by Ed Douglas
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In 1947, when Nehru became the first prime minister of an independent India, he was uncertain how to deal with Tibet. There was antipathy to the regime in Lhasa, which was viewed as out of date and socially restrictive. The notion of ‘buffer states’ was part of the fast-receding tide of British imperialism. Zhou Enlai told India’s new ambassador Madhava Panikkar that the ‘liberation’ of Tibet was China’s ‘sacred duty’, as though Tibet was a little Asian brother in need of a helping hand. Compared to Beijing’s focussed resolve, Delhi seemed distracted. Although in 1949 Harishwar Dayal had been supportive during his time as political officer of Sikkim, he was pessimistic that India would do anything meaningful to stop China absorbing Tibet. When China did invade the following year he sent a despairing memo suggesting India occupy the Chumbi valley north of Sikkim, a smart idea that was wholly ignored.
Given that China’s ally the Soviet Union was a member of the UN Security Council, Lhasa’s ambition to join the United Nations could get nowhere. Krishna Menon, India’s ambassador at the UN and high commissioner to the United Kingdom, told the British that Panikkar had advised India to ‘wash her hands completely of Tibet’. Lhasa continued to look hopefully towards the United States, where fear of communism was now driving foreign policy. The Americans were sympathetic, but were guided by India and Britain, and needed the Tibetans to declare themselves anti-communist. That was something the kashag was reluctant to do with a communist army of some forty thousand gathering strength on Tibet’s eastern border. Only later, as insurgent opposition to China’s occupation grew from the mid 1950s, did America provide covert funding for the rebel group Chushi Gangdruk, meaning Four Rivers, Six Ranges, the historic name for its region of origin, Kham.
China, watching these attempts at international legitimacy, proved adept at exploiting dissension within Tibet. In January 1950, the Xinhua News Agency released a telegram sent to Mao in the name of the Panchen Lama, then at Kumbum monastery in Qinghai, asking for Chinese troops ‘to liberate Tibet, to wipe out reactionaries, expel the imperialists’. The tenth Panchen Lama was not yet twelve; his ‘statement’ reflected long-standing friction between his followers in Shigatse and the government in Lhasa. The scholar Sherab Gyatso, also in Qinghai, warned Tibetans during a broadcast in June not to trust ‘British and American imperialist slander aimed at sowing discord between nationalities’. China under the Qing had at times proved a useful lever in Tibetan politics. Why shouldn’t Mao?
When the Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959, the Panchen Lama became the most senior religious leader still in Tibet and a useful ally for China. But in 1962, having toured Tibet and seen how communisation was tearing apart the monastic system and the practice of Buddhism itself, the Panchen Lama delivered a devastating indictment of the party’s policies in Tibet, known as the ‘Seventy Thousand Character Petition’. He warned that poverty had worsened, the population was decreasing and communist reform was failing. Zhou Enlai, China’s prime minister, was sympathetic, but as the situation across China deteriorated, attitudes within the party hardened. Mao dubbed the Panchen Lama’s petition a ‘poisoned arrow’ and he was denounced and imprisoned in Qincheng – with the communist Phuntsok Wangyal. At least the Panchen was hidden away in the relative safety of a jail cell when the Cultural Revolution began. In 1968, Mao’s Red Guards smashed Sherab Gyatso’s leg so badly he died of the injury.
In September 1950, Hugh Richardson left Lhasa for the last time.
That was the season of the annual parties that are held there; everybody was taking it easy, and they had their eyes only on the course of negotiations which had just begun between their representatives and the new Chinese ambassador. At all events, no one was prepared – apparently not even the Chinese ambassador in India – for the invasion of Tibet by Chinese troops about 7 October 1950.
Six days later, Mao sent two hundred thousand troops into Korea, and Tibet’s plight was lost in the shadows of that titanic confrontation.
