(Click picture to enlarge)
Jianglin Li and Matthew Akester
Following the recent protests in
their homeland, the Ngaba people have again reminded us that it is because this
was the first region of Tibet to be visited by the Red Army that the tradition
of opposition and animosity to Chinese Communist rule there runs particularly
deep (see Kirti Rinpoché’s address to the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission of
the US Congress, Washington DC November 3rd 2011).[1] The
fugitive 1st and 4th Front armies traversed the Gyalrong
and Ngaba regions of eastern Tibet in 1935-6 on the last and most gruelling
stage of their ‘Long March’, from Sichuan to the northwest. Ravaged by hunger and
fatigue, they were still quite capable of overcoming any military opposition
from the local inhabitants, who fled their villages and monasteries for the
hills. The Red Army left a trail of pillage, desecration and famine in these
regions, and apparently failed to build any local support. These wounds would
have still been fresh when PLA soldiers returned in the early 1950s, as the
national army of a new Communist republic bent on the annexation of Tibetan
territory.[2]
With the
recent publication in Tibetan of a collated oral history of Ngaba under
Communism (The wounds of three generations,
published by Kirti monastery in exile, Dharmshala 2010), the first
of its kind, we are in a slightly better position to rediscover these little
known events. A translation of the relevant section of this work is presented
here alongside translated passages from the memoirs of Long March veterans,
mostly also recently published. These describe experiences on the march through
Gyalrong up to Mugé (Ch: Mao Er Gai, 毛儿盖), rather than Ngaba itself, but nonetheless
paint a vivid picture of the state of the Red Army at the time, and of
relations with its future Tibetan subjects. In addition, ordinances passed by
the leadership in this period give us some idea of early Communist approaches
to winning over minority peoples.
In the early
summer of 1935, the 4th Front Army under Zhang Guotao was joined on the
march through the Tibetan borderlands by the beleaguered and numerically
inferior 1st Front Army led by Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, over which Zhang
attempted to gain control. A power struggle ensued, which was temporarily resolved
by Mao breaking away, in September, and leading his troops north, through Gansu
towards Shaanxi. Zhang’s objective was to return south to re-establish a base
area in western Sichuan, which he then proceeded to do, leading his forces to a
devastating defeat in a series of battles with government troops that winter.
Thus when Zhang’s army, the ‘western column’ of the Communist advance through
Gyalrong, pushed northwest onto the high plateau and entered Ngaba in June-July
1935, it can only have been with one objective, as these accounts confirm: to
plunder desperately needed food supplies.
It may have
been on entering Ngaba that the Communists encountered the strongest Tibetan
military resistance. The Tibetan account mentions that the king rallied Ngaba’s
forces south of Tsennyi monastery to block their advance, and Wu Faxian’s
account confirms that this was initially successful, the 1300-strong 6th
regiment involved in that action was repulsed, and only half came back alive.
As reinforcements arrived, the Tibetans were outnumbered and fled to the
mountains, where they remained for the next four months. The ‘eastern column’
marching through the valleys, to which Wu belonged, was subject to guerilla
attacks by local fighters that claimed many lives.
The defeated
4th Front army, whose leaders had established themselves as a rival
Party command known as the Northwest Bureau, retreated again into Tibetan
territory in February 1936. They went further west this time, through Tawu and
Litang, reaching Kandze (Ch: Ganzi， 甘孜) in the Trehor region of Kham in March,
where they were joined by the 2nd Front army and other units. This
episode is somewhat better known, as it was later depicted in Party history and
propaganda as a political coup. The revolutionary army managed to enlist local
supporters, most notably the Geda Lama (dGe rtag sprul sku sKal bzang bstan
’dzin) of Beri monastery, and establish a ‘Tibetan Peoples Republic’ (in May). It
was these troops, who started to leave Kandze in early summer for Gansu, that
returned through Ngaba, this time from the west, and put the population to
flight for a second time. They continued through Dzorgé and Tewo, following the
route taken by the 1st Front army a year earlier and, says the
Tibetan account, leaving a trail of pillage and facing guerilla resistance.
This account emphasises the looting
and desecration of monasteries. It is not clear how much Tibetans in Ngaba
would have known of Communism at the time, or differentiated the Red Army from
the other Chinese frontier armies that had plagued the region for years
(Guomindang, Liu Wenhui, Li Tazhang, Ma Bufang etc.), but this account
describes them as intent on destroying religion, as well as seizing supplies.
