“The Dalai Lamas”

Their True Faces

The 13th Dalai Lama in

1910 in Darjeeling, India

This is a backgrounder of the struggle in Tibet and how the

US has been building up Dalai Lama to pursue their
ideological struggle. In the US many uninformed people had
been awed by his philosophy on "peace" and "non-violence".
This article will bare facts to the real color and intent of the
Lama, why the US had given him a Nobel Prize and many
more. –
See Kalovski Itim: The True Story of Maoist Revolution in
Tibet, When the Dalai Lamas Ruled: Hell on Earth
Tibet is one of the most remote places in the world. It is
centered on a high mountain plateau deep in the heart of
Asia. It is cut off from South Asia by the Himalayas, the
highest mountains in the world. Countless river gorges and
at least six different mountain ranges carve this region into
isolated valleys. Before all the changes brought about after
the Chinese revolution of 1949, there were no roads in Tibet
that wheeled vehicles could travel. All travel was over
winding, dangerous mountain trails by mule, by foot or by
yaks which are hairy cow-like mountain animals. Trade,
communications and centralized government were almost
impossible to maintain.

Most of Tibet is above the tree-line. The air is very thin. Most
crops and trees won't grow there. It was a struggle to grow
food and even find fuel for fires.

At the time of the revolution, the population of Tibet was

extremely spread out. About two or three million Tibetans
lived in an area half the size of the United States about 1.5
million square miles.* Villages, monasteries and nomad
encampments were often separated by many days of difficult
travel.
* (Roughly 1½ times the size of the Congo or 120 times
Belgium). 20% or 500,000 of the 2.5 million population lives
in the 550km2 area of Lhasa.

Maoist revolutionaries saw there were "Three Great Lacks"

in old Tibet: lack of fuel, lack of communications, and lack of
people. The revolutionaries analyzed that these "Three Great
Lacks" were not mainly caused by the physical conditions,
but by the social system. The Maoists said that the "Three
Great Lacks" were caused by the "Three Abundances" in
Tibetan society: "Abundant poverty, abundant oppression
and abundant fear of the supernatural."
Class Society in Old Tibet

Tibet was a feudal society before the revolutionary changes

that started in 1949. There were two main classes: the serfs
and the aristocratic serf owners. The people lived like serfs
in Europe's "Dark Ages," or like African slaves and
sharecroppers of the U.S. South.

Tibetan serfs scratched barley harvest from the hard earth

with wooden plows and sickles. Goats, sheep and yaks were
raised for milk, butter, cheese and meat. The aristocratic and
monastery masters owned the people, the land and most of
the animals. They forced the serfs to hand over most grain
and demanded all kinds of forced labor (called ulag). Among
the serfs, both men and women participated in hard labor,
including ulag. The scattered nomadic peoples of Tibet's
barren western highlands were also owned by lords and
lamas.

The Dalai Lama's older brother Thubten Jigme Norbu claims

that in the lamaist social order, "There is no class system and
the mobility from class to class makes any class prejudice
impossible." But the whole existence of this religious order
was based on a rigid and brutal class system.

Serfs were treated like despised "inferiors" the way Black

people were treated in the Jim Crow South. Serfs could not
use the same seats, vocabulary or eating utensils as serf
owners. Even touching one of the master's belongings could
be punished by whipping. The masters and serfs were so
distant from each other that in much of Tibet they spoke
different languages.

It was the custom for a serf to kneel on all fours so his master
could step on his back to mount a horse. Tibet scholar A.
Tom Grunfeld describes how one ruling class girl routinely
had servants carry her up and down stairs just because she
was lazy. Masters often rode on their serfs' backs across
streams.

The only thing worse than a serf in Tibet was a "chattel

slave," who had no right to even grow a few crops for
themselves. These slaves were often starved, beaten and
worked to death. A master could turn a serf into a slave any
time he wanted. Children were routinely bought and sold in
Tibet's capital, Lhasa. About 5 percent of the Tibetan people
were counted as chattel slaves. And at least another 10
percent were poor monks who were really "slaves in robes."

The lamaist system tried to prevent any escape. Runaway

slaves couldn't just set up free farms in the vast empty lands.
Former serfs explained to revolutionary writer Anna Louise
Strong that before liberation, "You could not live in Tibet
without a master. Anyone might pick you up as an outlaw
unless you had a legal owner."

Born Female Proof of Past Sins?

The Dalai Lama writes, "In Tibet there was no special

discrimination against women." The Dalai Lama's authorized
biographer Robert Hicks argues that Tibetan women were
content with their status and "influenced their husbands." But
in Tibet, being born a woman was considered a punishment
for "impious" (sinful) behavior in a previous life. The word for
"woman" in old Tibet, kiemen, meant "inferior birth." Women
were told to pray, "May I reject a feminine body and be reborn
a male one."

Lamaist superstition associated women with evil and sin. It

was said "among ten women you'll find nine devils." Anything
women touched was considered tainted so all kinds of taboos
were placed on women. Women were forbidden to handle
medicine. Han Suyin reports, "No woman was allowed to
touch a lama's belongings, nor could she raise a wall, or 'the
wall will fall.' A widow was a despicable being, already a devil.
No woman was allowed to use iron instruments or touch iron.
Religion forbade her to lift her eyes above the knee of a man,
as serfs and slaves were not allowed to life the eyes upon
the face of the nobles or great lamas."

Monks of the major sects of Tibetan Buddhism rejected

sexual intimacy (or even contact) with women, as part of their
plan to be holy. Before the revolution, no woman had ever
set foot in most monasteries or the palaces of the Dalai
Lama.

There are reports of women being burned for giving birth to

twins and for practicing the pre-Buddhist traditional religion
(called Bon). Twins were considered proof that a woman had
mated with an evil spirit. The rituals and folk medicine of Bon
were considered "witchcraft." Like in other feudal societies,
upper class women were sold into arranged marriages.
Custom allowed a husband to cut off the tip of his wife's nose
if he discovered she had slept with someone else. The
patriarchal practices included polygyny, where a wealthy
man could have many wives; and polyandry, where in land-
poor noble families one woman was forced to be wife to
several brothers.

(But good friends were also called brothers).

Among the lower classes, family life was similar to slavery in

the U.S. South. (See The Life of a Tibetan Slave.) Serfs could
not marry or leave the estate without the master's
permission. Masters transferred serfs from one estate to
another at will, breaking up serf families forever. Rape of
women serfs was common under the ulag system, a lord
could demand "temporary wives."
The main problem of the Chinese Standing Committee of the
NPC of China is only at the level of what is called “the Dalai
clique”.
In the autonomous region of Tibet itself one can see a
growing prosperity, except in Lhasa

The Three Masters

The Tibetan people called their rulers "the Three Great

Masters" because the ruling class of serf owners was
organized into three institutions: the lama monasteries
possessed 37 percent of the cultivated land and pasture in
old Tibet; the secular aristocracy 25 percent; and the
remaining 38 percent was in the hands of the government
officials appointed by the Dalai Lama's advisors.

About 2 percent of Tibet's population was in this upper class,

and an additional 3 percent were their agents, overseers,
stewards, managers of estates and private armies. The ger-
ba, a tiny elite of about 200 families, ruled at the top. Han
Suyin writes: "Only 626 people held 93 percent of all land and
wealth and 70 percent of all the yaks in Tibet. These 626
included 333 heads of monasteries and religious authorities,
and 287 lay authorities (including the nobles of the Tibetan
army) and six cabinet ministers."

Merchants and handicraftsmen also belonged to a lord. A

quarter of the population in the capital city of Lhasa survived
by begging from religious pilgrims. There was no modern
industry or working class. Even matches and nails had to be
imported. Before the revolution, no one in Tibet was ever paid
wages for their work.

The heart of this system was exploitation. Serfs worked 16-

or 18-hour days to enrich their masters keeping only about a
quarter of the food they raised.

A. Tom Grunfeld writes: "These estates were extremely

lucrative. One former aristocrat noted that a 'small' estate
would typically consist of a few thousand sheep, a thousand
yaks, an undetermined number of nomads and two hundred
agricultural serfs. The yearly output would consist of over
36,000 kg (80,000 lbs.) of grain, over 1,800 kg (4,000 lbs.) of
wool and almost 500 kg (1,200 lbs.) of butter A government
official had 'unlimited powers of extortion' and could make a
fortune from his powers to extract bribes not to imprison and
punish people. There was also the matter of extracting
monies from the peasantry beyond the necessary taxes."

The ruling serf owners were parasites. One observer, Sir

Charles Bell, described a typical official who spent an hour a
day at his official duties. Upper class parties lasted for days
of eating, gambling and lying around. The aristocratic lamas
also never worked. They spent their days chanting,
memorizing religious dogma and doing nothing.

The Monasteries: Strongholds of Feudalism

Defenders of old Tibet portray Lamaist Buddhism as the

essence of the culture of the people of Tibet. But it was really
nothing more or less than the ideology of a specific
oppressive social system. The lamaist religion itself is exactly
as old as feudal class society. The first Tibetan king,
Songsten-gampo, established a unified feudal system in
Tibet, around 650 A.D. He married princesses from China
and Nepal in order to learn from them the practices used
outside Tibet to carry out feudalism. These princesses
brought Tantric Buddhism to Tibet, where it was merged with
earlier animist beliefs to create a new religion, Lamaism. *

This new religion had to be imposed on the people over the

next century and a half by the ruling class, using violence.
King Trosong Detsen decreed: "He who shows a finger to a
monk shall have his finger cut off; he who speaks ill of the
monks and the king's Buddhist policy shall have his lips cut
off; he who looks askance at them shall have his eyes put
out"
Between the 1400s and the 1600s, a bloody consolidation of
power took place, the abbots of the largest monasteries
seized overall power. Because these abbots practiced anti-
woman celibacy, their new political system could not operate
by hereditary father-to-son succession. So the lamas created
a new doctrine for their religion: They announced that they
could detect newborn children who were reincarnations of
dead ruling lamas. Hundreds of top lamas were declared
"Living Buddha’s" (Bodhisattvas) who had supposedly ruled
others for centuries, switching to new bodies occasionally as
old host bodies wore out.

The central symbol of this system, the various men called

Dalai Lama, was said to be the early Tibetan nature-god
Chenrezig who had simply reappeared in 14 different bodies
over the centuries. In fact, only three of the 14 Dalai Lamas
actually ruled. Between 1751 and 1950, there was no adult
Dalai Lama on the throne in Tibet 77 percent of the time. The
most powerful abbots ruled as "regent" advisors who trained,
manipulated and even assassinated the child-king Dalai
Lamas.

SUCH A SYSTEM CANNOT RULE A COUNTRY IN 2018.

(Victor E. Rosez)

Tibetan monasteries were not holy, compassionate

Shangrilas, like in some New Age fantasy. These
monasteries were dark fortresses of feudal exploitation they
were armed villages of monks complete with military
warehouses and private armies. Pilgrims came to some
shrines to pray for a better life. But the main activity of
monasteries was robbing the surrounding peasants. The
huge idle religious clergy grew little food feeding them was a
big burden on the people.
The largest monasteries housed thousands of monks. Each
"parent" monastery created dozens (even hundreds) of small
strongholds scattered through the mountain valleys. For
example, the huge Drepung monastery housed 7,000 monks
and owned 40,000 people on 185 different estates with 300
pastures.

Monasteries also made up countless religious taxes to rob

the people including taxes on haircuts, on windows, on
doorsteps, taxes on newborn children or calves, taxes on
babies born with double eyelids and so on. A quarter of
Drepung's income came from interest on money lent to the
serf-peasantry. The monasteries also demanded that serfs
hand over many young boys to serve as child-monks.

