by John Avedon
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 e
xperience 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.
For all of its fury, the political contest of the Cultural Revolution in Tibet was limited, in the main, to the Chinese themselves. The bulk of the suffering it produced was endured by the Tibetan people. While a few thousand Chinese died or were arrested and tortured, Tibetan casualties—including fatalities and those imprisoned—ran into the tens of thousands, with millions experiencing extreme abuse. Worse, for the legacy of subsequent generations, Tibetan culture suffered what would have been—were it not for the refugees in India—nothing less than a fatal blow. Everything Tibetan was destroyed; everything Chinese and Communist adopted. The practice of religion was officially outlawed. Folk festivals and fairs were banned, traditional dances and songs, incense burning and all Tibetan art forms and customs prohibited. A large outdoor exhibit was erected at Tromsikhang, near the Barkhor in Lhasa, in which all forbidden religious and ornamental items were displayed under a banner ordering their immediate remission to work committees and the “Offices to Suppress the Uprising,” which had been reinstituted for the duration of the upheaval. All over Tibet people with bad class designations, who had not as yet been imprisoned, were dragged into the street and paraded in paper dunce caps—beaten and spat upon as they passed, tags listing their crimes pinned to their naked chest—in processions led by Red Guards beating drums, cymbals and gongs. Lashed to heavy religious statues lamas were bent double while ex-aristocrats and merchants had large empty vessels, once used for storing grain, roped to their backs. Loudspeakers, which had previously broadcast for only three to six hours daily, now emitted a nonstop stream of propaganda songs and paeans to Mao, their shrill whine permeating the streets and penetrating to within every household.
Between parades Red Guard factions vied for preeminence in the work of demolishing every vestige of Tibetan culture. The few remaining prayer flags were ripped down and replaced with red banners. The religious landscape of Tibet—lines of chortens gracing valleys and ridges, piles of mani stones before towns and mantras fashioned across hillsides out of whitewashed rocks were demolished and replaced by colossal slogans of Mao. The distinctive black borders framing Tibetan windows, as well as the bands of bright color decorating the interiors of most rooms, were chiseled out or painted over. In Kham and Amdo, the second floors of homes were decreed to be “bourgeois excesses”; their inhabitants were forced to raze them and live in the damp, windowless stables on the first floor. Long plaits of hair worn by both men and women were labeled “the dirty black tails of serfdom” and, if not cut by the individual, were slashed off by roving gangs of Red Guards. Others had their heads half shaved, to mark them as backward. By March 1967, tens of thousands of copies of Mao’s Little Red Book—issued with a red purse, inscribed with the slogan “Long Live Chairman Mao”—were given out. Tibetans were required to memorize passages from the book. They were tested both in nightly meetings and on the street—randomly waylaid by Red Guards who demanded flawless recitation on pain of violence. Boiler suits had to be worn, bracelets, earrings and rings discarded; even the traditional Tibetan greeting—equivalent to shaking hands—of sticking out one’s tongue, while sucking in the breath, was forbidden. Private pets were exterminated by Red Guards moving from home to home, where they forced the inhabitants to hang portraits of Mao in every room and wrote slogans on the walls. Tibetan youths—members of the Communist Youth League and schoolchildren—were also marshaled into pet and insect extermination campaigns in an effort to counter the Tibetans’ abhorrence of taking life. Tibetan writing and even the language itself were targeted for destruction, replaced by a bizarre, mainly Chinese patois called “the Tibetan-Chinese Friendship language”—the grammar and vocabulary of which were incomprehensible to most Tibetans. Great numbers of Tibetans—particularly cadres and others employed directly by the Chinese—were forced to change their names to Chinese equivalents, each with one syllable of Mao’s name included. When parents resisted naming their offspring for Mao, the children were officially called by either their date of or weight at birth—so that, as far as Chinese administrators were concerned, many of Tibet’s upcoming generation were literally no more than numbers. As a new expression describing the dementia that had gripped the Chinese stated, “First they make us laugh, and then they make us cry.”
