In Exile From the Land of Snows

by John Avedon

  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.”

  On June 1, as the second delegation headed across Kham toward Central Tibet, the third delegation entered Canton. Sent to investigate educational standards, its seven members were led by Pema Gyalpo, the Dalai Lama’s younger sister and head of the Tibetan Children’s Village in Dharamsala. “You can’t imagine what our first sight of China was like,” she recalled, describing the negative impressions which beset her group from the start of its journey. “It was a miserable rainy day. Outside our train hundreds of people were queued up behind a high wire fence in the Canton train station. A line of policemen held them back, and they were all pushing to get out of the country. I mean, as Tibetan refugees we’ve learned so many bad things about the Chinese Communists and now the very first thing we saw in China, after all these years, was crowds of people trying to escape. It put a chill into all of us.”

  The third delegation’s personal discomfort was accented by a pronounced shift in the behavior of their hosts. Aware of the second delegation’s tumultuous greeting in Tibet, officials of the Nationalities Affairs Commission’s “Third,” or Tibetan, department dropped the veneer of hospitality the earlier hosts had assumed. Quartered in the same military guest house that the first delegation had stayed in, the third delegation was maneuvered away from foreigners in Peking’s streets, taken on circuitous routes to their destinations—to discourage them, they assumed, from venturing out on their own—and on the few occasions they did take unguided walks, openly trailed by undercover police. “From the start the Chinese were studying us,” observed Pema Gyalpo. “In the guest house in Peking, the Tibetan interpreters who worked for them
came one at a time to our rooms, knocked on the door, stepped inside and said, ‘How are you today?’ Then, without waiting for an answer, they would just sit down and begin asking questions. ‘How do the Tibetans in India live? What are their feelings about the Dalai Lama? How are they employed? What are their schools like? What are the children studying?’ It was clear that their intentions were not good.” On receiving answers from one delegate, the interpreters would go to a second, ask the same questions, and then, if the replies varied, return to the first to inquire why he had given one answer while his colleague employed another. As Pema Gyalpo explained, “Because of this cross-examination they soon knew each of our characters perfectly. I’m a very blunt, straightforward person. Not at all diplomatic. They couldn’t get anything but an argument out of me, but with the others they directly tried to manipulate some of them and cause trouble.” On one occasion, a Swiss-raised Tibetan photographer with the group was missing for three hours. When he returned the other delegates discovered that he had been subjected to an intensive grilling. “Our photographer didn’t understand what the Chinese were getting at when they asked if the Tibetans in exile were disunited,” said Pema Gyalpo. “He just answered candidly concerning the differences that do exist, which is exactly what they sought in order to make trouble.” At the time, the questions themselves created dissension among the delegates, as the pressure of appraising different responses led to divisiveness. The photographer’s replies became the subject of a heated argument and he was finally told “just to take photos and keep quiet.”

  But though all the delegates from then on behaved with the utmost care, the questions never ceased. “By the time our stay was coming to an end,” said Pema Gyalpo, “they were trying to get as much information from us as possible. The cadres from Peking would go so far as to have teachers in schools we visited ask exactly how much aid the refugees receive from the government of India. What the budget for individual schools are, and who gives money to them. I couldn’t believe how devious their thinking was.”

  In this strained atmosphere, the first untoward occurrence inevitably produced a breakdown in relations. Shortly after entering Tibet, while driving to a destination near Tashikhiel, in Amdo, the delegation suddenly found the road blocked by 7,000 people. In a rage, one of the officials from Peking leaped from the lead car, in which Pema Gyalpo was sitting, and began to beat the Tibetans back. Deluged by their numbers, he soon retreated to the jeep, locked the door and pushed Pema Gyalpo between himself and a Chinese woman cadre, who in turn forbade her to open the windows. “It took us three hours to get out of that crowd,” Pema Gyalpo related. “The people were tearing bits of canvas from the jeep’s roof. They were calling to meet me, but the Chinese kept me like a prisoner in the jeep. I was furious. A while after lunch we came to another large crowd on the road, and this time I opened the window myself. The Chinese woman ordered me to close it, and then I really blew my top. I told the interpreter in the front seat to translate every word I said and I let her have it. I told her that if I chose to greet my own people, that was my wish, and that I would not tolerate her dictating to me. His Holiness the Dalai Lama had sent us to meet the people and if she persisted in blocking this, I said that I would return to India immediately. Then everything I thought finally came out. There were our people in rags, half starving, in tears, calling out all around the jeep, and I said to this lady, ‘Everywhere we’ve gone you’ve claimed that you’ve made so much progress. Look at these people. Is that progress? I want you to ask them when they had their last taste of meat like we had for lunch. What have you achieved in twenty years but this?’ Then all she said was: ‘Why are these people acting so wildly? Do the Tibetans in India behave like that?’ I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘Of course not.’ And she said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘In India we are free. These people are acting like this because you have suppressed them too much. This is the result of your cruelty.’ Then they just kept quiet. I was really in tears. When the Tibetan interpreter tried to calm me down, I turned on him and shouted, ‘What are you doing for your people? Just look at them!’ ”

  That evening Pema Gyalpo decided to cancel the tour. Apprised of her decision, the Chinese approached Rabten Chazotsang, the rector of the Mussoorie school, and tried to apologize. The woman, they explained, suffered from arthritis and could not bear a draft on her shoulder. For this reason—and no other—she had ordered Pema Gyalpo to keep the jeep’s window closed. Promised that henceforth they would not be interfered with, the delegation continued its tour. From that time on, though, a state of open hostility threatened to break relations at any time.

