A History of Modern Tibet, Volume 3: The Storm Clouds Descend, 1955–1957

A History of Modern Tibet,

Volume 3

Book

The Philip E. Lilienthal imprint honors special books in commemoration of a man whose work at University of California Press from 1954 to 1979 was marked by dedication to young authors and to high standards in the field of Asian Studies. Friends, family, authors, and foundations have together endowed the Lilienthal Fund, which enables UC Press to publish under this imprint selected books in a way that reflects the taste and judgment of a great and beloved editor.

A History of Modern Tibet,

Volume 3

The Storm Clouds Descend: 1955–1957

Melvyn C. Goldstein

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BerkeleyLos AngelesLondon

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Goldstein, Melvyn C.

A history of modern Tibet. Volume 3, The storm clouds descend, 1955–1957 / Melvyn C. Goldstein.

pagescm

Continues: A history of modern Tibet. Volume 2, The calm before the storm, 1951–1955.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-27651-2 (hardback)

ISBN 978-0-520-95671-1 (e-book)

Tibet Autonomous Region (China)—History—1951–2. Tibet Autonomous Region (China)—Politics and government—1951–I. Goldstein, Melvyn C. History of modern Tibet. Volume 2, The calm before the storm, 1951–1955. II. Title. III. Title: storm clouds descend, 1955–1957.

DS786.G6352013

951’.505—dc23 2013030870

Manufactured in the United States of America

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For my sister, Lyn, and my brother, Jay,

and, as ever, for CMB

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Philip E. Lilienthal Asian Studies Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from Sally Lilienthal.

We can be almost certain of being wrong about the future if we are wrong about the past.

—G.K. CHESTERTON

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Glossary of Key People and Terms

Ganzi County Names in Tibetan and Chinese

  1.First Steps

  2.Pushback

  3.Mao’s Socialist Transformation Campaign and Democratic Reforms in Sichuan

  4.The Khamba Uprising Begins

  5.The Rise of Jenkhentsisum

  6.Jenkhentsisum Expands and India Invites the Dalai Lama

  7.The Mönlam Incident of 1956 and Its Aftermath

  8.The Chinese Government Responds to the Uprising

  9.The Preparatory Committee for the Tibet Autonomous Region (PCTAR)

10.Fan Ming’s Great Expansion

11.The Dalai Lama Visits India

12.The Khambas, JKTS, and the CIA

13.The Dalai Lama Returns

14.The Great Contraction and the Great Discontinuance

15.Final Thoughts

Appendix A. Appeal of Thubten Nyenjik [JKTS] to the Queen of England

Appendix B. Correct Tibetan Spellings

References

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

  1.Kalön Surkhang, 1958

  2.Kalön Ngabö, 1950s

  3.The Dalai Lama and Lord Chamberlain Phala, 1950s

  4.Depön Sambo and Phala Rimshi, 1956

  5.Alo Chöndze, date unknown

  6.Tshatrü Rinpoche, 1950s

  7.The Nechung oracle in trance, 1950s

  8.Litang Monastery (from the front), 2011

  9.Litang Monastery (from behind), 2011

10.Tsipön Shakabpa and his brother Tregang Khenjung, 1947 or 1948

11.The Dalai Lama and his brothers in India, 1956

12.Monks at the Mönlam Prayer Festival, 1958

13.Vendor selling ammunition in Lhasa’s Bargor market, 1950s

14.Inaugural meeting of the Preparatory Committee for the Tibet Autonomous Region, April 1956

15.Chamdo, 1950s

16.Airport at Damshung, 1956

17.Tan Guansan, Chen Jinbo, Zhang Guohua, Li Ju, and Ya Hanzhang, 1950s

18.Prime Minister Nehru, the Dalai Lama, and Vice President Radhakrishnan, Delhi, 1956

19.The Panchen Lama, the Dalai Lama, Premier Zhou Enlai, and Prime Minister Nehru, Delhi, 1956

20.Prime Minister Nehru, the Dalai Lama, and the Panchen Lama, Delhi, 1956

MAPS

  1.China

  2.Kalimpong to Lhasa Corridor

  3.Ganzi Prefecture Counties

  4.Kham and Amdo

  5.The Northeast Frontier Agency

  6.Lhasa City (ca. 1950s)