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Sixty-six years after China’s invasion, I stood on a terrace in the Jokhang, Tibet’s most sacred temple, looking down on pilgrims prostrating themselves on flagstones at the temple’s door, polished to a bright sheen by countless generations before them. During the Cultural Revolution the courtyard beneath my feet had been converted into a pigsty and later a guest house before being rather haphazardly restored following Mao’s death. It is, though, one of the few parts of the city of Lhasa that Hugh Richardson would still recognise. When he lived there, the city had a population of around thirty thousand. Now it’s home to something like ten times that number. Lhasa as Richardson knew it, or at least its street plan, is now its central kernel: the old city, dominated by Tibetans. The rest is pretty much like any other big Han Chinese town. He would, I imagine, be gratified to see so many geraniums, a flower he introduced, being nurtured by the city’s gardeners. And to see so many trees in the city, shading new wide boulevards in areas that were pasture when he was here, although they hardly compensate for the unregulated plundering of southern Tibet’s forests for China’s construction industry.
When I first came to Lhasa, more than twenty years ago, the old Tibetan houses round the Barkhor, the street that circles the Jokhang, were being torn down. It was agonising to watch. Han Suyin had boasted in 1975 that ‘beautiful old houses belonging to Tibetan nobility are being kept, cleaned and repaired’. The opposite was true. Houses were left to rot and become unsafe, easing their eventual demolition in favour of modern concrete. Tibet had almost no industry when I first arrived but cement was an exception. In the 1990s Lhasa was still dominated by vast cement factories that poisoned their workers. People, admittedly mostly children, still defecated in the street. Now it’s much cleaner, a modern and far more prosperous town than it had been under Mao. There’s a hi-tech, high-altitude railway bringing millions of Chinese tourists. The Barkhor is no longer a demolition site, but a smart arcade of shops, which often surprises Western tourists, some of whom may wonder if that’s appropriate in Lha sa, the place of the gods. In fact, commerce was always part of the pilgrim’s experience. It was how the monks made their money.
Walking the circuit at dusk, the smell of juniper smoke hanging in the air, you are still surrounded by Tibetans muttering prayers and spinning prayer wheels. It’s rather special to share in what feels like an intense community spirit, although it is always rash to make assumptions in this contested city. As the activist–academic Robert Barnett put it:
A foreigner always has limited access to the associations that hover around the streets and buildings of another people’s city, but in Tibet even visitors fluent in the language are left to guess whether their more political conceptions are shared by local people.
Ordinary Tibetans at the entrances to the Barkhor seemed fairly resigned to being searched for lighters, a consequence of the self-immolation campaign, and having their bags put through X-ray machines. But I couldn’t tell how they really felt and I wasn’t about to ask. Among the biggest changes between my first visit to Tibet in 1995 and my last in 2016 was the breadth and depth of surveillance the state has managed to achieve. The vehicle I travelled in was required to download its satellite-tracking data to the police. Far from Lhasa, I’d watched new security cameras being installed on gantries across the highway. I revisited remote villages where twenty years ago there had been little evidence of the state. Now there was a small police station. The tendrils of the state reach ever deeper and further. Cash machines have been installed with face-recognition software and there are plans to do the same with Lhasa’s taxis. In the future, China will surveille how Tibetans walk, using gait-recognition software, a more accurate system even than reading their faces.
Technologies like this might have something to offer citizens whose rights are protected by independent judiciaries. In China, they look like paranoia: the tools of a colossal polity anxious about the limits of its control. As an issue, Tibet has become a useful resource for Chinese nationalist
s. No government call for national unity against the Dalai Lama’s splittist intrigues goes unheeded, as posts from ordinary citizens on China’s social media testify. Chinese people are welcome to express their outrage when former colonial powers lecture China on internal matters. No communist party cadre prospers arguing for a more tolerant line. In the West, Tibet is almost synonymous with Buddhism, a philosophically rich alternative to the environmentally destructive consumerism China has used to transform its economy. In China, the Dalai Lama and Tibet’s government in exile are inflammatory reminders of China’s humiliation at the hands of greedy imperialists.
There are around six million Tibetans living in the Tibet Autonomous Region and the various autonomous prefectures with Tibetan populations. That’s some 0.4 per cent of China’s population, in a quarter of its territory. In the last seventy years China has starved, murdered, tortured, imprisoned, bribed, and marginalised Tibetans. This systematic hostility hasn’t stopped them from wanting to remain Tibetan, just as the Chinese feel no less Chinese for having also endured the horrors of Mao’s famine and the Cultural Revolution. Identity, it turns out, is not, as Mao believed, a tap; you cannot reach inside someone else’s mind and turn it off. In the letters Baba Phuntsok Wangyal wrote to the former president of China Hu Jintao, in which he made a cogent socialist argument for real autonomy for Tibet within a sovereign China and the return of the Dalai Lama, he finished with a warning: ‘Comrade Jintao, a single matchstick is enough for the arsonist, but putting out the fire would take a great effort.’ Baba Phuntsok died aged ninety-two at the end of March 2014. That month three more young Tibetans had burned themselves to death.
