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needed to validate the choice of the Dalai Lama and the Panchen the landed estates owned by lords and lamas. They distributed Lama. When the current 14th Dalai Lama was installed in Lhasa, many thousands of acres to tenant farmers and landless peasants, it was with an armed escort of Chinese troops and an attending reorganising them into hundreds of communes. Herds once Chinese minister in accordance with centuries-old tradition. owned by the nobility were turned over to collectives of poor What upset the Tibetan lords and lamas in the early 1950s was shepherds. Improvements were made in the breeding of livestock, that these latest Chinese were communists. It would be only a and new varieties of vegetables and new strains of wheat and matter of time, they feared, before the communists started barley were introduced along with irrigation improvements, all of imposing their collectivist egalitarian schemes upon Tibet. which reportedly led to an increase in agrarian production.* In 1956-57, armed Tibetan bands ambushed convoys of the Many peasants remained as religious as ever, giving alms to the Chinese People's Liberation Army. The uprising received clergy, but monks who had been conscripted as children into the extensive assistance from the US Central Intelligence Agency religious orders were now free to renounce the monastic life—and (CIA), including military training, support camps in Nepal and thousands did, especially the younger ones. The remaining clergy numerous airlifts.” Meanwhile in the USA, the American Society lived on modest government stipends and extra income earned by for a Free Asia, a CIA-financed front, energetically publicised the officiating at prayer services, weddings and funerals.* cause of Tibetan resistance, with the Dalai Both the Dalai Lama and his adviser and Lama's eldest brother, Thubtan Norbu, youngest brother, Tendzin Choegyal, playing an active role in that organisation. claimed that "more than 1.2 million Tibetans The Dalai Lama's second-eldest brother, are dead as a result of the Chinese Gyalo Thondup, established an intelligence occupation". The official 1953 census—six operation with the CIA as early as 1951. He Whatever wrongs ears before the Chinese crackdown— : y later upgraded it into a CIA-trained guerrilla and new oppressions recorded the entire population residing in unit whose recruits parachuted back into H H Tibet at 1,274,000.” Other census counts put Tibet.* the Chinese introduced the population within Tibet at about two Many Tibetan commandos and agents after 1959, they did million. If the Chinese killed 1.2 million in hom the CIA d d into the count A the early 1960s, then almost all of Tibet were chiefs of aristocratic clans or the sons abolish slavery and the would have been depopulated, transformed of chiefs. Ninety per cent of them were Tibetan serfdom system into a killing field dotted with death camps never heard from again, according to a A and mass graves—of which we have no report from the CIA itself, meaning that they of unpaid labour. evidence. The thinly distributed Chinese were most likely captured and killed.” They eliminated the force in Tibet could not have rounded "Many lamas and lay members of the . up, hunted down and exterminated that elite and much of the Tibetan army many crushing taxes, many people, even if it had spent all its joined the uprising, but in the main the started work projects time doing nothing else. opulace did not, assuring its failure," Chinese authorities claim to have put ae i and greatly reduced " unemployment and beggary. wrote Hugh Deane.* In their book on an end to floggings, mutilations and Tibet, George Ginsburg and Michael amputations as forms of criminal Mathos reached a similar conclusion: punishment. They themselves, "As far as can be ascertained, the great however, have been charged with acts bulk of the common people of Lhasa of brutality by Tibetans in exile. The and of the adjoining countryside failed authorities do admit to "mistakes", to join in the fighting against the particularly during the 1966-76 Chinese both when it first began and as Cultural Revolution when the it progressed."*! Eventually the persecution of religious beliefs reached resistance crumbled. a high tide in both China and Tibet. Whatever wrongs and new oppressions the Chinese introduced After the uprising in the late 1950s, thousands of Tibetans were after 1959, they did abolish slavery and the Tibetan serfdom incarcerated. During the Great Leap Forward, forced system of unpaid labour. They eliminated the many crushing collectivisation and grain farming were imposed on the Tibetan taxes, started work projects and greatly reduced unemployment peasantry, sometimes with disastrous effect on production. In the and beggary. They established secular schools, thereby breaking late 1970s, China began relaxing controls and "tried to alleviate the educational monopoly of the monasteries. And they poverty in an attempt to undo some of the damage wrought during constructed running water and electrical systems in Lhasa.* the previous two decades".* Heinrich Harrer (later revealed to have been a sergeant in In 1980, the Chinese government initiated reforms reportedly Hitler's SS) wrote a bestseller about his experiences in Tibet that designed to grant Tibet a greater degree of self-rule and self- was made into a popular Hollywood movie. He reported that the administration. Tibetans would now be allowed to cultivate Tibetans who resisted the Chinese "...were predominantly nobles, private plots, sell their harvest surpluses, decide for themselves semi-nobles and lamas; they were punished by being made to what crops to grow, and keep yaks and sheep. Communication perform the lowliest tasks, such as laboring on roads and bridges. with the outside world was again permitted and frontier controls They were further humiliated by being made to clean up the city were eased to permit some Tibetans to visit exiled relatives in before the tourists arrived." They also had to live in a camp India and Nepal.* By the 1980s, many of the principal lamas had originally reserved for beggars and vagrants—all of which Harrer —_ begun to shuttle back and forth between China and the exile treated as sure evidence of the dreadful nature of the Chinese communities abroad, "restoring their monasteries in Tibet and occupation.* helping to revitalize Buddhism there".”” By 1961, the Chinese occupation authorities had expropriated As of 2007, Tibetan Buddhism was still practised widely and Whatever wrongs and new oppressions the Chinese introduced abolish slavery and the Tibetan serfdom system of unpaid labour. They eliminated the many crushing taxes, started work projects and greatly reduced unemployment and beggary. 46 = NEXUS after 1959, they did www.nexusmagazine.com FEBRUARY — MARCH 2008