PREFACE

My first exposure to the intricacies of modern Tibetan history occurred in 1964 while I was a PhD student in anthropology and Tibetan studies at the University of Washington. The university’s Far East and Russian Institute invited Wangchen Gelek Surkhang, the famous kalön (Kashag minister) in the traditional Tibetan government, to campus for a year to participate in its Inner Asia Project, and he ended up living with me for that year. Although I was officially in the Anthropology Department, I had received my BA and MA degrees in history from the University of Michigan and was then immersed in trying to understand modern Tibetan society and history, since my dissertation project was going to be a reconstruction of the Tibetan government and socioeconomic system through interviews with Tibetan refugees in India. Consequently, I took Surkhang’s visit as an opportunity to clarify the many things I had been puzzling over concerning Tibetan history and society.

It was an amazing year. Typically, we would finish dinner and then retire to the living room for a cup of tea and conversation about modern historical events and figures and whatever else Kalön Surkhang felt like discussing. Surkhang, who had an amazing, almost photographic memory for detail, would regale me with accounts of the great events and people in modern Tibetan history, such as Reting Rinpoche, Lungshar, Kunphela, Tsarong Dzasa, Trimön, Kapshöba, and Khyungram. In retrospect, it was somewhat analogous to a student studying the Vietnam era having a yearlong independent studies course with Henry Kissinger.

It did not take long for me to realize that a different level of analysis than currently existed in the classic historical studies such as Hugh Richardson’s Tibet and Its History was needed to meaningfully understand modern Tibetan history, and I made a commitment to myself to undertake to write such a history as soon as I received my PhD in anthropology and got settled into academia.

All of that took much longer than anticipated, and it was not until 1980 that I was able to free up the time to make a concerted effort to collect the primary data that existed in British and U.S. archives and conduct extensive oral history interviews with former officials. My initial plan to write a new, more detailed and nuanced single-volume history of modern Tibet has turned into a four-volume modern history project, two of which are completed, with this volume being number three.

From the start, I divided modern Tibetan history into three periods. The first extended from 1913 to 1951 and was the period during which Tibet operated as a de facto independent polity ruled by the Dalai Lama and a bureaucracy comprised of monk and aristocratic officials. That first period was the subject of volume 1, A History of Modern Tibet, 1913–1951: The Demise of the Lamaist State.

The second period was the era between the end of the de facto independent polity in 1951 and the end of the Tibetan government and estate system after the failed Tibetan uprising in 1959. The first half of that period, 1951–1955, was covered in volume 2, A History of Modern Tibet: The Calm before the Storm, 1951–1955.

I originally planned for the current volume—volume 3—to cover the rest of the period (i.e., 1955–1959), but after I started work, it became apparent that there was too much new material from both Chinese and Tibetan sources to compress it into a single volume, so I decided to divide the period into two. Volume 3, therefore, begins with the return of the Dalai Lama from his four-month visit to China in June 1955 and ends in the spring of 1957, when two major events occurred.

On the Tibetan side, despite being constantly pressured to enter exile to head an émigré organization, the Dalai Lama decided it was best to return, and he arrived in Lhasa on 1 April 1957.

On the Chinese side, at about the same time, Mao Zedong also made a major decision not to implement reforms in Tibet and to dismantle Fan Ming’s Great Expansion—through which Fan was preparing to start democratic reforms in Tibet—and replace it with his own Great Contraction.

What happened after this, and why, will be the subject of the next and last volume.

WRITING CONTEMPORARY TIBETAN HISTORY

The late Tsipön Shakabpa, one of the great figures in modern Tibetan history and politics, once told me not to write anything that would hurt the Tibetan cause. I understood his view, but in the end, when it came time to write up my research on Tibetan history, as an American academic I could not do that—any more than I could have ignored Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo while writing a history of the United States in the Middle East because it would hurt the reputation and relations of the United States in the Arab world.

My approach in this volume, therefore, is as it was in the two previous history volumes. That is, I present a detailed account of modern Tibet that moves beyond simple generalizations and naive, black-and-white representations to examine the complex centripetal and centrifugal forces at play as diverse actors sought to control the flow of events in accordance with very different ideologies, tactics, and strategies. The history of this period is messy and chaotic and confused, and what might have been is as interesting as what was. In the end, I hope to illuminate the history of the 1950s at a new level of detail and complexity, but in a balanced fashion, without regard to how this information may affect the current conflict over the political status of Tibet with respect to China, or whether parts of it contradict or disprove entrenched beliefs and widely held stereotypes.

