Mao: The Unknown Story

THE PHYSICAL WAR had its propaganda chorus. On 7 April, Mao made inquiries about Tibetan practices. One thing he was particularly keen to know was whether the Tibetan ruling class used torture, and whether disobedient lamas were skinned alive and had their tendons severed. On the 29th, following Mao’s orders, a vigorous media campaign began, painting Tibet as a terrifying place, where gruesome tortures of the kinds Mao had mentioned, plus gouging out eyes, were everyday occurrences. Aided by age-old prejudices, this propaganda drive was effective, and Mao succeeded in planting the idea in people’s minds that Tibet was a land of barbarism.

There had been a very dark side to the rule of the old Tibetan theocracy, but in terms of overall brutality and suffering, Mao’s rule was far worse. This is shown in a 70,000-word letter written to Chou En-lai by the second-ranking spiritual leader in Tibet, the Panchen Lama, in 1962, describing what happened in the years 1959–61. What gives the letter particular weight is that the Panchen Lama had initially welcomed Mao’s troops into Tibet, and even accepted the suppression of the Lhasa rebellion in 1959. Moreover, Chou himself acknowledged that the letter was accurate.

Mao had imposed a level of requisitioning on the Tibetan economy far higher than it could possibly sustain. In the old days, the Panchen Lama wrote, “food was not that short … there was no death from starvation.” But in 1959 and 1960 “too much grain was collected, even the food and tsampa [barley flour, Tibetans’ staple food] in people’s offering bags were confiscated.” Requisitioning was brutal: “nearly all the reserve food, meat and butter were confiscated … There was no oil to light lamps, not even firewood …” “To survive, herdsmen had to eat many of their animals …” The population was herded into canteens, where they were fed “weeds, even inedible tree bark, leaves, grass roots and seeds.” Food traditionally fed to animals had “now become rare nutritious delicious foods.” People’s health declined dramatically: “A tiny infectious illness like a cold led to … masses of deaths. Quite a lot … also died directly of starvation … Death rate was really terrible … Such awful pain of hunger had never existed in Tibetan history.”

While he was writing the letter, the Panchen Lama toured Tibetan regions. He found that in Qinghai, people did not even have food bowls. “In the old society, even beggars had bowls,” the Panchen Lama observed. Under Chiang Kai-shek and the Muslim warlord Ma Pu-fang, the Tibetans in Qinghai “were never so poor as not to be able to afford bowls!” Later, people even took to trying to break into labor camps and prisons to search for food.

Large numbers of Tibetans were put through violent denunciation meetings, including the father and family of the Panchen Lama, who wrote: “People were beaten till they bled from eyes, ears, mouths, noses, they passed out, their arms or legs broken … others died on the spot.” For the first time in Tibet, suicide became a common practice.

With so many Tibetans joining rebellions against Mao’s regime, Chinese troops treated most Tibetans as enemies, rounding up the majority of adult males in many places, leaving only “women, the old, the children and extremely few young and middle-aged men.” After Mao’s death, the Panchen Lama revealed what he had not dared put in his original letter: that a staggering 15 to 20 percent of all Tibetans — perhaps half of all adult males — were thrown into prison, where they were basically worked to death. They were treated like subhumans. Lama Palden Gyatso, a brave long-term prisoner, told us he and other prisoners were flogged with wire whips as they pulled heavy plows.

The crushing of the rebellions produced atrocious behavior on the part of Chinese troops. In one place, the Panchen Lama described (speaking after Mao died) how “corpses were dragged down from the mountains” and buried in a big pit, and the relatives were then summoned and told: “ ‘We have wiped out the rebel bandits, and today is a day of festivity. You will all dance on the pit of the corpses.’ ”