The class relations of Tibet were reproduced inside the

monasteries: the majority of monks were slaves and servants
to the upper abbots and lived half-starved lives of menial
labor, prayer chanting and routine beatings. Upper monks
could force poor monks to take their religious exams or
perform sexual services. (In the most powerful Tibetan sect,
such homosexual sex was considered a sign of holy distance
from women.) A small percent of the clergy were nuns.

After liberation, Anna Louise Strong asked a young monk,

Lobsang Telé, if monastery life followed Buddhist teachings
about compassion. The young lama replied that he heard
plenty of talk in the scripture halls about kindness to all living
creatures, but that he personally had been whipped at least
a thousand times. "If any upper class lama refrains from
whipping you," he told Strong, "that is already very good. I
never saw an upper lama give food to any poor lama who
was hungry. They treated the laymen who were believers just
as badly or even worse."
These days, the Dalai Lama is "packaged" internationally as
a non-materialist holy man. In fact, the Dalai Lama was the
biggest serf owner in Tibet. Legally, he owned the whole
country and everyone in it. In practice, his family directly
controlled 27 manors, 36 pastures, 6,170 field serfs and 102
house slaves.

When he moved from palace to palace, the Dalai Lama rode

on a throne chair pulled by dozens of slaves. His troops
marched along to "It's a Long Way to Tipperary," a tune
learned from their British imperialist trainers. Meanwhile, the
Dalai Lama's bodyguards, all over six-and-a-half feet tall,
with padded shoulders and long whips, beat people out of his
path. This ritual is described in the Dalai Lama's
autobiography.

The first time he fled to India in 1950, the Dalai Lama's

advisors sent several hundred mule-loads of gold and silver
bars ahead to secure his comfort in exile. After the second
time he fled, in 1959, Peking Review reported that his family
left lots of gold and silver behind, plus 20,331 pieces of
jewelry and 14,676 pieces of clothing.

Bitter Poverty, Early Death

The people lived with constant cold and hunger. Serfs

endlessly gathered scarce wood for their masters. But their
own huts were only heated by small cooking fires of yak
dung. Before the revolution there was no electricity in Tibet.
The darkness was only lit by flickering yak-butter lamps.

Serfs were often sick from malnutrition. The traditional food

of the masses is a mush made from tea, yak butter, and a
barley flour called tsampa. Serfs rarely tasted meat. One
1940 study of eastern Tibet says that 38 percent of
households never got any tea and drank only wild herbs or
"white tea" (boiled water). Seventy-five percent of the
households were forced at times to eat grass. Half of the
people couldn't afford butter the main source of protein
available.
Meanwhile, a major shrine, the Jokka Kang, burned four tons
of yak butter offerings daily. It has been estimated that one-
third of all the butter produced in Tibet went up in smoke in
nearly 3,000 temples, not counting the small alters in each
house.

These are severe crimes…

In old Tibet, nothing was known about basic hygiene,

sanitation, or the fact that germs caused disease. For
ordinary people, there were no outhouses, sewers or toilets.
The lamas taught that disease and death were caused by
sinful "impiety." They said that chanting, obedience, paying
monks money and swallowing prayer scrolls was the only
real protection from disease.

Old Tibet's superstition, feudal practices and low productive

forces caused the people to suffer terribly from disease. Most
children died before their first year. Even most Dalai Lamas
did not make it to 18 years old and died before their
coronations. A third of the population had smallpox. A 1925
smallpox epidemic killed 7,000 in Lhasa. It is not known how
many died in the countryside. Leprosy, tuberculosis, goiter,
tetanus, blindness and ulcers were very common. Feudal
sexual customs spread venereal disease, including in the
monasteries. Before the revolution, about 90 percent of the
population was infected causing widespread sterility and
death. Later, under the leadership of Mao Tsetung, the
revolution was able to greatly reduce these illnesses but it
required intense class struggle against the lamas and their
religious superstitions. The monks denounced antibiotics and
public health campaigns, saying it was a sin to kill lice or even
germs! The monks denounced the People's Liberation Army
for eliminating the large bands of wild, rabies-infested dogs
that terrorized people across Tibet. (Still today, one of the
"charges" against the Maoist revolution is that it "killed
dogs"!)

The Violence of the Lamas

In old Tibet, the upper classes preached mystical Buddhist

nonviolence. But, like all ruling classes in history, they
practiced reactionary violence to maintain their rule.

The lamaist system of government came into being through

bloody struggles. The early lamas reportedly assassinated
the last Tibetan king, Lang Darma, in the 10th century. Then
they fought centuries of civil wars, complete with mutual
massacres of whole monasteries. In the 20th century, the
13th Dalai Lama brought in British imperialist trainers to
modernize his national army. He even offered some of his
troops to help the British fight World War I.

These historical facts alone prove that lamaist doctrines of

"compassion" and "nonviolence" are hypocrisy.

The former ruling class denies there was class struggle in old
Tibet. A typical account by Gyaltsen Gyaltag, a
representative of the Dalai Lama in Europe, says: "Prior to
1950, the Tibetans never experienced a famine, and social
injustices never led to an uprising of the people." It is true that
there is little written record of class struggle. The reason is
that Lamaism prevented any real histories from being written
down. Only disputes over religious dogma were recorded.

But the mountains of Tibet were filled with bandit runaways,

and each estate had its armed fighters. This alone is proof
that constant defined Tibetan society and its power relations.
struggle sometimes open, sometimes hidden
Revolutionary historians have documented uprisings among
Tibetan serfs in 1908, 1918, 1931, and the 1940s. In one
famous uprising, 150 families of serfs of northern Tibet's
Thridug county rose up in 1918, led by a woman, Hor Lhamo.
They killed the county head, under the slogan: "Down with
officials! Abolish all ulag forced labor!"

Daily violence in old Tibet was aimed at the masses of

people. Each master punished "his" serfs, and organized
armed gangs to enforce his rule. Squads of monks brutalized
the people. They were called "Iron Bars" because of the big
metal rods they carried to batter people.

It was a crime to "step out of your place "like hunting fish or

wild sheep that the lamaist declared were "sacred." It was
even a crime for a serf to appeal his master's decisions to
some other authority. When serfs ran away, the masters'
gangs went to hunt them down. Each estate had its own
dungeons and torture chambers. Pepper was forced under
the eyelids. Spikes were forced under the fingernails. Serfs
had their legs connected by short chains and were released
to wander hobbled for the rest of their lives.

Grunfeld writes: "Buddhist belief precludes the taking of life,

so that whipping a person to the edge of death and then
releasing him to die elsewhere allowed Tibetan officials to
justify the death as 'an act of God.' Other brutal forms of
punishment included the cutting off of hands at the wrists,
using red-hot irons to gouge out eyes; hanging by the
thumbs; and crippling the offender, sewing him into a bag,
and throwing the bag in the river."

As signs of the lamas' power, traditional ceremonies used

body parts of people who had died: flutes made out of human
thigh bones, bowls made out of skulls, drums made from
human skin. After the revolution, a rosary was found in the
Dalai Lama's palace made from 108 different skulls. After
liberation, serfs widely reported that the lamas engaged in
ritual human sacrifice including burying serf children alive in
monastery ground-breaking ceremonies. Former serfs
testified that at least 21 people were sacrificed by monks in
1948 in hopes of preventing the victory of the Maoist
revolution.

Using Karma to Justify Oppression

The central belief of lamaism is reincarnation and karma.

Each living being is said to be inhabited by an immortal soul
that has been born and reborn many times. After each death,
a soul is supposedly given a new body.

According to the dogma of karma, each soul gets the life it

deserves: Pious behavior leads to good karma and with that
comes a rise in the social status of the next life. Impious
(sinful) behavior leads to bad karma and the next life could
be as an insect (or a woman).

In reality, there is no such thing as reincarnation. Dead

people do not return in new bodies. But in Tibet, the belief in
reincarnation had terrible real consequences. People
intrigued by Tibetan mysticism need to understand the social
function served by these lamaist beliefs inside Tibet: Lamaist
Buddhism was created, imposed and perpetuated to carry
out the extreme feudal oppression of the people.

Lamaists today tell the story of an ancient Tibetan king who

wanted to close the gap between rich and poor. The king
asked a religious scholar why his efforts failed. "The sage is
said to have explained to him that the gap between rich and
poor cannot be closed by force, since the conditions of
present life are always the consequences of actions in earlier
lives, and therefore the course of things cannot be changed
at will."
Grunfield writes: "From a purely secular point of view, this
doctrine must be seen as one of the most ingenious and
pernicious forms of social control ever devised. To the
ordinary Tibetan, the acceptance of this doctrine precluded
the possibility of ever changing his or her fate in this life. If
one were born a slave, so the doctrine of karma taught, it was
not the fault of the slaveholder but rather the slaves
themselves for having committed some misdeeds in a
previous life. In turn, the slaveholder was simply being
rewarded for good deeds in a previous life. For the slave to
attempt to break the chains that bound him, or her, would be
tantamount to a self-condemnation to a rebirth into a life
worse than the one already being suffered. This is certainly
not the stuff of which revolutions are made"

Tibet's feudalist abbot-lamas taught that their top lama was

a single divine god-king-being whose rule and dog-eat-dog
system was demanded by the natural workings of the
universe. These myths and superstitions teach that there can
be no social change, that suffering is justified, and that to end
suffering each person must patiently tolerate suffering. This
is almost exactly what Europe's medieval Catholic church
taught the people, in order to defend a similar feudal system.

Also like in medieval Europe, Tibet's feudalists fought to

suppress anything that might undermine their "watertight"
system. All observers agree that, before the Maoist
revolution, there were no magazines, printed books, or non-
religious literature of any kind in Tibet. The only Tibetan
language newspaper was published in Kalimpong by a
converted Christian Tibetan. The source of news of the
outside world was travelers and a couple of dozen shortwave
radios that were owned only by members of the ruling class.

The masses created folklore, but the written language was

reserved for religious dogma and disputes. The masses of
people and probably most monks were kept completely
illiterate. Education, outside news and experimentation were
considered suspect and evil.

Defenders of lamaism act like this religion was the essence

of the culture (and even the existence) of the Tibetan people.
This is not true. Like all things in society and nature, Lamaist
Buddhism had a beginning and will have an end. There was
culture and ideology in Tibet before lamaism. Then this
feudal culture and religion arose together with feudal
exploitation. It was inevitable that lamaist culture would
shatter together with those feudal relations.

In fact, when the Maoist revolution arrived in 1950, this

system was already rotting from within. Even the Dalai Lama
admits that the population of Tibet was declining. It is
estimated there were about 10 million Tibetans 1,000 years
ago when Buddhism was first introduced by the time of the
Maoist revolution there were only two or three million left.
Maoists estimate that the decline had accelerated: the
population had been cut in half during the last 150 years.

The lamaist system burdened the people with massive

exploitation. It enforced the special burden of supporting a
huge, parasitic, non-reproducing clergy of about 200,000that
absorbed 20 percent or more of the region's young men. The
system suppressed the development of productive forces:
preventing the use of iron plows, the mining of coal or fuel,
the harvesting of fish or game, and medical/sanitary
innovation of any kind. Hunger, the sterility caused by
venereal disease, and polyandry kept the birthrate low.