20
Claiming Chomolungma
It was gloomy in Liz Hawley’s Kathmandu apartment but nicely so, a drowsy refuge from the hot pre-monsoon sun and the chaos outside in Dilli Bazar. Everything was precisely arranged, the papers on her desk and the cushions on chairs that looked severe but were surprisingly comfortable. This was in 2015, when Liz was ninety-one. When I met her first in the mid 1990s, she was like one of the city’s sparrows, flitting busily between hotels to meet the leader of every climbing expedition in town, recording what they planned to do and afterwards what they had or had not done, before jumping in her sky-blue Volkswagen to move on to the next one. And like the city’s sparrows, crowded out these days by construction and pollution, Liz was nearing the end. She was frail, and cross about it, but pushed this unwelcome development aside with a wry twist of her mouth. When she sank onto a small sofa across from me, her face became lost in the shadows but her voice was as firm as ever. I closed my eyes and listened.
Liz was reminiscing about B P Koirala, the Nepali prime minister whom King Mahendra had arrested and imprisoned in December 1960, not long after she settled in Kathmandu and began stringing for American news outlets. She had planned to go trekking with B P that month to write him up for Life magazine: Nepal’s democratic visionary in the mountains of his homeland. Her story about him had had to wait more than twenty years. In July 1982 she was at Bangkok airport for her flight to Kathmandu, heading home from her annual trip to see her mother, when she spotted B P’s brother Girija at the airline’s desk. B P, she discovered, had been told his throat cancer was out of control and Girija was taking him back to Nepal to die. He was laid on the floor in business class and Liz spent the flight making notes for an article, going forward to check facts with both of them. B P died that night, even before Liz had finished her piece, which she filed with Reuters. At the age of fifty-eight, she’d made the front page of the New York Times.
Despite half a century in Nepal, you could still hear New England in her voice, an accent her mother had been determined Liz acquire after her years as a young girl in the Midwest. Her manner was direct and rather grand and could topple into rudeness. I liked to imagine Liz in 1950s Manhattan, on her way from her Midtown apartment up Fifth Avenue to the Rockefeller Center, where she worked for eleven years as a researcher for Fortune magazine: a formidable background in the sanctity of facts but also the glass ceiling for a woman in that era. Realising this and becoming a little bored, in her mid thirties she elected to travel for a while and do some reporting. Nepal was at first one more stop on a long itinerary that began with observing communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, then afterwards Beirut, where she met the double agent Kim Philby and his father John, who had known her hero, the great Middle East explorer Gertrude Bell. In Cairo, she climbed the Great Pyramid by moonlight. Karachi was just another ugly South Asian city that had grown too fast; Kathmandu, when she arrived in February 1959, was a peaceful contrast, green and beautiful, ‘a kind of fairy-tale mirage’ as Liz described it, the myth of ‘timeless Asia’.
In Delhi she had picked up an assignment from Time magazine’s bureau to cover Nepal’s first general election, which B P Koirala won handsomely. Mahendra had agreed to the vote reluctantly and only because he was sure it would result in a divided parliament he could easily dominate. Liz moved among Nepal’s political elite with Cyril Dunn of The Observer and Elie Abel, a friend from the New York Times who as Delhi correspondent would cover the Lhasa Uprising that spring. It all seemed so much more exciting than researching other peoples’ stories in the archives of Fortune. When she got back to New York, she wandered round Union Square eating a chocolate sundae and watching the crowds. ‘This is great,’ she told herself, ‘but it’s not the real world.’ She imagined herself instead in Nepal, ‘a place where you can see what the world is becoming’. A place also where she could live cheaply and still employ staff: stretch out a little. Eighteen months after her first visit, and with a couple of freelance contracts in her pocket, Hawley was back in Kathmandu, this time for good.