SOURCES

Primary Materials: Government Records and Documents

The United States government provided limited access to State Department documents via the National Archives and the United States Foreign Relations publication series, but many documents have been withheld and were not released despite my freedom of information requests and appeals. The CIA and the National Security Agency released virtually no documents. As absurd as this may sound five and a half decades after these events occurred, it was part of the reality I encountered while conducting this research.

The British national archives (the Public Records Office) contained some materials on this period, but this corpus was limited in quality and quantity, particularly for the years after 1953, when the government of India stopped sending copies of its Lhasa Mission’s monthly reports to London.

Chinese government archives were not available to me, but a sizable group of particularly important Chinese government documents was obtained by me in India, where they had been taken at the end of the Cultural Revolution. I refer to them collectively in the text as Dui xizang gongzuo de zhongyao zhishi (Important Instructions on the Work in Tibet) and in footnotes as DPRC (documents from the People’s Republic of China). Other important Chinese documents were found in compilations of official documents published in China—for example, compendiums of Mao Zedong’s and Zhou Enlai’s comments and speeches on Tibet—as well as in books on the period. Similarly, some important books and manuscripts were made available to me by the Tibetan government-in-exile and by the Library of Tibet Works and Archives in Dharamsala, India.

In addition, the Shakabpa family has kindly made available to me a number of documents from the library of the late T.W.D. (Tsipön) Shakabpa, including several volumes of the handwritten diary he kept for Jenkhentsisum, the important émigré organization based in Kalimpong/Darjeeling. This diary consists of chronological entries handwritten in school copybooks in cursive script by Tsipön Shakabpa, one of the group’s three principals, who also acted as its secretary because of his excellent Tibetan. The entries discuss the content of internal and external meetings, as well as reports of conversations the three principals had with others.

Taken together, these primary data provided an invaluable window into the history of the 1950s. There are, to be sure, still gaps and confusions whose clarification will have to wait until the remaining archival materials are released, but the size and quality of the corpus of primary materials that were available for this history are important and unprecedented. These materials have allowed me to engage in an analysis of this period at a level of complexity far deeper than heretofore possible.

Since most of the documents in this volume are not available elsewhere to readers, as in the previously published volumes I have included when possible the full text of relevant documents, so that readers can see the actual content of the whole document rather than have to depend on my one- or two-sentence summaries. In addition, for the same reason, in many cases I have also provided the original Tibetan and Chinese of key clauses (in Chinese pinyin and Tibetan romanization).

Oral Historical Data

Oral history—the collection of primary historical data by interviewing eyewitnesses concerning some period or event—can provide invaluable information as a supplement to government documents and is especially useful when such records are not readily available. Funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (RO-22251–91 and RO-22754–94) enabled interviews on the 1950s to be conducted with over one hundred former officials and other relevant individuals in China, India, Nepal, England, and North America. The interviewees included important Tibetan figures such as the Dalai Lama, Ngabö, Lhalu, Gyalo Thondup, Taktse Rinpoche, and Takla (Phüntso Tashi), as well as important Chinese and Tibetan cadres such as Fan Ming, Zhang Xiangming, Jambey Gyatso, and Phüntso Wangye. Several former members of the CIA who were involved with Tibet at that time, such as Frank Holober, John Reagan, John Rowland, and Roger McCarthy, were also interviewed in person and by phone.

In addition, parts of the interviews originally conducted for volume 1 of this modern Tibetan history series were also utilized. These were collected mostly in India with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (RO-20261–82 and RO-20886–85).

In general, most of our interviews were recorded on audiotape in people’s homes, and in many cases follow-up visits were made at a later date to clarify information in the initial interviews or to cover events not discussed initially. The English transcripts of these interviews compose a corpus of over six thousand pages.

Dr. Paljor Tsarong conducted most of the interviews in India, either alone or with me, and I did the interviews in England, Hong Kong, Tibet, and other parts of China. Both Dr. Tsarong and I conducted interviews in the United States.

