In Exile From the Land of Snows

by John Avedon

  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.

  I am your younger sister, Youdon. We have been separated from each other for eighteen years. You might still remember me as the girl who was fond of singing and dancing. Of all our sisters, I was the one you loved most. We are leading a happy life with good living standards. The whole city has come up with huge buildings, hospitals, general stores, schools, banks, post offices, restaurants and cinema theaters.… In the evening when the bulbs are lighted, long and sweet melodies are played over the loudspeakers.… Brother, you used to be very fond of tongue. I still remember your sending me to buy tongues for you. With the coming of many food industries, many food articles, including tongue, are on sale in the market. If you would like to taste all these once again, you must come back.… Oh, how glad we shall be if you come back to share all our happiness! As our proverb goes, as they grow older birds miss their nests and men their native country.… Brother, believe me, if you want to leave darkness and come to light, then please return and join us. Your family relations, the Communist Party of China and the People’s Government would welcome you and respect you.

  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.

  In 1952 Mao Zedong had stated that 10 million Chinese would eventually settle in Tibet. Before the influx could begin the country had to be stabilized. Until 1966, Tibet was governed by the PLA and a limited number of cadres and technicians. Early Red Guard arrivals brought the first large groups of Chinese civilians to “the Roof of the World,” and these were augmented by the Hsia Fang movement in 1968. On May 16, 1975, Radio Lhasa began announcing the systematic arrival of Chinese settlers. Seven years later, according to the PRC’s 1982 census, their numbers had grown to 96,000. Nonetheless, Tibetan cadres estimated that, including dependents, there were as many as 600,000 in Central Tibet alone—one third of the region’s population. Whatever the precise figure, they were still below Mao’s original hopes.

  The most visible effect of Chinese immigration appeared in the “new towns”; cement and corrugated-roofed compounds combining offices and residences that literally surrounded every Tibetan city. From 1970 on, Lhasa’s new town expanded the old city by up to eight square miles, ninety-one new roads bringing the development beyond Sera in the east and Drepung in the west. Though built exclusively by Tibetan labor, only those Tibetan cadres closely associated with the Chinese were permitted access to the new neighborhoods. Here they witnessed a lifestyle far superior to their own. Brought in through the “back door” by pulling strings, the families of officials in Tibet received, in a matter of days, jobs sought after for years by Tibetan workers. With all business, from store receipts to government reports, conducted in Chinese, the newcomers found themselves socially as well as physically insulated. While Tibetans received medical treatment either from “barefoot doctors,” trained for six months in first aid, or, in the case of severe illness, by gaining admittance to Chinese hospitals through bribery, Han settlers received free medical care and medicines. Their children attended special schools, while Tibetan schools were virtually nonexistent. Closed during spring and autumn so that the children could help with field work, those few students who could attend—their parents not requiring the extra work points earned from their labor—were often marshaled during the rest of the year to undertake road repair, cut grass, collect manure and exterminate birds and insects. The only topics studied were the Chinese language, Marxist doctrine and mathematics. But the crucial difference in the living standards of the immigrants was their greater access to rations. Even when supplies were scarce, the Chinese received thirty to thirty-five pounds of rice and flour per month, twice as much as the Tibetans. Furthermore, they had priority in the purchase of all consumer goods, the best item a high-ranking Tibetan cadre could hope to buy being a “Red Flag” transistor radio manufactured in Hupei especially for the Tibetans. To make a three- to four-year tour of duty more acceptable to Chinese technicians, winter leaves were routinely granted, the mainland community in Lhasa visibly depleting at autumn’s end, every plane and bus serving the region arriving empty and departing full.

  A side effect of Chinese immigration was the decimation of Tibet’s heretofore strictly protected wildlife. In mass slaughters—reminiscent of the nineteenth-century buffalo hunts in the American West—PLA machine-gunners exterminated, for both food and sport, vast herds of wild ass or kiang. At the same time, Chinese settlers, who were always armed when they traveled in the countryside, hunted to the brink of extinction numerous rare species—including snow leopards, Himalayan monkeys, gazelles, and drongs or wild yaks. When a group of over sixty Western scientists from seventeen nations was finally allowed to tour the region, in May 1980, they saw no large mammals and very few birds. Not even the once endless flocks of bar-headed geese and Brahmani ducks remained.

  China’s one unqualified success in Tibet lay with its military. Building roads capable of bearing seven-ton loads had been the army’s major task during the fifties and the first half of the sixties. By 1965, 90 percent of the districts in the TAR were linked; by the early seventies, almost all were joined. Two roads of great strategic value led southward out of Tibet, one to Nepal, the other to Pakistan. Numerous bridges—all-important in Tibet’s many river valleys—complemented the road network.