Jatsok Tulku recalled, for instance ‘The Chinese had made a toilet by piling up
a large quantity of scriptures and placing wooden beams on top, and many pages
had footprints and so on in the middle, so everyone got the idea that the Red Chinese
were coming deliberately to smash sacred objects and extinguish Buddhism.’
There is no sign of anti-clericalism
or militant atheism in the Chinese accounts. There, the temples are mentioned
for their spectacular wealth and exotic contents, but above all as a source of
food and shelter. The most detailed of these accounts, by Wu Faxian, admits to
destroying temple drums, but only to eat the leather. In one black comic
incident, he describes his fellow soldiers discovering that votive Buddha
figures placed on shrines as offerings were edible! It is difficult to see this
silence as anything other than denial, since there can be no doubt that the
temples, palaces and monasteries abandoned by fleeing Tibetans were thoroughly
and deliberately desecrated.
It is therefore remarkable to find
that the Communists were already committed to a tactical policy of tolerance
for religion in Tibetan areas. The articulation of this policy seems to have
been largely the work of Zhang Guotao and the leadership of the 4th Front Army, which spent by far the longest period in Tibetan regions. Due to his
defeat in the internal power struggle and subsequent defection, Zhang was
defamed in the official history of the Long March as it came to be written, yet
the approach pioneered under his command (see e.g., the ordinance issued by the
Kandze Peoples Government) contains the main elements of CCP religion policy as
pursued 1949-64 and from 1979 to the present: these are upholding the freedom
to believe or not to believe in religion, and the protection of Buddhist
monasteries that have no economic or legal powers over secular society and
submit to government supervision. Clearly these principles were, like the
provisional ‘Tibetan Peoples Governments’ themselves, more aspirational than real,
and did not apply in areas where the Red Army faced local opposition.[3]
The fact that the Red Army had indulged in the pillage and desecration of
monasteries, not only in Ngaba and Gyalrong but Kham as well, while nominally
committed to their protection, makes Tibetan scepticism of the ‘liberal’
nationality policy of the 1950s seem quite natural.
Moreover, the leadership clearly was
aware that pledging Communist support for local independence (‘from both China
and Britain’) was the best hope of winning Tibetan converts and popular
foundations for their ‘Peoples’ Republics’.[4] In
the ordinances passed by these fledgling institutions, and even in a policy
document issued by the central leadership, we find the Communists flirting with
the progressive Khampa nationalism advocated by the leading political figures
in the region at the time, most of them affiliated (at least nominally) with
the Guomindang.[5] Behind
this promised accomodation of local aspirations, however, lay an onerous programme
of grain requisitioning and taxation, emphasising class expropriation, and
apparently little adapted to the prevailing conditions and attitudes of Tibetan
society. Kandze, of all the Tibetan regions visited by the Long Marchers, seems
to have provided the most fruitful conditions for this project, perhaps because
it had been in the frontline of recent military confrontations and intrigues
between the Lhasa government, Nationalist forces and regional warlords: there
is no sign of such radicalisation among the Tibetans of Ngaba and Gyalrong in
the available sources.[6]
There is no trace of any
constructive approach in the memoirs presented here though. For the soldiers of
the revolution facing adversity in the wilderness, the Tibetans were simply
alien, occupants of a world beyond the struggle in which they were engaged,
upon whom they were obliged to impose themselves by hunger and the pursuit of
their goal. In contrast with the “integral part of China” to which the
Communists laid claim after the 1949 revolution, Tibet was still another
country, with no common language or shared history, and a strange, deeply held
religion. Far from the ‘feudal hell’ of unredeemed poverty and oppression
projected by later propaganda, the Long Marchers encountered a self-reliant and
confident people whose resources they coveted. These accounts show attitudes
ranging from the ideological stand that Tibetans opposed the advance of the Red
Army because they had been ‘duped by the GMD reactionaries’, to humane
recognition that opposition to a marauding foreign army is natural. Mao himself
was famously recorded by Edgar Snow as saying “This is our only foreign
debt...some day we must pay the Miao and the Tibetans for the provisions we
were obliged to take.”