Permission was also kindly granted to utilize transcripts of several important interviews conducted in Dharamsala by the Tibetan government-in-exile’s Publicity Office and by the Library of Tibet Works and Archives, some of which were from key Tibetan officials like Phala, Thubden Wönden, who did not give other interviews.

When contradictory versions of important events were collected, these were evaluated in accordance with (1) an understanding of how the traditional system operated, (2) other accounts, (3) the source of the subject’s information (hearsay or firsthand), (4) the relationship of the subject to the event—for example, whether he was a relative or ally of the actors in the event—and (5) the subject’s reputation for duplicity or honesty. On many important issues a decision had to be made regarding which version to accept, and I spent a great deal of time trying to clarify issues by reinterviewing and conducting interviews with new individuals. Although alternative explanations of incidents are sometimes presented, usually in footnotes, it was not always possible or desirable to do so.

These interviews are currently being translated and edited for inclusion in a Tibet Oral History Online Archive Project at the Center for Research on Tibet under my editorship, with support from the Henry Luce Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities (RO-22251–91, RZ-20585–00, RZ-50326–05, RZ-50845–08). This archive is expected to eventually be available to scholars and students on the Internet as a Library of Congress, Asian Division, Web archive.

Restricted Circulation (Ch. Neibu) Publications from China

I was fortunate to obtain several important sources of data from China that were published on a restricted circulation basis—that is, they were not available to the general public. One of these is the official Zhonggong xizang dangshi dashiji (1949–94) (Chronology of Major Events in the History of the CCP in Tibet, 1949–94). It is organized as a chronological diary of events and includes abstracts and citations from documents, telegrams, and so forth that were published in several versions covering different spans of history. In addition, I was able to utilize a number of important books published in China that were also either neibu or had been published briefly but then withdrawn from circulation—for example, Ji Youquan’s 1993 White Snow (Bai xue).

Memoirs and Autobiographies

Published accounts on the period written by participants constituted another important source of information. These memoir materials were published in China and India in both Tibetan and Chinese languages and, in a few cases, English. They range from books such as those written by Alo Chöndze, Kundeling, Fan Ming, and Namseling to articles in journals or magazines and collected volumes, such as Gsar brje’i dran tho (Reminiscences of the Revolution).

Newspapers and Secondary Sources

Published magazine articles from China during this period were utilized via the Survey of China Mainland Press series. Newspapers from Western countries and India were also consulted, as was the Tibetan-language newspaper published in Kalimpong called Yul phyogs so so’i gsar ‘gyur me long (the Mirror of World News, better known in English simply as the Tibetan Mirror). Books published in China and the West were, of course, also consulted. Many of these included some primary interview data or, on the Chinese side, government records otherwise unavailable to me. A set of issues of the Bod ljongs nyin re’i tshags par (Tibet Daily Newspaper) from the 1950s was also utilized.

Consequently, despite the lack of full access to official governmental records, this study is based on a substantial corpus of primary information.

CITATION CONVENTIONS

Throughout the book, square brackets are used for comments or clarifications that I have added. For example, in the following quotation, I added If this occurs for the reader’s clarification:

[If this occurs] we absolutely will fight back militarily and contend for victory according to the principle of reasonable, moderate, and beneficial to us [Ch. youli youli youjie].

The phrase Ch. youli youli youjie represents the original Chinese phrase in pinyin that was translated as reasonable, moderate, and beneficial to us.

ROMANIZATION CONVENTIONS

Tibetan written and spoken forms diverge considerably in that the written form contains consonant clusters that are not pronounced. For example, the written Tibetan word bsgrubs is actually pronounced drub, and rtsis dpon is pronounced tsipön. Throughout the narrative of this book, with only a few exceptions, only the spoken (phonetic) pronunciation is used; but the proper Tibetan spelling of each phonetic rendition of a Tibetan word, according to the system of T.V. Wylie (1959), is given in romanization at the end of the book in appendix B, Correct Tibetan Spellings.

References to an article or book written in Tibetan cite the author’s name in romanized type. However, given the divergence between spoken and written Tibetan, when the name of the Tibetan author also appears in the narrative in phonetic form, the phonetic version of his name is included in the written reference to enable readers to connect the person in the text and the author of the book or article—for example: Zhwa sgab pa [Shakabpa], Dbang phyug bde ldan. 1976.