As preposterous as the fanaticism of the Cultural Revolution seemed to most Tibetans, they had reason to fear it far more than the Democratic Reforms and their attendant campaigns of class cleansing. During these there had been a strict adherence to authority in the administration of various punishments; the Cultural Revolution was pure mob violence. The early parades through Lhasa soon gave way to branding with hot irons, executions and impromptu thamzing on the street—so much so that for years Tibetans feared to leave their homes, venturing out only to and from work and even then refusing to acknowledge friends, as it was the duty of watchers on every corner to report suspicious behavior. Then, as early as August 1966, gang rapes began. The female children of four hundred Tibetan families engaged in lumbering at Po Tramo were marched naked in public by Red Guards, submitted to thamzing and then raped. Appeals were made to the authorities in Lhasa, but they refused to intervene out of fear for their positions. In the winter of 1966-67, Revolutionary Rebels traveled to Nagchuka, north of Lhasa. Here they subjected vast numbers of nomads, gathered at the town during the cold months, to similar atrocities. Women were stripped, bound and made to stand on frozen lakes under guard. A man and his daughter, Karma Sherab and Tsering Tsomo, were compelled to copulate in public. Throughout Lhoka similar wanton acts took place, as classed Tibetans were left tied in gunnysacks for days at a time. At the Ngyang-chu River (a tributary of the Tsangpo) outside Gyantse, families, including the women and children of classed men, were made to stand in freezing water for five hours, wearing dunce caps, heavy stones strapped to their legs. More rapes and public beatings occurred in Shigatse. A wave of suicides swept over the country as many Tibetans, sometimes in family groups, chose to kill themselves by leaping from cliffs or drowning rather than die at the hands of Chinese gangs. In Lhasa, suicide attempts became so common that PLA guards patrolled the shores of the Kyichu River night and day.
As the fighting between the Red Guard factions intensified, so did the atrocities—committed not only by
civilian bands, but by the PLA as well. Rapes and beatings turned into executions in which victims were forced to dig their own graves before being shot. The bloodletting re-created the worst of the crimes that followed the suppression of the 1959 revolt. According to a new influx of refugees escaping, in the confusion, to India, Tibetans were routinely mutilated, their ears, tongues, noses, fingers and arms cut off, genitals and eyes burned. Boiling water was poured on victims hung by the thumbs to extract information they were thought to possess concerning rival factions. Crucifixion was also employed: on June 9, 1968, the bodies of two men were dumped in the street in front of Ngyentseshar—the old Lhasan jail—riddled with nail marks, not just through the hands, but hammered into the head and the major joints of the torso. As late as 1970 a group of ex-monks near the Nepal border were required to stand on pedestals in public and read Mao’s Little Red Book aloud for three consecutive days. Those who refused were shot on the spot by the PLA. Their corpses were dragged through the streets, where the people were forced to spit and throw dust on them. Two who would not were also summarily executed. Finally the bodies were prominently displayed beneath signs proclaiming their lot to be the natural end of all reactionaries.
The fate of the Tibetan people was duplicated in the country’s 6,254 monasteries. But while so much Red Guard behavior was uncontrolled, the destruction of the monasteries was the result of a carefully planned campaign inaugurated prior to the Cultural Revolution. Beginning in 1959, it had been the ongoing task of the Cultural Articles Preservation Commission to catalogue, according to specified grades of value, every item in every monastery in Tibet for eventual shipment to China. Metallurgy teams were sent from Peking. Nevertheless, it was a massive task, and the work had progressed slowly. The large monasteries around Lhasa, Shigatse, Gyantse and the main cities of Kham and Amdo alone contained so much that few in the countryside had been thoroughly examined prior to 1966. By September 1967, however, a year after the first Revolutionary Rebel group had formed in Lhasa, widespread destruction began in earnest. Older Red Guards supervised the operation equipped with booklets in which each article’s designation, either to be saved or destroyed, was noted. Images of gold, silver and bronze, expensive brocades and ancient thankas were packed and sealed. Intricately carved pillars and beams were dismantled for use in the construction of Chinese compounds. Then, under red flags—with drums, trumpets and cymbals providing a fanfare—local Tibetans were forced to demolish each monastery. Giant bonfires were lit to burn thousands of scriptures, while those not incinerated were desecrated—used as wrapping in Chinese shops, as toilet paper or as padding in shoes. The wooden blocks in which they were bound were made into floorboards, chairs and handles for farm tools. Clay images were ground to dust, thrown into the street for people to walk on and mixed with fertilizer. Others were remade into bricks for the specific purpose of building public lavatories. Mani stones, once among the most common expressions of prayer, were turned into pavement. Frescoes were defaced, the eyes of their images gouged out in a manner reminiscent of the twelfth-century Moslem destruction of Buddhist monasteries in India. Bronze and gold pinnacles crowning every temple’s roof were pulled down and—along with other metals—resmelted.