She had chosen an auspicious moment to set up as a journalist and researcher in the Himalaya. During her absence, following China’s ruthless crackdown in the aftermath of the Lhasa Uprising of March 1959, tension had risen steadily. Nehru had offered shelter to the Dalai Lama but not much else – certainly negligible political support – believing as a consequence he could ride out China’s annoyance without damaging his strategic interests. He was wrong about this. Beijing was infuriated when the Dalai Lama was allowed to give a press conference from his Indian exile. Despite his youth, he was showing himself to be a capable political leader and began to attract positive global media attention. Mao was struggling in the spring of 1959 with the negative consequences of the Great Leap Forward; Nehru had pressed on an open wound, pain that was reflected in aggressive anti-Nehru articles in the People’s Daily, personally overseen by Mao: ‘The Indian big bourgeoisie maintains innumerable links with imperialism,’ the paper warned. Any goodwill generated from India’s acceptance in 1954 of China’s rule of Tibet evaporated. Nehru’s response was that of a disappointed teacher:
I have been greatly distressed at the tone of the comments and the charges made against India by responsible people in China. They have used the language of the cold war regardless of truth and propriety.
Such loftiness annoyed China; Zhou Enlai told Henry Kissinger in 1973 that China wanted ‘to keep down his [Nehru’s] cockiness’. The joke in India was how the optimistic slogan Hindi-Chini bhai bhai, the ‘Indians and Chinese are brothers’, had been replaced with ‘Hindi-Chini bye-bye’.
If Tibet provoked this tension, as Mao later told Nepali diplomats, the Himalayan border between China and India was the trigger for conflict. After the communists came to power in 1950, Chinese maps started showing large tracts of the Himalaya, whose borders had been regarded as settled for generations, now belonging to the People’s Republic. In south-west Xinjiang, cadres who met inhabitants of Ladakh, until then an Indian region, told them their home was now also part of China. In 1953, to link the remote western province of Xinjiang with Tibet, China began driving a road across the Aksai Chin, desolate country north-east of Ladakh that Delhi regarded as within the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. The following year, India and China had signed a treaty legitimisi
ng China’s position in Tibet, the preamble of which is famous for articulating Nehru’s ‘five virtues’, the basis for India’s peaceful coexistence with foreign powers. Mao read this as complacency, a gift China could exploit, and the communists continued with their plans: the road was completed in 1957. In fact, American and presumably Indian intelligence had known about it from the start, thanks to spy networks in Kashgar, but Nehru, mindful of his earlier pronouncements about socialism and the rise of Asia, kept the road’s existence a secret from the Indian people; as late as April 1959, even after the Lhasa Uprising, Nehru was still denying the Aksai Chin road crossed Indian territory.
Although after 1950 there were Chinese troops in Gartok in western Tibet, many regions of the Tibetan Himalaya, including Dingri, north of Everest, saw little of the communists in the following years. That changed after the Lhasa Uprising, as units of the People’s Liberation Army arrived to restore order. Facing them in India were lightly armed border forces. With gathering speed, China’s true intentions in the Himalaya were revealed. On 26 August 1959 there was an exchange of fire between Chinese and Indian troops at Longju on the McMahon Line in the eastern Himalaya and an Indian soldier was captured. Chinese troops had made incursions across the border before but the Indian public got to hear about this one, raising the political temperature. Then a letter arrived in Delhi from Zhou Enlai laying claim to 130,000 square kilometres of Indian territory in the Himalaya. (‘I must frankly say,’ Nehru replied, ‘that your letter of 8 September has come as a great shock to us.’) Indian patrols were ordered along the Ladakh frontier, even though Nehru had explicitly prohibited them, and a group of Indian reserve police officers were ambushed near the Kongka La, roughly a hundred and sixty kilometres east of Leh. There was a brief, dramatic stand-off, as the Indian officer Karam Singh stooped to pick up a handful of dirt and let it fall from his hand, implying this was Indian soil. The Chinese officer did the same. (The irony was that this territory had once been part of a greater Tibet and was still culturally Tibetan.) Then Chinese heavy machine guns opened up from the hillside opposite, catching the Indians in a deadly crossfire. Eleven policemen died, one from untreated wounds; others were captured, including Karam Singh, who was tortured into signing a confession that the Indians had been on Chinese territory and were consequently responsible for the violence.