The phonetic rendering of Tibetan names has no universally accepted standard, so sometimes Tibetan names and terms cited in quotations vary considerably from those used in the book’s text. For example, Dzongpön is spelled in some quotations as Jongpoen, and Lobsang Samden is sometimes written as Lopsang Samten.

Chinese names are cited with the family name before the personal name—for example, in Zhang Guohua, Zhang is the family name and Guohua is the personal name. Tibetan names are listed with the family name first, followed by a comma and then the personal name. The comma is necessary, since not all Tibetans have family names. For example, in Changöba, Dorje Ngüdrub, the family name is Changöba, and the personal name is Dorje Ngüdrub. However, in Tsering Dolma, there is no family name, and Tsering Dolma is entirely the personal name.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This study would not have been possible without the assistance of many individuals in and outside of China who helped point me to key questions and issues, as well as to the actors still alive who could shed light on these questions. They, and the many individuals who agreed to be interviewed, did not do this for money, but because they felt strongly that future generations of Tibetans and Chinese should know what happened in the 1950s. There is no way to repay their advice and assistance, and it is regrettable that in many instances their names will have to remain anonymous. But their wish—that future generations would have access to an objective and nonpartisan account of what happened—was my guiding light throughout the project.

I express special thanks to the Shakabpa family for giving me access to valuable letters and documents from one of the great figures in modern Tibetan history, the late Tsipön Shakabpa. Special thanks also go to Chen Zonglie, an award-winning photojournalist who worked as a photographer for the Tibet People’s Daily for twenty-five years. He very kindly showed me his magnificent photographic collection and gave me permission to use images from it in this book.

In addition, I am grateful to a number of scholars and experts, such as John Dolfin, Dibyesh Anand, and Paljor Tsarong, for helping to identify actors in the history, and to Steve Harrell and his students at the University of Washington for reading a draft of the chapters dealing with Sichuan and making very helpful comments. And I specially thank Paljor Tsarong; John Dolfin; Hung, Ho-fung; Brantly Womack; and an anonymous reader for commenting on a draft of this book and saving me from making a number of errors in fact and tone. Of course, in the end, I am solely responsible for the content of this book.

My thanks also go to Reed Malcolm, my longtime editor at the University of California Press. As in the past, he and his staff supported my project and made it easy for me to focus on finishing the manuscript.

And last, but certainly not least, I thank the many excellent Chinese and American Case Western Reserve University students who worked for the university’s Center for Research on Tibet on this project. I especially thank T.N. Shelling, a brilliant Tibetan scholar who was formerly a Tibetan government official, and who worked at the Center for many years helping me to understand the nuances of the traditional Tibetan government while taking the lead in translating Tibetan documents and interviews.

ABBREVIATIONS

GLOSSARY OF KEY PEOPLE AND TERMS

GANZI COUNTY NAMES IN TIBETAN AND CHINESE

MAP 1. China

MAP 2. Kalimpong to Lhasa Corridor

MAP 3. Ganzi Prefecture Counties

MAP 4. Kham and Amdo

MAP 5. The Northeast Frontier Agency

MAP 6. Lhasa City (ca. 1950s)

1

First Steps

BACKGROUND

When the Dalai Lama returned from his trip to Beijing in 1955, five years had passed since the Chinese had invaded Tibet’s easternmost province, in October 1950.¹ Mao at that time had decided to make Tibet a part of China for nationalistic and geopolitical reasons and was willing to do so entirely by force if need be, although he preferred to accomplish it through peaceful liberation—that is, through a written agreement with the Tibetan government/Dalai Lama. Mao understood that Tibet was unlike all other areas that Beijing sought to liberate, in the sense that after the fall of the Qing dynasty, despite Chinese claims that Tibet was part of China, it operated as a de facto independent country. Not surprisingly, the Tibetan government did not want to be liberated and had deployed most of its armed forces—about six thousand regular and militia troops—to defend the Sino-Tibetan border (the Upper Yangtze River).²