The mystical wrapping of lamaism cannot hide that old

Tibetan society was a dictatorship of the serf owners over the
serfs. There is nothing to romanticize about this society. The
serfs and slaves needed a revolution!
Tibet Meets the Maoist Revolution

Through the 1930s and '40s, a revolutionary people's war

arose among the peasants of central China. Under the
leadership of the Communist Party and its Chairman Mao
Tsetung, the revolution won overall state power in the heavily
populated areas of eastern China in 1949. By then, U.S.
intrigues were already starting at China's northern border
with Korea, and French imperialists were launching their
colonialist invasion of Vietnam along China's southern
border. Clearly, the Maoist revolutionaries were eager to
liberate the oppressed everywhere in China, and to drive
foreign intriguers from China's border regions.

But Tibet posed a particular problem: In 1950, this huge

region had been almost completely isolated from the
revolutionary whirlwind that swept the rest of China. There
were almost no Tibetan communists. There was no
communist underground among Tibet's serfs. In fact, the
serfs of Tibet had no idea that a revolution was happening
elsewhere in their country, or even that such things as
"revolutions" were possible.

The grip of the lamaist system and its religion was extremely
strong in Tibet. It could not be broken simply by having
revolutionary troops of the majority Han nationality march in
and "declare" that feudalism was abolished! Mao Tsetung
rejected the "commandist" approach of "doing things in the
name of the masses." Maoist revolution relies on the masses.

In Part 2 of this series, we will discuss how Maoist revolution

got its foothold in Tibet, and how the revolution grew into
great mass storms that blew away the lamaist oppression.
Bringing the Revolution to Tibet

By 1949, Mao's People's Liberation Army had defeated all

the main reactionary armies in central China. The day of the
poor and oppressed had arrived! But the big powers in the
world were moving quickly to crush and "contain" this
revolution. French troops invaded Vietnam, south of China's
border. By 1950, a massive U.S. invasion force would land in
Korea with plans to threaten China itself.

The western mountains and grasslands of China's border

areas are inhabited by dozens of different national groupings,
whose cultures are different from China's majority Han
people. One of those regions, Tibet, had been locally ruled
as an isolated, "water-tight" kingdom by a class of serf-
owners, headed by the monk-abbots of large Lamaist
Buddhist monasteries. During the Chinese civil war, Tibet's
ruling class conspired to set up a phony "independent" state
that was really under the wing of British colonialism.

Maoist revolutionaries were determined to bring revolution to

Tibet to secure China's border regions against invasion and
to liberate the millions of oppressed Tibetan serfs there.
There was no doubt that Mao's hardened peasant-soldiers
could defeat any army of Tibetan feudalists.

But the revolution faced a problem: The huge, sparsely

populated region of Tibet had been completely isolated from
the revolutionary war sweeping the rest of China. In 1949
there was no force among the Tibetan masses to carry out
real liberation. There was yet no rebel underground among
Tibet's serfs. There were almost no Tibetan communists or
even Han communists who spoke Tibetan. The masses of
Tibetan serfs had never heard that a great revolution had
swept the rest of their country. Tibetan serfs had been taught
that their current misery and poverty was justified caused by
their own sinfulness in earlier lives.
Mao Tsetung taught that a true revolution must rely on the
masses on the needs, wishes, and actions of the oppressed
people themselves. Maoism calls this principle the Mass
Line. Mao said: "It often happens that objectively the masses
need a certain change, but subjectively they are not yet
conscious of the need, not yet willing or determined to make
the change. In such cases, we should wait patiently. We
should not make the change until, through our work, most of
the masses have become conscious of the need and are
willing and determined to carry it out. Otherwise we shall
isolate ourselves from the masses. Unless they are
conscious and willing, any kind of work that requires their
participation will turn out to be a mere formality and will fail."

In October 1950 the People's Liberation Army (PLA)

advanced into the grasslands and mountains of southwest
China. At Chamdo, they easily defeated an army sent against
them by the Tibetan ruling class - and then they stopped.
They sent a message to the Tibetan capital, Lhasa.

China's new revolutionary government offered Tibet's rulers

a deal: Tibet would be reattached to the Chinese republic,
but for the time being the regime of Tibetan serf-owners
(called the Kashag) could continue to rule as a local
government, operating under the leadership of the Central
People's government. The Maoists would not abolish feudal
practices, or challenge the Lamaist religion until the people
themselves supported such changes. The People's
Liberation Army would safeguard China's borders from
imperialist intervention, and foreign agents would be expelled
from Lhasa. About half of the Tibetan population lived in
regions of Tsinghai and Chamdo that were not under the
political rule of the Kashag. These regions were not covered
by the proposal.
The Tibetan serf-owners signed this special "17-point
agreement" and on October 26, 1951, the People's Liberation
Army peacefully marched into Lhasa.

Both sides knew that struggle would eventually break out.

How long could the aristocrats and monasteries continue to
enslave "their" serfs when everyone could now see Han
peasants who had liberated themselves from similar
conditions using guns and Maoism?

The most powerful serf-owning families started to plan an

armed uprising. The Dalai Lama's brother traveled abroad to
cement ties with the CIA, to get arms and request political
recognition. Monasteries organized secret conferences and
spread wild rumors among the masses: like saying Han
revolutionaries fueled their trucks with the blood of stolen
Tibetan children. Long mule-trains of U.S. arms started
winding their way from India to key Tibetan monasteries. The
CIA set up combat training centers for its Tibetan agents,
eventually based in the high altitude of Camp Hale, Colorado.
CIA planes dropped weapons into Tibet's eastern Kham
region.

Applying Mao's Mass Line to the Special Conditions of Tibet

Meanwhile, Mao instructed the revolutionary forces to win

over the masses for the coming revolution without provoking
an early polarization in which the masses might be against
the revolution. Mao wrote: "Delay will not do us much harm;
on the contrary, it may be to our advantage. Let them [the
lamaist ruling class] go on with their senseless atrocities
against the people, while we on our part concentrate on good
deeds production, trade, road-building, medical services and
united front work (unity with the majority and patient
education) so as to win over the masses."

One red soldier later said, "We were given much detailed
instructions as to how to behave."
The Tibetan masses were too poor to spare any grain for the
revolutionary troops. So the PLA soldiers often went hungry
until their own fields were ready for harvest. They were taught
to respect Tibetan cultures and beliefs even, for now, the
intense superstitious fears that dominated Tibetan life.

During those first years, the PLA worked as a great

construction force building the first roads connecting Tibet
with central China. A long string of work camps stretched
thousands of miles through endless mountains and gorges.
Alongside these camps, the Han soldiers raised their own
food using new collective methods. Serfs from surrounding
areas were paid wages for work on the road.

The rulers of old Tibet treated the serfs like "talking animals"
and forced them to do endless unpaid labor so the behavior
of these PLA troops was shocking to the Tibetan masses.
One serf said, "The Hans worked side by side with us. They
did not whip us. For the first time I was treated as a human
being." Another serf described the day a PLA soldier gave
him water from the soldier's own cup, "I could not believe it!"
As serfs were trained to repair trucks, they became the first
proletarians in the history of Tibet. One runaway said: "We
understood it was not the will of the gods, but the cruelty of
humans like ourselves, which kept us slaves."

The PLA road camps quickly became magnets for runaway

slaves, serfs, and escaped monks. Young serfs working in
the camps were asked if they wanted to go to school to help
liberate their people. They became the first Tibetan students
at Institutes for National Minorities in China's eastern cities.
They learned reading, writing, and accounting "for the
agrarian revolution to come"!

In this way, the revolution started recruiting activists who

would soon lead the people. The first Communist Party
member from central Tibet was recruited in the mid-1950s.
By October 1957, the Party reported 1,000 Tibetan
members, with an additional 2,000 in the Communist Youth
League. (See "Recruiting Young Rebels to the Revolution.")

All through Tibet's eastern rural areas and the valleys around
Lhasa, the People's Liberation Army acted as a huge
"seeding machine" of the revolution just as it had during
Mao's historic Long March of the 1930s.

Any Hint of Change Shook the Water-tight Kingdom

Once the first white-sand road was completed, long caravans

of PLA trucks arrived, carrying key goods like tea and
matches. The expanded trade and especially the availability
of inexpensive tea improved the diet of ordinary Tibetans. By
the mid-'50s, the first telephones, telegraphs, radio station
and modern printing had been organized. The first
newspapers, books and pamphlets appeared, in both Han
and Tibetan. After 1955, Tibet's first real schools were
founded. By July 1957 there were 79 elementary schools,
with 6,000 students. All this started to improve the life of poor
people and infuriated the upper classes, who had always
monopolized all trade, book-learning and contact with the
outside world.

When revolutionary medical teams started healing people,

even monks and the upper classes started showing up at the
early clinics. The first coal mine opened in 1958 and the first
blast furnace in 1959. This undermined superstitions that
condemned innovation and preached that diseases were
caused by sinful behavior.

Starting in 1956, increasingly intense armed revolts

organized by feudal landowners started in Han-Tibet border
areas. These areas were not covered by the 17 points, and
the serfs there were being encouraged by the revolutionaries
to stop paying land rent to the monasteries and estates. In
1958 a communist leader in Tsinghai wrote, "The great
socialist revolution in the pastoral areas has been a very
violent class struggle of life and death."

Some forces within the Communist Party urged compromise.

They suggested slowing down the land reform and closing
down the schools and clinics that were opposed by the
lamaists. Teachers and medical teams were withdrawn. But
this did not stop the conspiracies of the lamaists.

In the late '50s, the Tibetan ruling class pressed ahead with
a full-scale revolt. They believed that the intense struggles
breaking out in central China called the Great Leap Forward
might give them an opening to drive out the PLA. CIA support
was increasing, and trained agents were in place.

Serf-Owners' Revolt Triggers Revolution

"Historically, all reactionary forces on the verge of extinction

invariably conduct a last desperate struggle against the
revolutionary forces.” Mao Tsetung

In March 1959, armed monks and Tibetan soldiers attacked

the revolutionary garrison in Lhasa and launched a revolt
along the Tibet-India border. One monk later said, "All of us
were told that, if we killed a Han, we would become Living
Buddha’s and have chapels to our name." Without much
support among the masses, the lamaists were soon dug in at
some shrines. The main revolt was over within a few days.

All the revolts were always made by monks, the population

didn’t help them!

During the fighting, the Dalai Lama fled into exile. This flight
is portrayed by lamaists as a heroic, even mystical event. But
it is now well documented that the Dalai Lama was whisked
away by a CIA covert operation.
The Dalai Lama's own autobiography admits that his
cook and radio operator on that trip were CIA agents.
The CIA wanted him outside of Tibet as a symbol for a
contra-style war against the Maoist revolution.

Defeated in their revolt, large sections of the upper clergy and

aristocracy followed the Dalai Lama south into India -
accompanied by many slave-servants, armed guards and
mule-trains of wealth. In all, 13,000 went into exile, among
them the most hard-core feudal forces and their supporters.
Suddenly, many of Tibet's Three Masters the rich lamas, the
high government officials, and the secular aristocrats were
gone!

Revolutionary forces mobilized to root out the feudalist

conspiracy. And a thousand Tibetan students rushed back
from the National Minorities Institutes to help organize the
first great wave of revolutionary change in Tibet.

The Dalai Lama's Kashag government had largely supported

this counterrevolutionary revolt and was dissolved. New
organs of power were created in every region called "Offices
to Suppress the Revolt." The new regional government was
called "Preparatory Committee for the Autonomous Region
of Tibet" (PCART)in it, new Tibetan cadres and veteran Han
cadres worked together.

This first stage of the revolution was called "the Three Anti's
and the Two Reductions." It was against the lamaist
conspiracy, against forced labor, and against slavery. In the
past serfs had paid three-quarters of their harvest to the
masters, now the revolution fought to reduce that "land rent"
to 20 percent. The other reduction eliminated the massive
debts that serfs "owed" to their masters.