  After traveling for almost two months, the second delegation entered Lhasa in the last week of July 1980. On the morning of July 25, they were mobbed by 10,000 people while en route to the Central Cathedral. It took half an hour to drive the few blocks from the guest house and an hour to cross the short distance from where the bus stopped to the cathedral’s entrance. Offered a white scarf by the temple’s caretaker (fired that same day for his action), the delegation toured the interior and emerged on the roof to make a brief speech to the crowd, which had quietly seated itself in Tsuglakhang front courtyard. During their talk a group of young Tibetan men shouted in unison three times, “Tibet is fully independent!” The Chinese took no action, nor did they the next day, when, during a speech to a gathering of 3,500 at the base of the Potala, a man stood up and again yelled, “Tibet is independent!” On the following day, however, July 27, the most volatile demonstration to date exhausted their restraint.

  Driving out of Lhasa at nine in the morning, the delegation crossed the Kyichu River and headed northeast. Thirty miles up the valley, they rounded the end of a long scarp in the mountains and began to climb upwards. At the first turn in the road a Tibetan family stood waiting to greet them holding sticks of incense, scarves and a thermos of tea. After halting their minibus for a brief talk, the delegation proceeded to the next turn, where two more groups waited. Stopping again, they then resumed driving until, turning a final bend, they caught sight of their destination: Ganden Monastery. Thirty-two years before, on the eve of the Chinese invasion, the renowned Tibetan scholar Giuseppe Tucci had described the traveler’s first view of Ganden as “a sight out of this world.” Its “freshly whitewashed walls framing the blazing red of the temples and the garish gold of the roofs … looked bodiless,” he had written, “a mere outline silhouetted against the spotlessly blue sky.” Now, where over a hundred great buildings had once stood, only long lines of jagged ruins remained. Ganden had literally been blown to pieces. “We’d heard about Ganden’s destruction before,” recalled Tenzin Tethong, “but no words could ever describe the sight. Ganden means ‘the Joyful Paradise,’ and it truly used to be a shining city on a hill. Now it’s a blasted, bombed-out hulk. It looks as though it was destroyed five hundred years ago, not twelve.”

  At the last turn, more than eighty trucks, parked up to the first of the broken walls, blocked the road. Five thousand people waited beside them. “The moment we arrived, the crowd simply couldn’t contain itself,” related Tenzin Tethong. “Everyone came running down the hill, crying and calling out. I remember a few young boys and girls, teen-agers, grabbing on to my jacket. They were practically howling in tears. They refused to let go. People beside them were saying, ‘Please, you mustn’t cry so much,’ but then they started crying as well, pointing up the hill and saying, ‘Look. There is our Ganden. See what they’ve done to it!’ ”

  The Tibetans had gathered at Ganden not merely to welcome the delegation but to undertake the seemingly impossible task of reconstructing it. Using stones and lumber pilfered from construction sites around Lhasa, groups of volunteers had begun to work a few weeks before. Before dawn each Sunday they would assemble at designated spots to be picked up by Tibetan truck drivers. With their materials piled on board Chinese trucks, they set out on what, with repeated stops for new groups, amounted to a four-hour drive to the ruins of the monastery. Arriving at t
he foot of the hill below Ganden, all would dismount and help to push the overladen vehicles up the slope. Their labor, on the one free day in the week, continued until after dark. Supervised by a group of monks, carpenters and masons, the workers had already begun to rebuild a residence for the Dalai Lama and the temple which once housed Je Tsongkhapa’s tomb. Not merely a defiance of Chinese ideology, the effort represented the essence of the Tibetan people’s will to pursue their own vision of life, and, on the day of the delegation’s visit—the 571st anniversary of Ganden’s founding—the underground meant to mark it as such, by openly escorting the exiles through the demolished monastery to three tents in which monks, wearing robes they had kept hidden for decades, waited to conduct religious services before outdoor altars fashioned from images preserved until then in secret caches. After reciting the Dalai Lama’s prayers for a free Tibet, the delegates made lengthy, impassioned speeches, during which thousands, emboldened by both the moment and the distance from Lhasa, raised their hands in clenched fists, shouting for Tibet’s freedom.

  Receiving reports of the day’s event, Chinese authorities in Lhasa finally decided to act—regardless of its effect on relations with the Dalai Lama. Rumors of a demonstration at which the Tibetan flag was to be raised were circulating through the capital. Moreover a group of twenty-one Western correspondents, each representing a major periodical and only the second such party permitted into Tibet, were staying at the same guest house as the delegation. So far they had successfully been kept away from the visitors. Their presence, though, plainly threatened to turn an as yet unknown internal disturbance into an international publicity disaster.