Mao, of course, knew that achieving peaceful liberation would not be easy, so he employed a classic carrot-and-stick strategy that offered the Dalai Lama especially attractive terms to return to the motherland while simultaneously threatening a full-scale military invasion if he did not. Beijing, therefore, called for the Dalai Lama to send a negotiating delegation to Beijing and, when the Tibetan representatives did not arrive in a timely fashion, unleashed the stick, ordering the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to invade Chamdo, Tibet’s easternmost province. After a two-week blitzkrieg-like offensive, the PLA surrounded and captured the Tibetan troops, including the Tibet governor general and his staff. The total defeat of the main Tibetan army left the road to Lhasa wide open to further invasion, but since Mao really sought peaceful liberation rather than military conquest, he instructed the PLA to stop and wait while China renewed its earlier call to the Dalai Lama to send representatives to negotiate the terms of an agreement to become part of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Mao commented on this in a telegram to the Southwest Bureau (SWB):³

After you take Chamdo, leave only three thousand of our people there during the winter. Do not get to Lhasa this year. Withdraw our main forces to Ganzi [Xikang Province]. From the Tibetans’ point of view, they may take this as a friendly gesture by us.

Mao Zedong

23 August⁴

The Tibetan government responded to the defeat by moving the Dalai Lama to the Indian border, where he could easily escape if the Chinese invasion continued toward Lhasa, and by desperately trying to secure assistance from countries it had dealt with in the past, such as Britain, the United States, and India, as well as the UN. Tibet, however, received no assistance. The West was fighting to stop Communist aggression in Korea, but would not do the same for Tibet. That left the Tibetan government with two bad options: to fight militarily as best they could until the end, or to negotiate to secure whatever they could.

The PLA had over one million battle-hardened troops in uniform at that time, about forty thousand of which were actively participating in the Tibet campaign, so conventional warfare against the PLA, as Chamdo had demonstrated, stood no chance of success. However, a guerrilla strategy might well have been effective given Tibet’s high altitude, difficult mountain terrain, and total absence of motorable roads. Supplies for a PLA force invading Lhasa from Chamdo would have had to be sent over 650 miles on pack animals, so coordinated guerrilla attacks might have slowed down the PLA’s advance and bought more time for the Tibetan government to garner support from the international community and the UN.

Tibet, however, did not do that, because it was not prepared to organize and implement a guerrilla strategy. After it became a de facto independent polity in 1913, Tibet had consciously declined to modernize. In particular it had refused to create a modern and effective army and so had no professionally trained military corps in 1950. Its generals and commanders in chief were regular government officials who were appointed for short terms to these military positions and had virtually no special military training or experience.⁵ Not surprisingly, no contingency plans had been prepared to oppose the PLA through guerrilla warfare should the Chamdo army be defeated. Consequently, with its army decimated, its morale low, and the PLA poised to launch a full-scale invasion of its heartland, the Tibetan government and the Dalai Lama opted to negotiate and reluctantly sent two delegations to Beijing, one from Chamdo headed by the captured governor general, Kalön Ngabö, and another from Yadong (Tib. Tromo) through India. They arrived in late April 1951.

The Tibetan representatives had no real negotiating points, so they agreed to start the discussions using a ten-point Chinese document that laid out terms for what a peaceful liberation agreement might look like. This document, initially drafted by the Southwest Bureau under Deng Xiaoping, embodied the core of Mao’s Tibet policy and was the carrot in Mao’s carrot-and-stick strategy.⁶ It became the basis of the Seventeen-Point Agreement that was signed on 23 May 1951 and which gave China what Mao wanted—Tibet formally accepted that it was part of China and agreed to allow Chinese troops and officials to enter Tibet peacefully. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had achieved its paramount goal in Tibet—the legitimization of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet.

In return, China agreed to allow the Dalai Lama and his government to continue to administer Tibet internally with its own laws and officials, basically as it had been doing up to then. At the same time, it also allowed the huge monastic establishment and the ubiquitous manorial estate system to continue to operate unchanged until such a time that the elite and masses in Tibet agreed to accept reforms. In other words, unlike in inland (neidi) China,⁷ where the traditional sociopolitical system and elites had been totally destroyed in the land reform movement right after liberation, in Tibet, Beijing agreed to allow the traditional sociopolitical system to remain intact for some unspecified time. Land and class reforms (called democratic reforms in Tibet) would need to be implemented eventually, but not until Tibetans were ready to accept such changes, although how to know when that point was reached was never clearly discussed let alone operationalized in the Seventeen-Point Agreement. Nevertheless, for the time being the CCP and PLA would have to work with the Tibetan government, not replace it. Mao’s carrot, therefore, the Seventeen-Point Agreement, became the initial legal framework for Sino-Tibetan relations.