This campaign attacked the heart of Tibet's feudal relations:

Forced ulag labor was abolished. The nangzen slaves of the
nobles and monasteries were freed. The masses of slave-
monks were suddenly allowed to leave the monasteries.
Arms caches were cleaned out of the main monasteries, and
key conspirators were arrested.

Some people like to talk about "struggle for religious freedom

in Tibet" but throughout Tibetan history, the main struggle
around "religious freedom" has been for the freedom not to
believe, not to obey the cruel monks and their endless
superstitions. The sight of thousands of young monks
eagerly getting married and doing manual labor was a
powerful blow to superstitious awe.

Women's liberation got off the ground under the then-

shocking slogan "All men and women are equal!"
Revolutionary property changes helped ease old pressures
for polygamy. With a large new pool of eligible men, there
was no longer the same pressure for women to accept a
situation where one man could have many wives. With the
redistribution of the land, women were no longer under the
same pressure to marry several brothers in one family a
practice that had been used to limit the population who
depended on small plots of land.

Without the land rent, the huge parasitic monasteries started

to dry up. About half the monks left them and about half the
monasteries closed down.

In mass meetings, serfs were encouraged to organize

Peasant Associations and fight for their interests. Key
oppressors were called out, denounced and punished. The
debt records of the serf-owners were burned in great
bonfires. Women played a particularly active role. They are
seen in the photographs of those days leading such meetings
and denouncing the oppressor. Soon, the serfs seized the
land and livestock. Ex-serfs, former beggars, and ex-slaves
each received several acres. Serfs received 200,000 new
deeds to the land and herds decorated with red flags and
pictures of Chairman Mao.

Serfs said: "The sun of the Kashag shone only on the Three
Masters and their landlord henchmen, but the sun of the
Communist Party and Chairman Mao shines on us the poor
people."

Sharp Class Struggle

These revolutionary moves took intense and often bloody

class struggle. There was all the complexity, heroism,
mistakes, advances and setbacks of real-life revolution.

The revolutionaries aroused the class hatred of the serfs. The

serf-owners countered by accusing revolutionary Tibetans of
being foreign collaborators and destroyers of holiness.
Sometimes the revolutionary forces had the upper hand and
huge changes happened in the lives of the people. In other
places the feudal forces gained the upper hand and tried to
wipe out any challenge. For years, there were pitched battles,
raids, and executions by both sides. As Mao Tsetung
teaches: "A revolution is not a dinner party. A revolution is an
insurrection, an act of violence by which one class
overthrows another. Without using the greatest force, the
peasants cannot possibly overthrow the deep-rooted
authority of the landlords which has lasted for thousands of
years."

The revolutionary army was a powerful force backing the

upsurge, and many eager serfs volunteered to join the
People's Liberation Army. But Tibet is a huge land of isolated
valleys. Organizers in the widely scattered settlements were
largely on their own. They risked everything for the people
and were often killed by feudal gangs just like the early Klan
killed freed slaves in the days after the U.S. civil war.
Sharp struggle also broke out in the new Institutes of National
Minorities often along class lines. Some Tibetan students
from aristocratic background intended to become a new elite
some resented it when land reform affected their serf-owning
families back in Tibet. They also rejected moves toward
social equality: demanding to have servants who would make
their beds and clean their rooms, and they refused to mingle
with fellow students from slave and serf backgrounds. Similar
issues divided the new schools in Lhasa itself: aristocrat-
students demanded that slave-students carry their "master's"
books. Lamas were sent in to "oversee education" and
conduct prayers before and after study sessions. These early
struggles prepared the students from serf, slave and beggar
classes for the day when such issues would be struggled out
throughout Tibet's society.

Even as most land was divided into individual plots, far-

sighted experiments tried out socialist, collective forms in the
countryside. Mao taught that the road to liberation in the
countryside required new forms of cooperation among the
people. In Tibet, new "mutual aid teams" shared farm
implements and animals, worked the fields together and
pooled their labor to dig canals, dam streams, collect fertilizer
and build new roads.

Through these great storms of struggle, the Maoist revolution

created a wide base for itself among the newly freed serfs of
Tibet.

In Part 3: The Revolution Within the Revolution

Tibet's storm of class struggle displeased some powerful

forces inside the Chinese Communist Party itself. These
forces, called revisionists, opposed Mao's revolutionary line.
These forces were grouped around the party leader Liu
Shao-chi, the top general Lin Piao, and Deng Xiaoping (who
rules China today.) They had a completely different (and
quite capitalist) view of what should be done with Tibet.

The revisionists did not see much reason to mobilize the

masses to overthrow the feudal landlords. They were "Han
chauvinists" who looked down on the masses of Tibetan
people considering them hopelessly backward and
superstitious. They thought the Tibetan students in the
Institutes of National Minorities should be trained as
administrators, not as revolutionary organizers. They thought
Tibet should be ruled through the educated upper classes,
while relying on military means to keep the region "under
control."

To these revisionists, Maoist class struggle was just

"disruption" of their plans for exploiting Tibet. When they
looked at Tibet, they saw only a border that needed
defending, mineral resources to be exploited, and a potential
"breadbasket" that could help feed the rest of China. They
thought that developing independent industries or diversified
agriculture was "inefficient" and a waste of time. The
revisionists imagined that they could reach a long-term
arrangement with the Lamaist ruling class that would be
profitable for them both.

But at that time, these capitalist-roaders did not have overall

power. Mao was determined to lead the masses of people in
all-the-way revolution. He fought to have a revolutionary
approach carried out in Tibet and other national minority
areas.

As early as 1953, Mao wrote in the essay Criticize Han

Chauvinism: "In some places the relations between
nationalities are far from normal. For Communists this is an
intolerable situation. We must go to the root and criticize the
Han chauvinist ideas which exist to a serious degree among
many Party members and cadres, namely, the reactionary
ideas of the landlord class and the bourgeoisie which are
manifested in the relations between nationalities. In other
words, bourgeois ideas dominate the minds of those
comrades and people who have had no Marxist education
and have not grasped the nationality policy of the Central
Committee."

In 1956 Mao again raised the issue in his famous speech "On
The Ten Major Relationships": "We put the emphasis on
opposing Han chauvinism. Local-nationality chauvinism must
be opposed too, but generally that is not where our emphasis
lies. All through the ages, the reactionary rulers, chiefly from
the Han nationality, sowed feelings of estrangement among
our various nationalities and bullied the minority peoples.
Even among the working people it is not easy to eliminate the
resultant influences in a short time. The air in the
atmosphere, the forests on the earth and the riches under the
soil are all important factors needed for the building of
socialism, but no material factor can be exploited and utilized
without the human factor. We must foster good relations
between the Han nationality and the minority nationalities
and strengthen the unity of all the nationalities in the common
endeavor to build our great socialist motherland."

The storms of revolution in Tibet after 1959 were a great step

forward for Mao's line. While the serfs were fighting for their
land, struggle intensified within the Communist vanguard
itself over how far such movements should go. In many
places in Tibet there were still rich and poor, even after the
land was distributed. Feudal customs and practices of all
kinds were still strong. New revolutionary organizations were
just getting started. The revolution still had a long way to go.

In the early '60s, revisionist forces called for "five years of

consolidation" within Tibet which to them meant a cooling-out
of the struggle. Socialist experiments in Tibet, like the early
rural communes and many new factories, were disbanded.
The revisionists did not get "five years of consolidation" to
suppress the people in Tibet. In 1965 the sharp line struggle
came to a head within the Central Committee of the
Communist Party itself. Chairman Mao unleashed an
unprecedented "revolution within the revolution" called the
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Fertile Soil in Tibet for Mao's Cultural Revolution

One sun-filled day in August 1966, Mao Tsetung stood in

front of a million young Red Guards who had flooded into
Peking and he put on one of their red armbands. Mao
Tsetung did something no other head of state in history had
done: he called on the masses of people to rise up against
the government and the ruling party that he himself headed.
"Bombard the Headquarters!" he said. The intense and
historic struggle he unleashed was to rage across China for
the next ten years from 1966 until 1976. The Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution was on.

Within a couple days of that great rally, some Red Guards

flew into Lhasa, Tibet where their radical message found an
eager audience. The new high school in Tibet had graduated
its first senior class in 1964. A core group of youth from serf
and slave backgrounds now knew how to read and had
learned basic Maoist principles about revolution.

Immediately, students of Lhasa High School and the nearby

Tibet Teacher's Training School formed their own Red Guard
organizations. They were in no mood to wait for orders. They
debated how to push the revolution forward. And they
immediately took action.

Here, in Part 3 of this series, we will tell what we know about

the ten years of struggle that followed in Tibet. It is not easy
to uncover the truth. These were wild, complex events in a
large and isolated region.

On one hand, those class forces who were targets of the

Maoist revolution portray the Cultural Revolution as a
senseless nightmare of fanaticism and destruction. The
Publicity Office of the Dalai Lama, based in India, offers
"eyewitness accounts "told by ultra-conservative, mainly
upper-class Tibetan exiles. The men who rule China today
talk of "ten wasted years" filled with the "excesses of the
Gang of Four." ("Gang of Four" is the name they give to Mao
Tsetung's closest supporters.) Such anti-revolutionary
accounts are highly unreliable.

On the other hand, the revolutionary activists in Tibet have

themselves not found a way to make their own story heard.
Many of them are undoubtedly in prison or dead.

To write this article we examined leaflets written by Tibetan

Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution itself. We read the
writings of different observers and progressive scholars and
even critically examined the claims of Maoism's enemies.
There are major gaps in the story. But it is possible to piece
together a basic picture of what the revolutionaries in Tibet
were trying to accomplish in these intense ten years.

Real Communists vs. Phony Communists in Tibet

Mao unleashed the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

because he saw a great danger for the people: The Chinese
revolution that came to power in 1949 had stalled.

Powerful forces in the government and the Communist Party

of China called for building a "modern" China by focusing on
orderly production. Though these forces called themselves
"communists," they really had no intention of going farther
than abolishing feudalism and building a powerful national
state. They wanted a halt to revolutionary change.

Mao saw that their imitation of "efficient" capitalist methods

would leave the masses of people powerless. Their road
would create a soulless, de-politicized, state-capitalist
system similar to the one that came to power in the Soviet
Union under Khrushchev. Mao labeled such forces
"revisionists" and "phony communists." He said they were
"bourgeois democrats turned capitalist roaders." Their main
national leaders in the mid-'60s were Liu Shaoqi and Deng
Xiaoping.

In Tibet, this conflict between the revisionist line and Mao's

line was not widely known among the people but it had been
very sharp.

Mao's line called for a continuing revolutionary process

conducted one step after another a process that
fundamentally relied on and organized the masses of Tibetan
people themselves.

Mao had urged patiently building revolutionary organization

in Tibet during the 1950s. By the early 1960s, a great alliance
of Tibet's serfs and the People's Liberation Army (PLA) had
shattered the heart of the old oppressive society liberating
the masses from serfdom and slavery, seizing land from the
ruling class, and forbidding many old oppressive practices. It
was a great advance and application of Mao's line.

Mao believed the revolution had to advance beyond anti-

feudal land reform if the masses of people were to be truly
liberated. He envisioned the systematic development of new,
collective organization in the countryside so that the masses
of peasants could pool their resources: dig irrigation, build
roads, create armed peasant militias and schools. Without
socialist collectivization, Mao believed, poor peasants would
ultimately be oppressed by richer peasants and new
exploiters. This applied to Tibet, just as in the rest of China.
Mao argued for a self-reliant socialist industrial base in the
Tibetan highlands to meet the needs of the people there. And
Mao envisioned a revolution of ideas that would uproot the
hateful superstitions of the past and on that basis bring about
the flowering of a new liberating Tibetan culture.