Given that the project of building
support for the CCP among the Tibetans was associated with one of Mao’s main
rivals in an internecine leadership struggle, we could take this remark as less
surprisingly humane than first appears. Nonetheless, in the ‘Boba Peoples’
Governments’ established by Zhang’s Northwest Bureau, the main contours of
subsequent nationality and religion policy - tolerance of state-supervised
religion, encouragement of minority languages, cultivation of influential and
‘progressive’ figures in minority communities through the United Front, and so
on - are already apparent. The promise of ‘national self-determination’ and
even ‘independence’ offered in these programmes from the 1935 Party Central
Committee, however, had turned into the prospect of ‘nationality autonomy’
within the PRC no later than the foundation of the new state in October 1949.
[1]
http://www.savetibet.org/policy-center/us-government-and-legislative-advocacy/testimony-kirti-rinpoche-chief-abbot-kirti-monastery-tom-lantos
[2] In one of the standard English language accounts,
based on Chinese rather than Tibetan perceptions, Dick Wilson wrote: ‘Some
small part of the tragedy of Communist China’s role in Tibet in the 1950s and
60s may be owed to these experiences in 1935 when Tibetan hostility made the
difference between death and survival for many comrades and(?) soldiers who
survived to take high positions in the government and armed forces after 1949’
(The Long March 1935. New York,
Viking 1971). An example of this is given in Wounds of three generations (p.109): ‘When the Red Army came
through (the Shingra Dewa area of present Tewo county in Gannan prefecture) in
1935 the local people fought them, killing and wounding many, so at the time
when the Communists seized control of all Tibet in 1958, they saw this area as
deserving punishment, and many people there were killed or suffered starvation
and torture as terrible as hell on earth.’
[3]
Zhang admitted in his memoirs that the Peoples Governments were ‘empty in all
but name’ (quoted in Red Army’s first
encounters with Tibet - experiences on the Long March by Elliot Sperling,
Tibetan Review, October 1976). The author notes: ‘Zhang’s concept of autonomy
for the Tibetan governments, however, was no doubt rooted in paternalistic
feelings for he didn’t have a high opinion of Tibetan culture: “The culture of
the Tibetans is relatively low...and their language is especially incomplete.
They can’t express many relatively complex concepts” (he wrote).’
[4]
This issue is addressed in some detail in Bapa Puntsok Wangyal’s polemical
essay denouncing the betrayal of the CCP’s early, Soviet-inspired nationalities
policy, In Memory of Comrade Tashi
Wangchuk (see A Witness to Tibet’s
history (trans. Tenzin Losel) Delhi: Paljor publications 2007 p.1-9). He
cites the constitution adopted by the First National Soviet Representative
meeting in November 1931 as the first commitment to these principles: ‘The
Chinese Soviet authority recognises that all the nationalities within its
territory have the right to self-determination until the time they separate
from China and establish a highly independent state of their own...’
[5]
See e.g., Frontier process, provincial
politics and movements for Khampa autonomy during the Republican period by
Peng Wenbin, in Khampa Histories: visions
of people, place and authority, (ed. L. Epstein), Leiden: Brill
publications 2002 p.70-74. Puntsok Wangyal wrote (In Memory of Comrade Tashi Wangchuk p.5): ‘Although the Tibetan
Authority was established under special historical conditions while the Red
Army was passing through Karze in northern Kham, and was short-lived, in terms
of China’s nationality relations and problems with Tibet, politically it
planted a precious revolutionary seed of nationality among local people -
especially among young Tibetan intellectuals’ like himself. It was of course a
similar accomodation by the pre-revolution CCP that led to the declaration of
an autonomous national republic in Inner Mongolia in 1947 on principles of
national self-determination no longer respected after the Party came to power
(see e.g., From inequality to difference:
colonial contradictions of class and ethnicity in ‘Socialist’ China by
Uradyn E. Bulag, Cultural Studies 14 (3/4) 2000).
[6]
The situation was of course different in other parts of A mdo, more directly
affected by the Ma clan’s devastating wars in the 1920s and 30s, which drove
local leaders into tactical alliances with the GMD and even CCP. On the case of
the Alo clan leaders of Labrang, see Xuan Xiafu’s memoir Northwest Traverse (first published in 1930, Tibetan translation
published by Nationalities Publishing House, Beijing 1984) and Labrang: a Tibetan Buddhist monastery at the
crossroads of four civilizations by Paul Nietupski, Snow Lion publications
1999 p.81-93.
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