Over the next six months, roughly eight thousand Chinese troops and officials peacefully entered Lhasa, receiving polite welcomes by the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government. A new chapter in Tibetan history and Sino-Tibetan relations was under way.

Incorporating Tibet territorially, however, turned out to be the easy part of China’s goals for Tibet. The hard part was persuading the Tibetan elite and masses to have a positive attitude toward their new role as citizens of the PRC. Mao believed that long-term stability and security in Tibet were best obtained not by forcing compliance but by gradually winning over Tibetans. This ambitious goal of transforming Tibetans’ attitudes was at the heart of Mao’s top-down gradualist policy.

MAO’S GRADUALIST POLICY

Mao understood that the elite had the most to lose by reforms and would be the most hostile to them, but he also believed that trying to bypass the elite by going directly to the masses, although theoretically a possibility, was unlikely to yield positive results because of the backwardness of the masses and the powerful influence of religion—lamas and monks—over their attitudes and beliefs. The CCP’s options in Tibet were also limited because there were virtually no Han in Tibet who could be counted on to help them. Consequently, Mao was convinced that in Tibet the CCP’s initial efforts should concentrate on winning over the elite, especially the young Dalai Lama, rather than rushing to push for reforms using their theoretical natural allies, the masses. To facilitate this, Mao emphasized that when Tibet underwent reforms, these would be what he called peaceful reforms, in that the elite would receive compensation for their property and would be guaranteed subsequent income comparable to what they were accustomed to in the old society. In addition, the humiliating and vicious militant struggle sessions that were inflicted on the elite in inland China would not be held in Tibet.⁸ Many in the elite, in fact, were to be given positions in the new socialist institutions. Mao’s gradualist strategy, therefore, prioritized pragmatism over ideology and stipulated that work should proceed slowly and cautiously with respect to making changes to the traditional society. The cadres working in Tibet, therefore, were instructed repeatedly not to let their ideological enthusiasm for creating a fully socialist China impel them to start reforms in Tibet prematurely—that is, before the elite were ready—even if that meant having to leave the traditional system in place for some years. In the meantime, the CCP cadres were to treat the elite with respect and cordiality, despite their ongoing exploitation of the Tibetan masses (in the CCP’s view). Deng Xiaoping’s final instructions to the Sichuan troops under him who were about to leave for Tibet in 1950 illustrates this emphasis: "If the soldiers go to Tibet with the ideal of class struggle in their heads [as they did in the Han areas], when they get to Tibet and see the exploitation of the landlords they will become very anxious to intervene [and] so will do something against our [gradualist] policy. Therefore, in order for that not to happen, go to Tibet with one eye open and one eye shut."⁹

The Chinese who arrived in Lhasa, therefore, maintained a strict code of discipline and presented themselves as a new breed of Chinese—new Chinese (Tib. gyami sarpa)—who had come in friendship and brotherhood to help Tibetans. In this, they contrasted themselves with the old Chinese, the Guomindang (GMD) and the Qing dynasty, whom they said were arrogant and had come to exploit and oppress Tibetans. The PLA’s troops, therefore, from day one were under strict orders to expropriate nothing from the local people and to not respond to verbal insults or even to being jostled by Tibetans on the roads and in the markets. And they strictly followed this. A Chinese cadre in the Tibet Work Committee (TWC), the office of the Chinese Communist Party in Tibet (Ch. zhonggong xizang gongwei), recalled that initial period:

In the beginning, we were soldiers, but after arriving in Tibet we took off our uniforms and we became civil cadres. At that time, the discipline was very tight. We were not allowed to go to market recklessly. In those days, there were many times when the masses beat us with their fists and spit on us. We just had to clean up the spit and leave. We were not allowed to fight and scold them. The reason for tolerating this was the hope of leading them on a good path [winning them over].¹⁰

Local Tibetans had not known what to expect from these Red Chinese and so were pleasantly surprised by their mild-mannered and well-disciplined behavior. That, however, did not change the fact that they were still aggressors who had invaded Chamdo, killed many Tibetan troops there, and forced their government to accept Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. So together with some relief that the behavior of the Red Chinese was better than expected, they also felt anger and resentment at what had befallen Tibet. They feared, too, that the initial good behavior of these atheist Communists was not genuine, and that soon their true colors would show and Tibet’s great religion and way of life would come under attack.

