The Truth about Tibet in the PRC

     I finally watched the 1997 Hollywood production of "Seven Years in Tibet", starring Sean Penn, after starting the paperback autobiography of Heinrich Harrer a few weeks before. I was up to page forty-six and he was about to enter Tibet. The movie is quite different from the British 1956 Great Pan paperback edition of the book I found in a Pittsburgh used book store. I also happened to find and start reading A Tibetan Revolutionary, a book I got last year at an Eslite clearance here in Taichung. It is the autobiography of Bapa Phüntso Wangye, a Tibetan man who lived in the same time period. I trust his point of view more than the movie version's with its anti-China propaganda. I also trust Harrer that the rest of his autobiography will be as fair as the beginning and a lot more truthful than the Hollywood film.

     It is interesting juxtaposing the story of the Tibetan Revolutionary, Phünwang (he is named Phuntsok Wangyal in Wikipedia, the form given in the Dalai Lama's autobiography Freedom in Exile) with the story of the stranded Austrian from Seven Years in Tibet, (1943-1950) Heinrich Harrer, with his degenerated autobiography in the Brad Pitt Hollywood version. It is also bizarre the points-of-view from the introduction in the 1956 paperback from which I read and the introductions of the reissued editions. The 1956 edition had yet to see the Chinese Communist clampdown or flight of the Dalai Lama in 1959. Instead it glories in the British Victorian colonialism Younghusband the Brit that opened Tibet to English interference in 1903 and took it over in 1911 to add it to India, Nepal, and nations subdued by imperialism.

     The Harrer expedition of 1942 after his escape from a British POW camp (he was from a Nazi nation) in India has him enter Lhasa from the southwest while Phünwang enters from the east near the Chinese border in 1950, Harrier from 1943 to 1950. I wonder if they might have passed one another in the streets. In the 1950’s, Phünwang was the highest-ranking Tibetan in the Chinese Communist Party and may have been one of the three unidentified vilified Communist Party delegates sent to meet the Dalai Lama in 1950. Harrer may have seen him then.  Harrier was an athlete and adventurer that grabbed the chance to stay in Lhasa while Phünwang was a Tibetan nationalist fighting to overthrow the KMT and British designs on Tibet. Harrier made short shrift of the arbitrary cruelty and backward superstition that came with the package of Buddhist oligarchy while Phünwang fought to liberate Tibetans from their religious and hierarchical stronghold.

      In the Pitt film, the KMT official is a hapless old man, a Yoda figure, but Phünwang knew Liu Wen-Hui and the KMT (its called the GMD [guomindang] in his book) as oppressors along with the local Derge royal family and Buddhist establishment in Lhasa using Dalai Lama's power for their intentions. China had its hands filled fighting against the KMT, British subterfuge, and the Dalai Lama's complicity; he fell lock, stock, and barrel over western culture (at least the Pitt movie got that right) and agreed with the CIA to help him escape, like the U.S. helped Chiang Kai-Shek out of China, but not to fight their way back; they have  been used ever since as a wedge against China. Phünwang could tell the difference in the sound of the British supplied weapons used against the nationalists and their own supplied by the Chinese KMT; I have to read that over again to get clear who is who in the struggle for Tibet. Who is right? I have my opinions. I think China was right to defend Tibet and demand back and protect Hong Kong and Macao from the British and Portuguese, and will be right in getting back Taiwan in the least violent way. Unfortunately, as we have seen in Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, Philippines, and Taiwan, the U.S. and U.K. are making a peaceful transition to indigenous rule almost impossible. 

          I ordered Freedom in Exile. Now that I’m getting Harrer and Phünwang’s point of view on the occurrences in Tibet after WW II, I should read what “His Holiness” had to say. 

          A few years ago I lost one friend over a difference of opinion about Tibet and I don’t regret it. He picked a fight with me over a joke I made and kept writing I was denying the Chinese “1.5 million murdered” in Tibet. I responded that he should pay attention to what he could do in his community and he lashed out red baiting me into defending China compared to U.S. and European aggression. Today's historical status is proof China was right to secure Tibet and Xinjiang before western powers could meddle there; the living standard there has gone up and poverty nearly eradicated. The absurdity of Western governments defending religious rights in China but vilifying and annihilating them elsewhere. The absurdity of condemning China for giving Han people bonuses for relocating to Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang when gentrification has made many U.S. and European cities unaffordable for the middle class; I want my Brooklyn back! 

 Freedom in Exile; The Autobiography of The Dalai Lama arrived in the mail. To show you where his head is at, one of his earliest childhood memories he wrote about was a destitute Chinese couple begging at his home with a dead baby in their arms; how his gracious mother gave them alms, and then more when they told her they would be eating their baby. My question is why did his mother have sixteen children, more than half passing away in childhood, living in destitution as they did? I will be making mental notes of the defenses he gives and comparing them with Phünwang and Harrer’s accounts of life in contemporary Tibet. 

     The innuendos against China are prevalent in the Dalai Lama's autobiography. On page 31, he writes of a monk that helped him figure out how to use an old movie projector, "...like many Chinese, he had a very bad temper." On page 28 he attributes the exaggeration of ten million tons of tea imports (admitting than no one drinks more tea than the British but Tibetans) "an attempt to prove Tibet's economic dependence on China." On page 10 he is proud of Tibetan's past empire writing vainly how "it included much Chinese territory", and that "Tibetan forces actually captured the Chinese capital where they extracted promises of tribute and other concessions." No doubt, his contempt for China will pepper his entire account. 