But the powerful revisionist forces saw Tibet through very

different eyes. They were not interested in the revolutionary
potential of Tibet's people. They wanted to develop "efficient"
systems for exploiting Tibet's wealthso the region could
quickly contribute to the "modern" China they envisioned.

The revisionists intended to turn Tibet's peasants into

efficient grain producers. They planned to import workers and
technicians from other Chinese regions to develop a few
mineral-based industries.

The revisionists wanted to eliminate those aspects of Tibetan

feudalism that held back increased production. But they
intended to offer the old feudal rulers a permanent slice of
power to use their feudal organizations and ideology as
instruments for stabilizing a new revisionist order.

Everyone knew that the lamaist aristocracy was involved in

all kinds of counterrevolutionary conspiracies. But the
revisionists believed they could contain such plots: first, by
offering to protect different aspects of the old society from the
masses, and second, by relying on the overwhelming military
power of the PLA.

This line was clearly hostile to the masses of Tibetan people:

It saw them as hopelessly backward, while it based itself on
alliances with their oppressors. This line justified itself by
talking constantly of "special conditions in Tibet "but in
practice had an extreme "Han chauvinist" approach to
anything Tibetan, and expected to eventually absorb
Tibetans into the Han nationality the majority nationality of
China. And the revisionists were not about to tolerate the
people rising up to make revolution.

In particular, the revisionists were hostile to any plans for a

new revolutionary wave in Tibet. They were against socialist
measures including both collective land ownership and an
autonomous industrial base. They said these socialist things
would be premature, disruptive, inefficient, and would forever
break their "united front" with the feudalists.

In short, the revisionist line for Tibet was essentially a plan

for a new oppressive order in which the revisionists (in
alliance with the old oppressors) relied on military means to
exploit Tibet. This "capitalist road" was sharply opposed to
Mao's line in every way.

The revisionist program is familiar because this line is

precisely the oppressive capitalist policies that have been
carried out by Deng Xiaoping's government and troops in
Tibet since they defeated the Maoists in 1976. Mao launched
the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to overthrow
exactly those forces who oppress the people of China
(including Tibet) today.

Revolution Hits Lhasa Like a Thunderbolt

"Revolutionary successors of the proletariat are invariably

brought up in great storms." Mao Tsetung

In 1966 the revisionists in Tibet were quite arrogant. They

controlled the army and had powerful connections in Peking,
including with Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. The top
Tibetan revisionist was PLA General Zhang Guohua, who
had arrived in 1950 and saw Tibet as his private "kingdom."
Zhang's forces planned to ride out Mao's new campaign.
They used the tactic of "waving the red flag to oppose the red
flag." When the Cultural Revolution was announced, they
organized their own official "Cultural Revolution Group."
They literally painted Lhasa Tibet's authorities announced
"there are no two lines here in Tibet." The main reactionary
forces, they said, were the bands of CIA-backed feudalists
and so the armed struggle by the PLA was the main
revolutionary activity that was still needed. In short, the
revisionists wanted the Cultural Revolution in Tibet to be
confined to orderly production, quiet study, and army actions.
They sent squads to every factory and school to make sure
that the growing Red Guard movement did not get out of their
control. Powerful forces in Peking, including Premier Zhou
Enlai, one of the top officials in the government, tried to help
by ordering the Red Guards to stay out of Tibet. They even
gave the Red Guards a going-away dinner party. But the Red
Guards refused to leave. red announcing that every house
should fly the red flag and display a Mao poster.
Loudspeakers broadcast revolutionary songs and streets
were given new names. Having "proven" their revolutionary
enthusiasm in this way,

Tibet's Cultural Revolution took off like a prairie fire! Red

Guards formed everywhere and rocked the house. Some
Red Guard organizations immediately seized the Jokhang
shrine in Lhasa declaring war on those who tolerated
continued feudal oppression and superstition. Shocked
authorities declared this illegal and "counter-revolutionary."
Building takeovers spread.

The Red Guards demanded to know why senior Party

officials kept putting forward serf-owners and top lamas like
the Dalai Lama, Panchen Lama and Ngawang Jigme Ngabo-
as "leaders of the Tibetan people." Red Guards revealed that
Deng Xiaoping even suggested recruiting Tibet's upper strata
lamas as Communist Party members. Didn't class analysis
and social practice show such forces were oppressors?

The special conditions of Tibet, one early leaflet said, did not
mean that Tibet was "a zone of vacuum for the class
struggle." The Red Guards said the authorities were violating
Maoist principles: "The core of Chairman Mao's revolutionary
line is the mass line to have complete faith in the masses, to
give free rein to the masses, to have the courage to rely on
the masses."

First Seizure of Power, Then Exercise of Power

"In the new situation of the Great Proletarian Cultural

Revolution, surrounded by war drums repudiating the
bourgeois reactionary line, the Lhasa Revolutionary Rebel
General Headquarters is born! We don't fear winds or storms,
or flying sand, or moving rocks. We don't care if that handful
of capitalist-roaders in authority oppose us or fear us. We
also don't care if the bourgeois Royalists denounce us or
curse us. We will resolutely make revolution and rebel. To
rebel, to rebel and to rebel through to the end in order to
create a brightly red new world of the proletariat. "Founding
of Tibet's "Revolutionary Rebels" Red Guards, December
1966

Hundreds of Red Guard groups united to form the

Revolutionary Rebels. They were based among the masses:
the new generation of Tibetan activists and students, Han
truck drivers, ordinary soldiers, lower-level cadre, and Red
Guards who arrived from other parts of China.

Some people will be surprised to learn that the Cultural

Revolution was not imposed on the Tibetan people by
Communist Party authorities and by Red Guards "imported"
from the rest of China. Even supporters of the Dalai Lama,
like John Avedon and the "exile accounts," acknowledge that
large numbers of young Tibetans joined the Revolutionary
Rebels from the beginning and that many older Tibetan
cadres enthusiastically joined the struggle.

Tibetans were involved in both sides of this revolution. Some,

recruited and trained by the revisionists, hoped to become a
new elite Maoists called them the "bourgeois Royalists."
Others, especially among the ex-slave and ex-serf youth,
were eager to push the revolution forward to socialism.
During the coming storms, a whole new generation of
communist Tibetan activists was tempered and the Maoist
current took far deeper root among the masses of Tibetan
people.

In January 1967, when Maoist organizations seized power in

Shanghai, Tibet's Revolutionary Rebels declared that they
too would seize power from Zhang, "the overlord of Tibet." In
February, worker-rebels at the Linchih Woolen Textile
complex took over their factory it was the first power seizure
of Tibet's Cultural Revolution. Revolutionary Rebels seized
the Tibet Daily newspaper and part of the capital. One Rebel
fighter said: "Various kinds of fighting organizations acted
first, were declared `unlawful' by the `reactionary line,' and
later gained Chairman Mao's approval." These were brave
and dangerous moves.

Fearing arrest, Zhang plotted a counterattack and then fled

Lhasa. Loyal police units started a conservative "Red Guard"
group, called the Great Alliance. It based itself on upper-level
party officials and Tibetan aristocrat-cadre. Within weeks,
army units suppressed the Revolutionary Rebels with the
backing of the Great Alliance. This coup (part of a China-wide
anti-Mao movement called the "February Adverse Current")
was driven back when Mao Tsetung told the army to "support
the masses of the left."
We don't know many details of the complex and sometimes
armed struggles that spread through Tibet over the next two
years. This much is known: In September 1968, a new
government, the Tibetan Revolutionary Committee, was
finally established. It united diverse forces around Mao's line.
Once this new revolutionary power was consolidated, the
Cultural Revolution entered a new phase leaving no part of
social life and thought unchanged.

The Creation of the People's Communes

"When wild geese fly in formation, they can fly over the
highest mountains. We poor people can overcome any
difficulty if we unite and help each other."Tsering Lamo,
communist leader of a township's Woman's Association
explaining the socialist road to other ex-serfs

The liberation of Tibet's people was, and is, intimately tied up

with the revolutionization of land ownership and production.
After the land reform of the early 1960s, the new
arrangement based on small individually owned farms
contained the seeds of new oppression. Rich and poor
started to reappear as prosperous farmers hired and bought
out their poorer neighbors. Focused on family survival, serfs
were often too unorganized to face constant feudal attempts
at restoration.

With the victory of Mao's line in 1969, experimental new

farms called People's Communes started to be organized
throughout Tibet's vast countryside. The collective methods
that had built the new roads of Tibet were now used to
change rural life. In each commune, the land was worked
collectively by hundreds of peasants. Collective harvests
were divided up based on "work-points" a measure of the
amount of work each person did. By 1970 nearly 666
communes were operating in 34 percent of the region's
township districts. Soon the communes were everywhere.
It took both patient political work and fierce class struggle to
make such changes. Some peasants just wanted their own
land and didn't see the larger picture. Often the poorer
farmers, like ex-slave women, were willing to try the new
ways first. People's dictatorship was exercised over
oppressors the serf-owners and top lamas. They had to work
now too whether they liked it or not. Counterrevolutionaries
were uncovered and pursued.

For centuries, forced labor of the people had served idle

aristocrats and built great temples to honor superstition. Now,
collective labor brought irrigation and drinking water to 80
percent of Tibet's farmland. Because each family's survival
no longer depended on just their own plot of land, it was now
possible for the peasants to experiment with dozens of new
vegetables, fruits and crops.

Some experiments worked, some didn't. The class struggle

itself disrupted some harvests. But big leaps in land
productivity were achieved. Food production in Tibet
doubled.

The People's Communes also made it possible to organize

the first rural schools, mass education and rural theater
troops in Tibet's history. Old people were now taken care of
even if they had no children of their own. Women had new
power. One young Tibetan woman Red Guard said, "Since
we, the women, did the labor, of course, the communes were
good for us." Arranged marriage and polygamy stopped.
Exiles complain that children were revolutionized and no
longer obeyed reactionary parents.

The famous Maoist Barefoot Doctor's Manual was published

in Tibetan and used to train thousands of new doctors among
the serfs. Soon 80 percent of Tibet's hospital beds were in
rural areas and medical personnel arrived from urban
hospitals in eastern China. Over half of the 6,400 barefoot
doctors were women (who had once been forbidden to
practice medicine by Buddhist dogmas).

The People's Communes greatly increased the political

power of the peasants. Commune members were armed and
trained by the PLA. Each commune produced a yulmag
militia brigade to fight the oppressors. They hunted the Dalai
Lama's CIA-trained contra bands and broke up all kinds of
feudal gangs. These militias are proof of the support for
revolutionary change among the Tibetan masses.

Once the revisionist line was overthrown, huge strides were

taken in developing a new socialist industrial base in Tibet.
In 1964 there had only been 67 factories. By 1975 there were
250 enterprises most of them serving local and agricultural
needs. Small hydroelectric plants brought electricity to the
people. Manufactured goods were available to the masses
for the first time: Sun goggles cut down the widespread
cataract-blindness among old people. Pressure cookers
wiped out many child-killing diseases passed in old-style
Tibetan cooking. New farm implements increased
productivity and made life easier.