  Its road building completed, the PLA concentrated on transforming Tibet into an impregnable fortress. While the original three provinces were divided among four of the PRC’s eleven military zones, each of the TAR’s seventy-one districts saw the construction of many minor bases and a single major base. They in turn took orders from six regional headquarters, each commanding a 40,000-man division. Lhasa remained the general headquarters for the 500,000 troops in the autonomous region alone, roughly half of whom were deployed on the Himalayan border. Fourteen major airfields, augmented by twenty airstrips, were built exclusively for the military, with only one, Gonkar Airport, south of Lhasa, used for civilians.

  The Himalayan front was most critical. Nicknamed “Mao’s Underground Great Wall” by Tibetan refugees, it comprised scores of secret bases, subterranean troop positions and supply depots joined by tunnels, stretching 932 miles all the way across Tibet. At their core lay the all-important Chumbi Valley. Following the 1962 war at least 40,000 troops—one bri—occupied the valley, each village receiving its complement of soldiers, with major installations planned for about twenty of the towns. East of the Chumbi Valley, China’s line of bases faced the NEFA, their rear command located in Chamdo. Westward they stretched 638 miles to Rudok, with the command center for the whole Himalayan front based at Shigatse.

  A key unit lay on the northern slope of Mount Everest, near the district headquarters of Dhingri. Early in 1967, a high-ranking team of military officers escorted six scientists to the mountains. After their departure eight days later, a twenty-square-mile zone was sealed off, even Tibetan road workers in the area being replaced by Chinese soldiers. In company with twenty-six PLA officers, half the scientists returned, followed in May 1968 by convoys carrying equipment to Rongbuk Monastery, 15,000 feet up the mountainside. By September large caves in the surrounding hills, their outlets carefully camouflaged from aerial reconnaissance, were reported to be linked by tunnels wide enough for jeeps and trucks to pass one another. Their dimensions were such that whole regiments, according to refugees and Sherpas from Nepal, could be quartered within. More camps were set up on the surface, and by 1970 high ridges in the area began sprouting radar dishes. In 1973 a major radar complex was constructed in Rudok in western Tibet. Indian intelligence confirmed that the technology was designed not just for detecting incoming flights but, more critically, was capable of functioning as tracking stations for both satellites and missiles. The stations were further proof of what India had suspected since 1968: Peking’s decision to locate its major nuclear facility at the very heart of Tibet.

  The first report that China was shifting its principal nuclear base from Lop Nor in Xinjiang to Tibet was leaked to the press by Indian intelligence sources in the summer of 1969. In the previous year a gaseous diffusion plant, warhead assembly plant and research labs were said to have been moved to an undisclosed area in Tibet. Lop Nor, despite China’s great manpower in Xinjiang, had apparently been deemed vulnerable to a Soviet assault. Besides Tibet’s added security and protected supply lines, two natural factors combined to work in its favor: the sparse population on the changthang or northern plains made it an ideal test site, and the extensive cloud cover for much of the year would hamper detection by spy planes and observation satellites. In 1970, the French air force periodical Forces Aériennes Francaises confirmed the Indian report, stating that the move had been detected by American satellites, though facilities had been left functioning at Lop Nor, it surmised, to co
nfuse observers. By 1976, the actual site of the transfer was revealed: Nagchuka, 165 miles north of Lhasa on the southern border of Amdo, already a major truck stop on the Xining-Lhasa highway.

  Refugee reports soon brought further details to light. The entire county of Amdo Hsien, in which Nagchuka lay, had been declared off limits to both Tibetans and civilian Chinese, with only a few select PLA units permitted to remain. A way-stop called Changthang Kormo, three days by horseback from Nagchuka and previously containing only a single nomad’s dwelling, was turned into a “new town” filled with Chinese workers. Further reports detailed extensive underground work. With the tracking station in Dhingri completed, now clearly in place to support Nagchuka, the western base at Rudok received a number of missiles, whether IRBM or MRBM (the former with a range of 1,500 to 2,500 miles, the latter with one of 400 to 600 miles) was not known. By 1978, Nagchuka was believed to be ready for its own complement of warheads, intelligence experts in India predicting that it would “come to occupy a place of importance rivaled only by the Nevada testing range in the United States.” While the Dalai Lama appealed for Tibet to be left a “nuclear-free zone,” it was not conclusively known whether the new installation had actually tested a weapon (though there was one eyewitness report of a mushroom cloud). By 1980, however, the Hong Kong Times reported the stockpiling of seventy medium-range and twenty intermediate-range missiles at the facility. Thus, New Delhi and twenty major Indian cities, as well as Irkutsk and Soviet population centers in both Central Asia and Siberia, came within range of the nuclear weapons. With Tibet high and secure at 14,000 feet, far above its neighbors, it seemed that the PRC’s dream of transforming the region into its ultimate redoubt had finally been realized. Yet at this very moment, in many ways the climax of all of China’s efforts in Tibet, the country’s fate was once more to be opened to question—this time, ironically, by the Chinese leaders themselves.