moving rocks … To rebel, to rebel and to rebel through to the end in order to create a brightly red new world of the proletariat!
—Inaugural Declaration of the Lhasa Revolutionary Rebel General Headquarters,
December 22, 1966
BY THE LAST WEEK of December 1966, Red Guards in Lhasa stood poised to seize power from Tibet’s CCP Central Committee. Four months before, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution had officially been proclaimed. Far more than a “cultural” revolution, as its name implied, the policy signaled the most severe outbreak to date of the decades-old power struggle between the left and the right dividing the allegiance of Chinese Communists across both personal and ideological lines. Despite the debacle of the Great Leap Forward, the left’s first attempt to push China toward pure Communism by radical means, Mao Zedong had continued to call for class warfare as the best method for leveling Chinese society to a homogeneous, proletarian whole. For much of the early sixties, Liu Shaoqi, China’s President, had led a renewal of the moderate line. By the autumn of 1965, however, Mao, undaunted by his earlier failure, had set the left back on par with the right. Having done so, he determined to wipe out once and for all the conservative opposition. With the army’s support under Lin Biao he succeeded by June 1966 in purging his opponents from the powerful Peking Party Committee; in August, at the nth Plenum of the CCP Central Committee he announced the Cultural Revolution. Every organ of the Party and the government bureaucracy throughout China was ordered to subject itself to upheaval, summarized by the slogan “to bombard the headquarters,” a euphemism for eliminating the right. While the ideology of the Great Leap had emphasized increasing production, the left line now stressed violent “cleansing” of China’s “rotten core,” which was held accountable for the country’s slow political and economic progress.
Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were targeted—at first privately and later publicly—as the main “capitalist-roaders,” and a Cultural Revolution Group was established in Peking to oversee the nationwide purge. Members of the army, Maoist cadres and representatives of mass organizations, a synonym for the newly created Red Guards, were called on to join together, seize power from their local Party organizations and establish Revolutionary Committees whose task it would be to perform the duties of both Party and government until the two could be separated once more, with the left firmly in control. The “three-in-one” groups were bequeathed an eight-point program by which to implement the radical policies held in abeyance till now: the destruction of “Four Olds” and the creation of “Four News.” The “Four Olds” were old ideology, culture, habits and customs; the “Four News,” their inverse, Mao’s new ideology, proletarian culture, Communist habits and customs. China’s vast number of disaffected youth seized the opportunity to rebel against the status quo, and were encouraged to do so by Mao’s wife, Jiang Jing, who oversaw Red Guard activities. Licensed to travel anywhere in China to “exchange revolutionary experience,” they were given free rein overnight to vent their frustrations channeled by Mao against his enemies.
Of all regions in the People’s Republic, minorit
ies areas proved the most vulnerable to the new directives. Compared to the mainland, they had maintained the “Four Olds” in fulsome dimensions; the very fact that their people possessed separate languages, much less culture, was regarded as reactionary. Chinese administrators in autonomous regions, districts and counties were singled out as responsible for having failed to obliterate vestiges of “decadent” societies under their tutelage. The much-vaunted United Front policy of working with the minorities’ “patriotic upper strata” was cast aside; the people everywhere were urged to generate new activists, directly from their own ranks, to wage this, China’s second revolution.
On August 25, 1966, the Cultural Revolution began in Tibet. Following a rally held to celebrate its inauguration by the nth Plenum, the Central Cathedral was invaded by Red Guards. Hundreds of priceless frescoes and images, dating to the time of Songtsen Gampo, the temple’s founder and Tibet’s 33rd king, were defaced or destroyed. Its two courtyards were filled for five days with mobs burning scriptures. The destruction was particularly devastating as the Tsuglakhang had, under the Panchen Lama’s direction, become a warehouse for countless invaluable artifacts brought from neighboring monasteries. With the height of the rampage past, Tibet’s holiest shrine, equivalent, for its people, to the Vatican, was dubbed Guest House #5, its yards used to keep pigs, and its catacombs of old government offices, storage rooms and chapels taken over as headquarters for the most radical of the burgeoning Red Guard groups. Within the next few days the Norbulingka was opened to an orgy of destruction, following which the entire city, given over to the Red Guards, was again renamed. Street plaques were smashed to the ground and replaced with new revolutionary titles such as Foster the New Street and Great Leap Forward Path. As the first week of September got underway, 40,000 prints of Chairman Mao’s portrait were distributed in Lhasa, draped with red ribbons and placed over every gate and in every home, office and factory in the capital. Giant red posters on the Potala and elsewhere heralded the Cultural Revolution; others, supporting the North Vietnamese, condemned U.S. imperialism or offered quotes from China’s Great Helmsman, Mao.
As early as July, a small number of revolutionary youth had arrived in Lhasa to instigate a Red Guard movement in the TAR. Progressing slowly at first, by mid-September their work had produced enough Red Guard groups in the city to mount the first open attack on the establishment. Their initial handbill called for “burning the capitalist-roaders in authority in the Party.” In practice, such an undertaking gave rise to a complex power struggle, just then being reduplicated throughout China. Because the Central Committee of the CCP had itself issued orders to commence the Cultural Revolution, those in authority at every level of the bureaucracy were paradoxically compelled to attack themselves. Failing to carry out a facsimile, at least, of the Central Committee’s dictum would immediately mark them for genuine destruction by “the masses.” However, almost all were marked to begin with, the assumption being that whoever held office was—until proven innocent by the people themselves—guilty of revisionism. Accordingly, General Zhang Guohua and Comrade Wang Jimei, Secretary of the Secretariat of the region’s CCP Committee and a Deputy Political Commissar of the PLA, quickly organized Lhasa’s own Cultural Revolution Group to oversee the work of rebellion and hopefully deflect its “spearhead” away from themselves. In the beginning, they emphasized “study” and “discussion” over violent “exposure,” discouraged—until it appeared counter to the trend of the times—the hanging of big-character posters and, most importantly, dispatched observation teams of loyal cadres into every office and factory in Lhasa in an attempt to check any spontaneous organization of Red Guards. Their efforts were successful through the end of October, despite Lin Biao’s clarion call, announced from the rostrum of Tienanmen Square, to wage a “mass campaign of repudiating the bourgeois reactionary line.” But as more and more Red Guard groups organized and pressed their sanctioned attacks, the establishment’s attempt to save itself began to falter. By mid-November, four Red Guard groups, bolstered by more than a thousand Red Guards from beyond the region, began to gain the upper hand by demanding, directly from the broadcasting studios of Radio Lhasa, an open repudiation of those in power. They accused both Zhang Guohua and Wang Jimei—who headed Tibet’s Cultural Revolution Group—of suppressing the revolution while pretending to support it. The two tried to profess their innocence but continued to come under increasing pressure over the next month. Finally, on December 22, the first coalition of Revolutionary Rebels—representing fifty Red Guard groups—announced its inception and prepared to “seize power.”
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:
To rebel! To rebel! We are a group of Revolutionary Rebels combined through our own free will under the banner of Mao Zedong’s thought.… This organization of ours has no cumbersome rules and regulations. All can join us so long as they are Revolutionary Rebels who share our viewpoints.… We will persist in the struggle by reasoning, not by violence. However, when we do rebel, we will certainly not measure our steps and act with feminine tenderness, and will certainly not be so gentle, and so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous.
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-po
werful’ 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.”