Revolution in the Thinking of the People

"The communist revolution is the most radical rupture with

traditional property relations; no wonder that its development
involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas. "Karl
Marx and Fredrick Engels, 1848

"We emancipated serfs have today thrown to the very bottom

of the Tsangpu River all the old wicked songs, dances and
dramas that prettify the serf owners and spread superstition
about gods and supernatural beings. Let the rushing waves
carry them away, never to come back."Dzomkyid, a 50-year-
old emancipated serf of Gyatsa county, 1966
"Before I studied Chairman Mao's works, all I cared about
was what belonged to me. I knew exactly how many piles of
yak dung fuel I had stored at home. I could even tell you how
many were dry and how many were wet without looking at
them. But I did not care as much for the herds of the
collective. Chairman Mao's teachings widened my outlook.
My purpose in life is now clear to me. Today I am concerned
with not only the collective but the whole world and the world
revolution. "A Tibetan herdsman, 1967

"We now know that it was not gods, not demons, that made
the motors work. We handled them and we saw that it was
not the blood of children that made them run, as the lamas
told us. "A new Tibetan machinist

In the Cultural Revolution, Maoists took aim at the "four olds"

old ideas, old customs, old culture and old habits. And in
Tibet there were many "olds" to challenge. Heavy religious
superstition held back the struggle of the people. It was a
central instrument of the old feudal order and was used by
the new revisionists too.

Before the Cultural Revolution, most serfs had never

discussed matters that, to them, were defined by religious
authorities. Iron plows, tanning hides, canning milk, shearing
sheep, acupuncture, surgery, antibiotics, metal working all
ran into taboos of Lamaist dogma. Women were constrained
by countless taboos. Many animals were considered too
sacred to eat. In the 1950s the first Tibetan medical students
would often pray hard at night, begging the gods to forgive
them for the sins they were committing during the day.

New ways were discovered to help the people liberate

themselves from the chains of superstition. Bold serf women
organized teams to hunt sacred animals and "iron brigades"
to break plowing taboos. In 1966, 100,000 farmers waged a
two-month mass campaign to exterminate earth rats, rodents
that were eating their grain. In the past the monks had
protected these rats, saying they were sacred reincarnations
of lice from Buddha's body.

The spread of communist ideology especially the writings of

Chairman Mao Tsetung played a key role in this revolution of
the mind. Top revisionist officials had opposed the
publication of Mao's Red Book in Tibetan. But soon tens of
thousands of bilingual Red Books were distributed in
traditional Tibetan-style red purses. Memorizing key
quotations and revolutionary songs was especially popular,
because many poor people could not read.

On the mountainsides, huge carved revolutionary quotations

from Chairman Mao appeared, in the place of carved
prayers. On mountain passes, new red flags showed that the
people held power.

Herds people in Tibet's grasslands described how PLA Mao

Tsetung Propaganda Teams helped them deal with a winter
disaster. In the past, they would have accepted their "fate"
and many would have died. Now they developed collective
plans for saving lives and herds. One old herdsman said,
"With Mao Tsetung Thought, we dare to struggle even with
god!"

Dismantling the Feudal Fortresses of the Lamas

"It is the peasants who made the idols, and when the time
comes they will cast the idols aside with their own hands. "-
Mao Tsetung, 1927

It was the thousands of monasteries that inspired the

greatest superstitious awe. In the heady days of the Cultural
Revolution, these feudal strongholds themselves were
targeted. In a huge mass movement, the many monasteries
of Tibet were emptied and physically dismantled.

Supporters of Tibetan feudalism often say this dismantling

was "mindless destruction" and "cultural genocide." But this
view ignores the true class nature of these monasteries.
These monasteries were armed fortresses that had loomed
over the peasants' lives for centuries. Under the revisionist
line, many monasteries were kept alive by paid government
subsidies. These fortresses provoked justified fear that the
old ways might return one conspiracy after another was
plotted behind monastery walls. Dismantling these
monasteries was anything but "mindless." These were
conscious political acts to liberate the people!

All available accounts agree that this dismantling was done

almost exclusively by the Tibetan serfs themselves, led by
revolutionary activists. Mass rallies of ex-serfs gathered at
the gates, daring to enter the holy sanctums for the first time.
The wealth stolen from them over centuries was revealed to
all. Some especially valuable historic artifacts were
preserved for posterity.

Valuable building materials were taken from fortresses and

distributed among the people to build their houses and roads.
One exile describes how sacred wooden blocks were
snatched up by the serfs, used for fuel and carved into
handles for new farm tools. Backward elements claim they
were criticized for not participating. Often idols, texts, prayer
flags, prayer wheels and other symbols were publicly
destroyed as a powerful way of shattering century-old
superstitions. As a final comment on restorationist dreams,
the ruins were often blown sky high by the revolutionary
armed forces.

Later in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a few

lamaist monasteries were restored, so that they could serve
both as religious shrines and museums of national relics. But
the verdict of the Cultural Revolution was that these
monasteries should never again exist as feudal fortresses
living from the suffering of the masses.

Difficult Struggles over the Four Olds and the Four News

Like all revolutions, the Cultural Revolution in Tibet advanced

through complex debates and struggles. The "four olds" were
criticized, and the revolution fought to bring the "four news"
into being. New ideas, new customs, new culture and new
habits. Important questions were raised and struggled over
again and again: What practices are reactionary feudal
culture and what practices are Tibetan national culture? Was
it revolutionary or Han chauvinist to promote new cultural
forms that the revolution had developed in eastern Han
regions of China? Was it feudal to wear the old braided
hairstyles of serfdom, or was it just Tibetan? Was it
reactionary to bless people when you met them and how
reactionary was it?

Han chauvinism (anti-Tibetan prejudices among the majority

Han people) remained a problem. Han Suyin gives proof of
this in her 1977 book on Tibet where she endorses the view
of some in the Party that higher education in Tibet should be
conducted in the Han language because, according to her,
the Tibetan language was incapable of expressing the ideas
of modern subjects like chemistry.

At the same time, others fought for Mao's line on minority

nationalities. When that line led, there was a new blossoming
of Tibetan culture. The first Tibetan typewriters were
developed allowing for easier communication and records in
Tibetan. A single Tibetan dialect was promoted so people
from various areas could communicate. Films were dubbed
into Tibetan. Millions of books were published in Tibetan
many dealing with the theory and practice of liberation.
Tibetan short stories and plays were published. And many
Tibetan festivals were transformed to celebrate the people's
new triumphs their People's Communes and their rich new
harvests.

Traditional Tibetan medicine was studied and its herbal

discoveries were made available to the lower classes for the
first time.

New revolutionary leaders were developed among the

Tibetans. By 1975, half the top leaders were native Tibetans.
Half of these were new cadre in their early thirties often from
serf and slave backgrounds. Women became leaders at all
levels. In one county the revolutionary committee was all
women. Out of 27,000 Tibetan cadre, 12,000 were women.
One Tibetan woman, Phanthog, climbed Mount Everest in
1975!

During the Cultural Revolution, the young revolutionary son

of a slave-herdsman named Jedi said, "Where would I be,
what would we the people of Tibet be like, if Chairman Mao
and the Revolution had not come to us?"

The Last Great Battles

"We are in the process of doing things our forebears never

attempted, following a road they never took. "A veteran
Tibetan communist, 1975

One observer captured a basic truth about the Great

Proletarian Cultural Revolution in Tibet: "Now you don't see
emancipated serfs in rags carrying the litter of a noble
dressed in warm clothing, turquoise rings and gold
bracelets." The old, hateful system of lamaist feudalism had
been shattered by the people themselves. The life of the
people improved. Disease declined. The population
increased. The numbing isolation of old Tibet was broken.
Literacy and basic scientific knowledge spread among the
people. Even enemies of Maoism admit that the wide gap
between rich and poor vanished.

At the same time, the Cultural Revolution represented far

more than the historic defeat for feudalism. For ten years it
prevented the revisionists from carrying out their schemes of
turning the Tibetan people into wage-slaves in a capitalist
China.

But the life-and-death struggle between Maoism and

revisionism was not over!

In 1971 a high-level military coup by revisionists was

defeated in Peking. The powerful general Lin Piao was
exposed and overthrown. Some of his close supporters were
prominent leaders of Tibet's Revolutionary Committee and
they lost power. In the following struggle Ren Rong, a leader
of the "February Adverse Current," suddenly emerged as the
new leader in Tibet. A cold, rightist chill crept over Tibet.

In Tibet, a campaign was launched upholding the so-called

"four basic freedoms" (to practice religion, to trade, to lend
money with interest, to hire laborers and servants). This
slogan of "four freedoms" had not been upheld since before
the serf-owners' uprising of 1959. Upper class Tibetans
reappeared in high posts. Negotiations were opened with the
Dalai Lama seeking to bring him back in a prominent
figurehead position.

The revolutionary forces regrouped and counterattacked. In

the end of 1972, a new campaign criticized "bourgeois
extravagance, capitalistic profit motive and economic waste."
In 1973 the intrigues with the Dalai Lama were abruptly
halted. And in 1974 a national campaign was launched
against capitalist restoration. It was called the "Criticize Lin
Piao and Confucius Campaign." In Tibet, it was used to
deepen the anti-religious consciousness of the people and to
reaffirm the revolutionary verdict that aristocrat-monks like
the Dalai Lama were "wolves in monk's clothing." Throughout
China the key message of this campaign was "capitalist
roaders were still on the capitalist road," and this was very
true.

The struggle between Mao's forces and the revisionist forces

tightened throughout China. And in the end, the revisionists
succeeded in launching a decisive blow to revolutionary
Maoist forces. In October 1976, shortly after Mao's death, the
revisionist right staged a coup d'état in Peking. They arrested
Mao's closest supporters and started a countrywide purge of
revolutionaries. They put into place all the policies that Mao
and the Cultural Revolution had rejected. Mao's enemy Deng
Xiaoping came to power.

Two Lines Clash in Tibet

The Maoist revolutionaries fought powerful forces within the

Communist Party who wanted to impose a capitalist road on
China, including Tibet. In Part 3, we described the program
of these "capitalist-roaders "whose leaders included Deng
Xiaoping. They called themselves "communists" and talked
of building a "powerful modern socialist state," but they really
wanted to stop the revolution after abolishing feudalism. Mao
Tsetung considered these forces to be bitter enemies of the
revolution he called them "revisionists," "capitalist roaders"
and "phony communists." Mao saw that their imitation of
"efficient" capitalist methods would bring class polarization
and capitalist exploitation back to China. The result would be
that China would once again be penetrated and dominated
by foreign investors and exploiters.

The contrast between Mao's revolutionary communist line

and the revisionists' capitalist line is very clear on all the
issues related to Tibet.
Mao's line called for organizing and relying on the masses of
Tibetan people in a continuing revolutionary process. He
rejected imposing change on national minority areas before
the masses there were able to participate in liberating
themselves.

Mao repeatedly criticized the traditional "Han chauvinist"

prejudices that considered the Tibetan people "backward"
and "barbaric." Mao envisioned a revolution of ideas that
would uproot the hateful superstitions of the past and on that
basis bring about the flowering of a new liberating Tibetan
culture. He argued that the masses needed the new
revolutionary ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism to
liberate themselves.

And Mao insisted that the revolution had to move beyond

anti-feudal land reform to socialism, if the masses of people
were to be truly liberated including People's Communes in
the countryside. Mao argued for a self-reliant socialist
industrial base in the Tibetan highlands to meet the needs of
the people there.

The revisionists had a completely different plan for Tibet:

They wanted "efficient" systems for exploiting Tibet's wealth
so the region could quickly contribute to the "modern" China
they envisioned. They considered Tibet's people backward
and wanted to bring in lots of workers and technicians from
eastern China, while the Tibetans were supposed to be little
more than efficient grain producers.

