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?

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.