The Tibetan elite initially responded to the presence of thousands of Han Chinese troops and officials in Lhasa and elsewhere in Tibet in a number of different ways that can roughly be aggregated into four broad categories.

The Kashag (Council of Ministers) was the main administrative office in the Dalai Lama’s government, and was the Tibetan government office that would deal directly with the Chinese in implementing the Seventeen-Point Agreement. Although the Kashag strongly disliked the large Chinese military presence in Tibet, Tibet’s hopeless military and diplomatic position led them, like Mao, to conclude that a pragmatic strategy should be utilized, so they tried to make the best of this bad situation by developing good working relations with the Chinese officials in keeping with the agreement. The kalöns (Kashag ministers) hoped that by acting cordial, cooperative, and professional, they could gain influence with the Chinese, which could affect the extent and rate of change that the traditional religious, political, and social institutional spheres would have to undergo. By contrast, they felt that angry confrontation and opposition might provoke the PLA to go on the attack and destroy traditional Tibet. One of the kalöns, Lhalu, explained that, in the first year, I didn’t think that the old society could continue, but I also didn’t think that it would vanish at once. I thought that the reforms would occur slowly, over time.¹¹ So the Kashag set off to pursue a strategy of working cooperatively with the TWC.

On the other hand, there was a second, quite small, segment of socially progressive government officials who had a very different view. Their desire for change and modernization had been thwarted by the religious conservatives who had thoroughly dominated the Tibetan political system for decades, so for them the arrival of the Chinese was a long-awaited opportunity to finally develop and modernize Tibet—for example, start newspapers and build schools, hospitals, roads, and the like with the help of the Chinese.

A third segment of the elite was exemplified by the two sitsabs (acting chief ministers) who openly and actively sought to oppose the Chinese however and whenever they could.¹² For these hard-line nationalists, whether or not the Chinese improved life in Tibet by building new schools or roads did not change the fact that the Chinese had invaded their peaceful country and were occupying it against the will of Tibetans. They wanted not some autonomy under close Chinese Communist control but complete freedom as had existed before 1951 in the de facto independence era, or at least the loose protectorate status they had held during the Qing dynasty era.¹³ Getting the Chinese troops and officials out of Tibet, or at least all but a small contingent, therefore, was their goal, and for the first year they tried hard to pressure the Chinese to revise the agreement and withdraw most if not all of their troops. In essence, the two sitsabs were working at cross-purposes with the Kashag, and neither office coordinated their activities. By mid-1952, the sitsabs, working with the newly created Tibetan People’s Association (which is discussed in chapter 2), had brought Lhasa to the verge of open violence. At this point the Kashag intervened to restore calm by persuading the Dalai Lama to remove the two sitsabs from power as the Chinese were demanding.

Finally, most of the Tibetan government’s lay and monk officials—that is, most of the elite—thought much like the Kashag. They did not want to be part of a Communist China and did not want a large contingent of Chinese troops stationed in Lhasa, but they did not see confrontation and violence as a useful strategy for dealing with the militarily dominant Chinese. As mentioned earlier, they had found that the Chinese troops and officials were not nearly as bad as they had previously feared. Troops and officials were showing great restraint in dealing with the populace and were not stealing or looting or bullying Tibetans, and unexpectedly they were also showing respect for core Tibetan institutions such as monks, monasteries, and temples. So in day-to-day life, the Tibetan government was administering Tibet much as it had been doing before their arrival, and its monk and lay officials were simply continuing to perform their government jobs as before, leaving the big decisions about Sino-Tibetan relations to the Kashag and the Dalai Lama.

Nevertheless, Mao’s gradualist policy did not mean that the CCP was not interested in making changes or that they had accepted a loose protectorate model for Tibet, as Wang Lixiong suggested when he wrote, The intention of the CCP . . . was to ‘manage’ the country from afar through something very like the Qing model.¹⁴ To the contrary, Mao and the Central Committee wanted to start to integrate Tibet into the PRC as soon as possible, albeit clearly with the agreement of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan elite. There were a number of items, for example, that were specifically mentioned in the Seventeen-Point Agreement that the TWC cadres in Lhasa felt could be quickly implemented within