The revisionists complained that the Maoist revolution's

"socialist new things" broke up their "united front" with
elements of the old feudalist class. The revisionists wanted
to offer the old feudal rulers in Tibet a permanent slice of
power to use their feudal organizations and ideology as
instruments for stabilizing the new revisionist order.
In short, the revisionist line for Tibet was a plan for a new
oppressive, militarized order in which the revisionists
exploited Tibet's people in alliance with the old oppressors.
This is the program that the revisionists followed after they
overthrew Mao's close supporters and seized overall power
after Mao's death in 1976.

The Bitter Turning Point: The 1976 Revisionist Coup

The complex class struggles of the Great Proletarian Cultural

Revolution ebbed and flowed from 1966 to 1976. During high
tides of mass struggle, innovation swept across the region.
When the revolutionaries were forced to retrench, the
revisionist forces pushed to overthrow the revolutionary
changes.

In October 1976 the revolutionary forces suffered a decisive

setback. Two weeks after the death of Mao Tsetung, army
forces loyal to the revisionist line arrested key Maoist leaders
in Beijing including Chiang Ching and Chang Chun-chiao. It
was a revisionist coup d'état. Over several years of transition,
capitalism was more and more openly imposed on the
Chinese people. The arch-revisionist Deng Xiaoping
emerged as the national leader of the new state-capitalist
ruling class.

The historic defeat was deeply felt in Tibet. Many details of

the counterrevolution in Tibet are still not known. However,
this much is clear: the capitalist-roaders, who still held many
key posts in Tibet, put their program into full effect.

Today, the masses of Tibetan peasants are suppressed and

exploited by new rich classes closely allied with state
functionaries. The revisionists are carrying out a Han
chauvinist policy of flooding central Tibet, especially its cities,
with Han immigrants. Government troops and police have
shot down protesters. Tibet's resources are being
thoughtlessly exploited serving the capitalist god of
profit.(See, for example, "Revisionist Clear-Cutting.")

These policies have nothing to do with Maoism. They have

everything to do with the restoration of capitalism in China
which has full support from the U.S. imperialists.

The Purge of Tibet's Maoist Revolutionaries

When "the sky changed" in revolutionary China, the new

revisionist rulers focused on consolidating their rule. They
had two immediate needs in Tibet: First, to overthrow and
break up the vast revolutionary forces trained and organized
under Mao's line. And second, to unleash all available
counterrevolutionary forces under their leadership.

There was a widespread purge of Maoist revolutionaries from

the party and government. It is likely that many were jailed or
killed. Historian A. Tom Grunfeld documents that the number
of Tibetan communists had risen dramatically during the
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) and then
dropped sharply after 1976: In 1973 alone, during the GPCR,
the Chinese press reported the recruitment of 11,000 new
Tibetan members into the Chinese Communist Party and the
Communist Youth League. The year after the coup, the CCP
reported having only 4,000 Tibetan party members. A
decade later, the Communist Party was reporting it had
40,000 members in Tibet without describing how many were
Tibetan and how many were immigrated Han. This suggests
that the whole generation of young Tibetan revolutionaries,
overwhelmingly from the poor classes, were driven from
power. By 1979 a new party leadership was consolidated -
including many revisionist figures who had been discredited
during revolutionary periods.
The revisionists stretched their hand to the forces among the
Tibetans who could help them beat back the revolutionaries
including the remnants of the die-hard feudal-lamaist
classes. Starting in 1977, the revisionists issued sweeping
pronouncements restoring "rights" to feudal customs and
forces saying that the revolution's condemnation and
expropriation of all kinds of oppressors and class enemies
had been "unjust." They promised to create great prosperity
by distributing collective property.

In April 1977, shortly after the coup, Ngawang Jigme Ngabo

stated that the new revisionist government "would welcome
the return of the Dalai Lama and his followers who fled to
India." Nagabo is a Tibetan feudal-aristocrat who fled Tibet
during the Cultural Revolution and later returned to
prominence. This public call was followed by secret
negotiations where Deng Xiaoping contacted the Dalai
Lama's older brother, Gyalo Thondup, to discuss a possible
return of significant sections of the old feudal ruling class,
including the Dalai Lama himself.

On February 25, 1978 the Panchen Lama, one of old Tibet's

greatest exploiters and a "reincarnated Buddha," was
released from prison and given a prominent government
post. Thirty-four prominent Tibetans from the CIA-backed
1959 revolt were released from prison. From 1977 on, U.S.
officials started making regular trips to the region.

The rehabilitation of new and old exploiters set the stage for
a sweeping counterrevolution in all aspects of Tibetan life.

The So-called Reforms in Tibet's Countryside

Countless villages and nomadic settlements lie scattered, far

from each other, across Tibet's vast rural plateau. The
struggles and changes there have been largely ignored by
lamaist exiles and the Western media however, this is the
heart of Tibet, where the majority of its people live. Once the
revisionists consolidated overall state power for themselves,
they quickly turned to reversing the revolution in Tibet's
countryside.

The new revisionist rulers abolished socialist farming by

stages. First, in 1980 they abolished the People's Communes
and abolished any centralized guidance of the smaller, local
Production Teams (which involved 20 to 30 households).
Soon they abolished the Production Teams altogether.

Reactionaries routinely portray this as "giving the peasants

more power over their lives." But, in the most profound way,
this broke up peasant organization into isolated family units.
It left the masses powerless again in the face of capitalist
market forces and in the struggle against their emboldened
class enemies. Solidarity was declared a thing of the past
aspiring families could again get rich by exploiting their
poorer neighbors.

Reactionary forces assume the abolition of collective farming

was uniformly popular among Tibet's peasants. These claims
are contradicted by the information available.

It is revealing, for example, that the revisionists abolished

taxes in Tibet's countryside for ten years at the same time
that they instituted their counterrevolutionary "reforms." They
hoped that the bribery of "tax relief" would neutralize less
conscious parts of the peasant population.

Some peasants probably welcomed the division of collective

property embracing the immediate power this gave the males
within each family group and the promise that class enemies
could retrieve their old wealth and privilege. At the same time,
the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution had seeded the
countryside with class conscious serf-activists, and there
was undoubtedly struggle against the restoration.
Observations from the Yak-Tents of Pala

Two prominent Tibet experts, Professors Melvyn C.

Goldstein and Cynthia M. Beall, provided valuable firsthand
observations on the current life of Tibet's nomadic peoples in
their 1990 book, Nomads of Western Tibet. Goldstein and
Beall spent 16 months between 1986 and 1988 living in Pala,
an extremely remote tent-encampment of 300 Tibetan yak-
herders. This study does not describe the farming Tibet,
where the Maoist revolution sank its deepest roots, and these
authors are deeply sympathetic to old Tibetan feudalism.
Still, it is useful when Beall and Goldstein, despite their
hostility to revolution, document the return of oppression in
Tibet's remote countryside and signs of continuing class
struggle. communities of

Goldstein and Beall report that even in remote Pala, nomads

had a history of participating in Tibet's class struggles. In
1959 the herders waged an armed struggle against Bo
Argon, a local supporter of the Dalai Lama, because the
nomads did not want to join the counterrevolutionary revolt
that was organized out of Lhasa. Goldstein and Beall also
document how the overwhelming majority of Pala nomads,
eager to struggle against local officials, joined the Gyenlo,
one of Tibet's two main Red Guard groups during the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The cultural revolution stirred
complex struggles, even among the herders of this most
remote region.

Goldstein and Beall then document how the 1976 coup

represented a fundamental "change of sky" for Tibet: "The
end of the cultural revolution in China proper in 1976 and the
destruction of the `Gang of Four' brought a new group of
leaders to the fore in the Chinese Communist Party whose
views changed the fate of the Pala nomads. Holding an
entirely different economic and cultural philosophy from Mao
and the Gang of Four, they viewed the `Cultural Revolution'
as a catastrophe for China and terminated communes,
implementing a more market-oriented rural economic system
called the `responsibility' system. Responsibility for
production was shifted from the commune to the household."

The coup installed a revisionist government over this region

of Lagyab Lhojang (named after the old feudal estate that
once owned all the people and animals there). "The full
impact of these changes reached Pala in 1981. Overnight, all
the commune's animals were divided equally among its
members. Every nomad infants one week old, teenagers,
adults, the elderly received the same share of 37 animals:
five yak, 25 sheep, and 7 goats. Each household regained
complete responsibility over its livestock, managing them
according to their own plans and decisions. Pastureland was
allocated at the same time to small groups of three to six
households living in the same home-base encampments."

Wealth, Poverty, Wage Labor and Malnutrition Return

However, the dividing of wealth was only a first step toward

restoring a system of rich and poor in Tibet's countryside.
Goldstein and Beall give examples from the grasslands:
"Another striking consequence of China's post-1981 reform
policy is the rapidity and extent to which economic and social
differentiation has reemerged in Pala. Although all Pala's
nomads in the old society were subjects of the Panchen
Lama, tremendous class differences existed among the
subjects. Rich families had huge herds and lived in relative
luxury alongside a substantial stratum of herdless laborers,
poor nomads, servants and beggars. Implementation of the
commune in 1970 removed these disparities since all private
ownership of the means of production ended at this time. The
dissolution of the commune in 1981 maintained a rough
equality since all nomads in Pala received an equal number
of livestock. However, in the ensuing seven years, some
herds have increased while others have declined
dramatically. Once again there are both very wealthy and
very poor nomads. One household actually has no livestock
at all.

"While no households had less than 37 animals per person

in 1981, 38 percent had less than 30 in 1988. At the high end
of the continuum, the proportion of Pala households with
more than 50 animals per person increased from 12 percent
in 1981 to 25 percent in 1988. Ten percent of the households
had more than 90 animals per person versus none in 1981.
As a result of this process of economic differentiation, the
richer 16 percent of the population in 1988 owned 33 percent
of the animals while the poorer 33 percent of the population
owned only 17 percent of the animals. The past seven years
of family-based `responsibility' system has resulted in an
increasing concentration of animals in the hands of a minority
of newly wealthy households, and the emergence once again
of a stratum of poor households with no or few animals.
These new poor subsist by working for rich nomads, several
of whom now, as in the old society, regularly employ herders,
milkers, and servants for long stretches of time."

In the Maoist, socialist period, the social surplus in Tibet's

countryside went toward serving the people and supporting
the revolution: funding of public works, schools and cultural
institutions, and the armed revolutionary forces. As Bob
Avakian explains in his book, Phony Communism Is Dead,
Long Live Real Communism!: this reflected the line and
practice of the revolutionaries in China who aimed to create
a "common abundance" which is more and more shared by
the masses of people as a whole.

Now, however, that surplus is consumed by officials and the

handful of new rich exploiters, creating an explosion in luxury
purchases, while the masses endure malnutrition again.
Goldstein and Beall document that the "newly wealthy" are,
in fact, the same "class enemies" who had exploited their
neighbors in the old society. This was not accidental. The
revisionist "reforms" were designed to restore an exploitative
class system in the countryside and to unleash the old class
enemies to support the new government. Large sums of
money were given by the new revisionist government to the
old class enemies to help them restore their previous
privilege. Goldstein and Beall document that one of Pala's
old exploiters received thousands of Chinese dollars, "a
small fortune in Tibet where, by comparison, the annual
salary of a university instructor in Lhasa is about 2,500 to
3,000."

This counterrevolution is not a restoration of the old feudal

order. The old aristocrats and monasteries have not been
restored at the top of this new class structure. Property is
increasingly concentrated in a wealthy stratum of farmers,
while profits are often gathered by state-capitalists operating
as merchant capital within the local and district governments.
Production in Tibet as a whole is being shaped to serve the
needs of the larger bureaucratic-capitalist class that now
rules China as a whole.

