New Left Review published a very long and very interesting article in 2002 by Wang Lixiong. Here’s the first paragraph:
In the current debate on Tibet the two opposing sides see almost everything in black and white—differing only as to which is which. But there is one issue that both Chinese authorities and Tibetan nationalists consistently strive to blur or, better still, avoid altogether. At the height of the Cultural Revolution hundreds of thousands of Tibetans turned upon the temples they had treasured for centuries and tore them to pieces, rejected their religion and became zealous followers of the Great Han occupier, Mao Zedong. To the Chinese Communist Party, the episode is part of a social catastrophe—one that it initiated but has long since disowned and which, it hopes, the rest of the world will soon forget. For the Tibetan participants, the memory of that onslaught is a bitter humiliation, one they would rather not talk about, or which they try to exorcise with the excuse that they only did it ‘under pressure from the Han’. Foreign critics simply refuse to accept that the episode ever took place, unable to imagine that the Tibetans could willingly and consciously have done such a thing. But careful analysis and a deeper reflection on what was involved in that trauma may shed light on some of the cultural questions at stake on the troubled High Plateau.
It’s well worth reading the rest (good proxy needed in China). The 1998 Chinese article is posted at the Tianya Forum among other places.
There’s a bit of an irony in this: the English version, which few Chinese people would choose to read, is currently blocked by keyword, while the Chinese-language version is freely accessible.
See also: Tsering Shakya’s rebuttal.
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FYI, his wife is a Tibetan.
Pretty interesting stuff. A bit contradictory in places, but the main message - that Tibetans (probably like most people) didn’t understand the CPC’s message in quite the way it was meant, sounds pretty convincing. The concomitant analysis of why Tibetans are now so “ungrateful” for the benefits the central government has brought them is possible, though not the only explanation.
One point that does seem a bit questionable: Wang says that the destruction of the temples “must have” had massive Tibetan participation; and yet in the 1970s Tibetans accounted for only 23% of leading cadres. I can accept that many Tibetan people did physically participate in the breaking up of the buildings. But can we really be sure that this was their own idea? Is it not equally likely that they were told (made?) to participate by Han superiors, and complied because the power of the clergy had been broken?
The point in the first paragraph is well taken, though. I had never considered this aspect of modern Tibetan history at all, before reading this piece.
Han accounted for a much higher percentage of cadres in big cities than in rural area. Wang did mention that temples and monasteries survived best in the main cities (Lhasa, Shigatse) where “the authorities could still exercise some control”.
To understand why the ‘authorities’ would not necessarily side with the radical Red Guards, you have to know the root cause of the Culture Revolution. CR was a campaign to purge ‘the Liberal Establishment’ inside the party. Both State President Liu and party General Secretary Deng Xiaoping disgraced during the CR. In Wang’s book, he described how the Tibet Party Chief later died in the hands of the Red Guards.
It’s impossible that a mass movement in such a scale would happen without either the incitement of Party ‘activists’ (Tibetan or not) or the participation of the local people, just like in other parts of China. Wang’s question is, isn’t Tibet supposed to be different?
I think WANG’s point is not distinguish Tibetans. Tibetans Chinese had something that most Hans Chinese don’t have, religion, even a living God. That’s why it is asked by WANG.
“There is no need to resort to the kind of cheap psychological analysis Wang adduces to explain why Tibetans turned against the sacred symbols of their religion during the Cultural Revolution. The real reasons are far more straightforward. One of these lay in the Party’s need to restrict the inter-factional struggle in an area which, as we have seen, was highly sensitive militarily. As soon as things looked like getting out of hand the Central Committee issued an order that, in these zones, the struggle should not be formulated as a fight between the “two lines”. Such conflict was thus essentially confined to the towns, especially Lhasa. The result was that, in most rural areas of Tibet, the ferocity of the Cultural Revolution was shifted away from the battle between the two factions and directed instead towards an attack on tradition, under the call to smash “The Four Olds”. In this effort, no stone was left unturned. The Red Guards may not have entered far into the countryside but CCP rule penetrated every crevice of the vast Himalayan landscape. The Party’s hegemony was so deeply entrenched at this time that even the way a peasant slept was said to indicate ideological orientation — someone who lay with their head towards the west was accused of turning away from Chairman Mao, since he was “the Sun that rises in the East”. One of the crimes of which the Panchen Rinpoche was accused during his trial by Red Guards in Beijing was of having anti-Party and reactionary dreams. (The Red Guards here, it should be noted, were not Tibetans but Chinese students.)
“The Cultural Revolution was exported from China to the High Plateau by the Communist Party, much as opium was forced upon China by British gunboats — and eagerly consumed by the Chinese. Do we condemn the starving coolie for resorting to narcotics to escape the pains of his empty stomach, or do we censure the drug-pushing masters of a foreign empire who, despite endless pleas and petitions, directed the expeditions? There is no doubt that individual Tibetans committed despicable acts in the course of the Cultural Revolution; and many of them today hold senior posts in the regional Communist Party. In fact, such deeds are now viewed as a badge of party loyalty. Wang fails to mention the fact that in China, in the 1980s, the CCP purged “three categories of people” who had committed crimes during the Cultural Revolution, but that in Tibet, despite repeated appeals by leaders such as the Panchen Rinpoche, no such purge took place. Hu Yaobang noted in his speech at the Tibet Work Forum in 1984 that he had received written submissions from both traditional leaders and CCP members, urging the Party to expel such people; instead he promoted them, saying they could be reformed. The real reason was that the Communist Party could not find anyone else they could trust to run Tibet so dutifully. The stark contrast between the policy implemented in the TAR and that applied to the rest of China highlights the classic colonial tactic, often observed in Western imperial practice, whereby the hegemonic power seeks to cultivate loyal and servile natives to guard its interests. China rules Tibet differently from China, because there it faces the problems of being a colonial power.” FROM TSERING SHAKYA: BLOOD IN THE SNOWS
ADMIN NOTE: I’ve edited this comment, adding quotation marks and the source. The full article is already linked to in my original post above. Rob
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