The results of this restoration can be seen in the cities.

Wealthy pilgrims have returned to Lhasa, and starving
beggars have reappeared too. Journalist Ludmilla Tüting
reports seeing Tibetan peasants traveling to Lhasa to sell
their children something common under the old Lamaist rule
that had disappeared after the Maoist revolution. Tüting adds
that while the poor go hungry, 55,000 tons of yak meat are
now being exported from Tibet to Hong Kong every year.

Oppressive Customs Return Under the Dictatorship of the

Bourgeoisie
Goldstein and Beall tell a story that illuminates some of the
issues of today's class struggle.

A "poor class" nomad who was an activist during the Great

Proletarian Cultural Revolution sold a sheep in the late 1980s
without thoroughly milking it. This violated an old feudal
superstition that said selling a sheep with full udders would
bring a curse on the herds of the whole camp. A nomad who
had been a wealthy class enemy in the old society attacked
the revolutionary nomad demanding that the old superstitions
be obeyed. The revolutionary said unscientific taboos should
be rejected as they had been under Mao. He said this class
enemy was trying to exercise reactionary dictatorship over
the poor nomads and over revolutionary ideas. There was a
fight.

Later, the new local government officials ruled that it was

wrong to uphold the revolutionary standards of the past. They
fined both men for fighting and upheld the right of former
class enemies to struggle for reactionary taboos.

Though Goldstein and Beall themselves support the

restoration, they document such signs of opposition. They
report widespread hatred of local officials. And they even
brought back a photograph from one nomad camp that
refuses to take down their picture of Mao Tsetung!

The stories from Pala are undoubtedly repeated in countless

communities scattered across Tibet's countryside and across
the rest of China too as hundreds of millions of people have
been forced back into a web of oppression by the
counterrevolution.

Restoring the Rites

In mid-1977 the revisionist party chairman Hua Guofeng

called for a revival of feudal customs in Tibet. Feudal rituals
were soon restored at Lhasa's main Lingkhor and Barkhor
shrines. By the late '80s, the Chinese government said there
were over 200 functioning monasteries with perhaps as
many 45,000 monks. At the end of the '80s, Li Peng (the
butcher who ordered the Tiananmen Square massacre) was
orchestrating the first officially sponsored "search for a
reincarnated Buddha."

The New Wave of Han Immigrants

Starting in 1983 the revisionists launched a policy that

represents a true challenge to the survival of Tibetan culture
and rights of the Tibetan people. They started a wave of Han
immigration into the Tibetan Autonomous Region. (See also
"The False Charges of 'Genocide Under Mao.'")

Even spokesmen for Tibet's nationalist movement

acknowledge that, under Mao, there was not an effort at Han
settlement in the Tibetan Autonomous Region. In the
collection Anguish in Tibet, Jamyang Norbu writes, "But with
the death of Mao and the fall of `The Gang of Four,' China's
new leaders seem to have gradually put together a scheme
not only to fill Tibet with Chinese immigrants but even to
make it pay." Pro-lamaist writer John Avedon writes: "The
current policy began in January 1983. By September, the
Beijing Review reported calls for wide-spread immigration to
Tibet; age and home-leave incentives guaranteed, with
bonuses at eight- and 20-year increments for all
immigrants."(Utne Reader, March/April 1989). The top
revisionist Deng Xiaoping claimed that Tibet needed Han
migration because the "region's population of about two
million was inadequate to develop its resources."
Billboards in some eastern Chinese cities read "MIGRATE
TO TIBET."
This immigration has not touched the countryside of the
Tibetan plateau, but it has changed the character of most
Tibetan cities making urban Tibetans feel like strangers in
their own lands. There is now a Holiday Inn in Tibet built by
the revisionists to accommodate Western tourists with a
fascination for Tibetan mysticism.

The influx of Han into Tibet's cities and emergence of many

Han as a wealthy stratum of officials and merchants has
created a great deal of resentment among Tibetans giving
rise to struggle and a series of justified rebellions since 1987.

*****

"If the rightists stage an anti-Communist coup d’état in China,

I am sure they will know no peace either and their rule will
most probably be short-lived, because it will not be tolerated
by the revolutionaries who represent the interests of the
people making up more than 90 percent of the population."
Mao Tsetung.

But it would be the communist party itself that would put an

end on the reign of Mao Tsetung.

Beall and Goldstein tell another story about revolutionary

resistance in Tibet's remote grasslands. One night a nomad
came to their tent. He had been a leading Maoist activist
during the cultural revolution. And he wanted these foreign
visitors to carry a message for him to the revolutionary center
he thought might still exist in Lhasa's capital.
The revolutionary whispered, "You have to tell Lhasa what is
going on here." When Goldstein asked him what he meant,
the man repeated himself, "You have to tell what is going on
here." After much prodding, he finally said, "You know, the
class enemies! They are rising up again."
 Such opposition to the capitalist restoration is persistent
enough that many in Pala believe the revolution may emerge
again from among the people.

Some History of the 13th Dalai Lama

After the British expedition to Tibet by Sir Francis Younghusband in

early 1904, the Dalai Lama was convinced to flee to Urga in Mongolia,
almost 2,400 km (1,500 mi) to the northeast of Lhasa, a journey which
took four months. The Dalai Lama spent over a year in Urga and the
Wang Khuree Monastery (to the west from the capital) giving teachings
to the Mongolians. In Urga he met the 8th Bogd Gegeen Jebtsundamba
Khutuktu several times (the spiritual leader of Outer Mongolia). The
content of these meetings is unknown. According to report from A.D.
Khitrovo, the Russian Border Commissioner in Kyakhta Town, the Dalai
Lama and the influential Mongol Khutuktus, high lamas and princes
"irrevocably decided to secede from China as an independent federal
state, carrying out this operation under the patronage and support from
Russia, taking care to avoid the bloodshed".[13] The Dalai Lama insisted
that if Russia would not help, he would even ask Britain, his former foe,
for assistance.

After the Dalai Lama fled, the Qing dynasty immediately proclaimed him
deposed and again asserted sovereignty over Tibet, making claims over
Nepal and Bhutan as well.[14] The Treaty of Lhasa was signed at the
Potala between Great Britain and Tibet in the presence of the Amban
and Nepalese and Bhutanese representatives on 7 September 1904. [15]
The provisions of the 1904 treaty were confirmed in a 1906 treaty[16]
signed between Great Britain and China. The British, for a fee from the
Qing court, also agreed "not to annex Tibetan territory or to interfere in
the administration of Tibet", while China engaged "not to permit any
other foreign state to interfere with the territory or internal administration
of Tibet".[16][17]

The Dalai Lama was suspected of involvement in the anti-foreign 1905

Tibetan Rebellion. The British invasion of Lhasa in 1904 had
repercussions in the Tibetan Buddhist world,[18] causing extreme anti-
western and anti-Christian sentiment among Tibetan Buddhists. The
British invasion also triggered intense and sudden Qing intervention in
Tibetan areas, to develop, assimilate, and bring the regions under
strong Qing central control.[19] The Tibetan Lamas in Batang proceeded
to revolt in 1905, massacring Chinese officials, French missionaries,
and Christian Catholic converts. The Tibetan monks opposed the
Catholics, razing the Catholic mission's Church, and slaughtering all
Catholic missionaries and Qing officials.[20][21] The Manchu Qing official
Fengquan was assassinated by the Tibetan Batang Lamas, along with
other Manchu and Han Chinese Qing officials and the French Catholic
priests, who were all massacred when the rebellion started in March
1905. Tibetan Gelugpa monks in Nyarong, Chamdo, and Litang also
revolted and attacked missions and churches and slaughtered
westerners.[22] The British invasion of Lhasa, the missionaries, and the
Qing were linked in the eyes of the Tibetans, as hostile foreigners to be
attacked.[23] Zhongtian (Chungtien) was the location of Batang
monastery.[24] The Tibetans slaughtered the converts, torched the
building of the missionaries in Batang due to their xenophobia. [25] Sir
Francis Edward Younghusband wrote that At the same time, on the
opposite side of Tibet they were still more actively aggressive, expelling
the Roman Catholic missionaries from their long-established homes at
Batang, massacring I many of their converts, and burning the mission-
house.[26] There was anti Christian sentiment and xenophobia running
rampant in Tibet.[27]

No. 10. Despatch from Consul-General Wilkinson to Sir E. Satow, dated

Yünnan-fu, 28th April, 1905. (Received in London 14th June, 1905.)
Pere Maire, the Provicaire of the Roman Catholic Mission here, called
this morning to show me a telegram which he had just received from a
native priest of his Mission at Tali. The telegram, which is in Latin, is
dated Tali, the 24th April, and is to the effect that the lamas of Batang
have killed PP. Musset and Soulie, together with, it is believed, 200
converts. The chapel at Atentse has been burnt down, and the lamas
hold the road to Tachien-lu. Pere Bourdonnec (another member of the
French Tibet Mission) begs that Pere Maire will take action. Pere Maire
has accordingly written to M. Leduc, my French colleague, who will
doubtless communicate with the Governor-General. The Provicaire is of
opinion that the missionaries were attacked by orders of the ex-Dalai
Lama, as the nearest Europeans on whom he could avenge his
disgrace. He is good enough to say that he will give me any further
information which he may receive. I am telegraphing to you the news of
the massacre.

I have, &c., (Signed) W. H. WILKINSON. East India (Tibet): Papers

Relating to Tibet [and Further Papers ...], Issues 2–4, Great Britain.
Foreign Office, p. 12.[28][29]

Tibetans Christian families gunned down after refusing to give up their

religion at Yanjing at the hands of the 13th Dalai Lama's messengers at
the same time during the 1905 rebellion when Father Dubernard was
beheaded and all the French missionaries were slaughtered by the
Tibetan Buddhist Lamas.[30] The name "Field of Blood" was given to
where the slaughter happened.[31][32]
In October 1906, John Weston Brooke was the first Englishman to gain
an audience with the Dalai Lama, and subsequently he was granted
permission to lead two expeditions into Tibet.[33] Also in 1906, Sir
Charles Alfred Bell, was invited to visit Thubten Chökyi Nyima, the 9th
Panchen Lama at Tashilhunpo, where they had friendly discussions on
the political situation.[34] The Dalai Lama later stayed at the great
Kumbum Monastery near Xining and then travelled east to the most
sacred of four Buddhist mountain in China, Wutai Shan located 300 km
from Beijing. From here, the Dalai Lama received a parade of envoys:
William Woodville Rockhill, the American Minister in Peking; Gustaf
Mannerheim, a Russian army colonel (who later became the president
of independent Finland); a German doctor from the Peking Legation; an
English explorer named Christopher Irving; R.F. Johnson, a British
diplomat from the Colonial Service; and Henri D’Ollone, the French
army major and viscount.[35] The Dalai Lama was mounting a campaign
to strengthen his international ties and free his kingdom from Chinese
rule. Worried about his safety, Mannerheim even gave Tibet's spiritual
pontiff a Browning revolver and showed him how to reload the
weapon.[36].
In September 1908, the Dalai Lama was granted an audience with the
Guangxu Emperor and Empress Dowager Cixi. The emperor tried to
stress Tibet's subservient role, although the Dalai Lama refused to
kowtow to him.[37] He stayed in Beijing until the end of 1908.[14]
When he returned to Tibet in December 1908, he began reorganizing
the government, but the Qing sent a military expedition of its own to
Tibet in 1910 and he had to flee to India.