I haven't found this prejudice against China so far in Harrer's adventure. Phünwang's motivation for bringing Chinese communism to Tibet is at odds with the gist of the Hollywood movie of Harrer's account. Phünwang is Tibetan, too, and condemns the Kuomintang administration there keeping the theoretical oligarchy in place impoverishing  its people and keeping them backwards. Harrer's account of Tibetan life and cruel justice concurs with Phünwang's. The Dalai Lama admits it as such.  
   I finished reading Seven Years in Tibet. It's quaint how Harrer condones feudalism while admitting the unhygienic backwardness and cruelty of the theocracy. He calls the Red Army invaders, not liberators, but admits the fear the Tibetans have of them in 1950 stems from the carnage inflicted on them in 1910 after the Qing was overthrown and the KMT took over; the Red Army soldiers were disciplined. Harrer left Tibet in 1952 on the same route as the Dalai Lama near the Indian border. He doesn't say why he "had to leave" but it was probably because he would have been considered a spy for encouraging the impressionable nineteen-year-old god-king to look westward. He didn't support communism which makes me think that the Austrian national and his German companion might have supported or tolerated the Nazis; he did participate on Nazi teams in the Olympics. He never mentions his political leanings in the book but found no problem schmoozing with the ruling class in Lhasa. His naive acceptance of social inequality with no more than a 'tisk-tisk’ may stem from his jock mentality. But it is the Dalai Lama himself that is smitten by the modern world; who could blame any child that is cloistered in archaic isolation from playing with toys the 13th Dalai Lama dabbled with? 

     Past god-kings were manipulated by the National Guard; this Dalai Lama was manipulated by the CIA. As early as 1948 his ministers was looking for British or U.S. support when the KMT were dislodged from Tibet and China and fled to Taiwan. Up to 1954, when, with Phünwang translating, he met Mao Tsetung, he was accepting the communist ideals and incorporating them. Even Mao told him to go slow to not ignite the ire of his conservative theocrats. 

          The Freedom in Exile autobiography was published in 1990. A Tibetan Revolutionary was published in 2004 but the interviews began in 2003. There are editors’ notes in ATR that refer to passages in FIE. There are recollections of Phünwang and Heinrich Harrer in FIE, recollections of the Dalai Lama but none of Harrer in ATR. Seven Years in Tibet concludes in March 1951 overlapping time, Harrer arriving in Jan. 15, 1946 and Phünwang in late 1947 to Aug. 15, 1949 were both in Lhasa and had interactions with the Dalai Lama. Phünwang’s interviewers must have asked him about those passages relating to him in addition to all his interactions. Some references specifically dispute what the Dalai Lama said, some concur. 

      I burned through fifty pages of A Tibetan Revolutionary at the riverside yesterday afternoon. Such a good man and communist like Phünwang was the victim of Han chauvinism, despite support from Mao, Chow En-Lai, and others at the top, commanders of the Northwest PLA were prejudiced and overzealous to implement land reforms in eastern Tibet and set him up to get him out of the way, accused him of being a Tibetan separatist. Because of the Dalai Lama's brother's contacting the CIA starting in 1956 and the CIA meddling and weakly empowering independence Karmapa, an aspect that Phünwang doesn't allude to in his autobiography. It is probably a paranoid reaction since so many of Phünwang’s compatriots were recruited to destabilize the PRC in any way, without helping independence, like they still do in Taiwan,  in the name of stopping Chinese progress that would hinder their world domination, calling them communist dominoes in Asia, to keep imperialist capitalist influence here. The documentary I saw, “The Shadow Circus; The CIA in Tibet”, about the secret CIA project up to 1974, was the real domino ruining China’s goal of  eradicating feudalism and the good relationship Phünwang helped establish between the Dalai Lama in Tibet and the PRC, causing the Dalai Lama to flee unnecessarily and killing thousands of guerrillas and local people, destroying temples where they probably took shelter to weed them out, and bombing building in collateral damage; you have to blame the CIA more than PRC paranoia. 

If that wasn't enough to convince me that meddling from the U.S. CIA precipitated a hurried response by the PLA into Tibet, I then checked on-line for other books about the hidden story and found this:

"Into Tibet, by Thomas Laird, is the incredible story of a 1949 -- 1950 American undercover expedition led by America's first atomic agent, Douglas S. Mackiernan -- a covert attempt to arm the Tibetans and to recognize Tibet's independence in the months before China invaded. It recounts a harrowing and unprecedented two-thousand-mile trek on foot and camel across China and the deserts of inner Asia. For the first time, Thomas Laird reveals how Mackiernan helped established a covert intelligence pipeline from China to India; how he gathered atomic intelligence for the United States; how his partner Frank Bessac urged the Tibetan government to request covert U.S. military aid and then carried the signed request out of Lhasa; and, finally, how Dean Rusk and the CIA responded. Laird reveals how the clash between the State Department and the CIA, as well us unguided actions by field agents, hastened the Chinese invasion of Tibet. Commenting on American motivations during this operation for the first time, the Dalai Lama says bluntly, "The courage was not there." U.S. government actions were ultimately a kiss of death for Tibet and Mackiernan -- the first CIA agent ever killed during a covert operation. A gripping narrative of survival, courage, and intrigue among the nomads, princes, and warring armies of inner Asia, Into Tibet rewrites the accepted history behind the Chinese invasion of Tibet."

If not for the initial error of `"Han chauvinism" against better judgement, it is clear to see why the PRC went on its radical course through the failed Great Leap Forward to catch up to western militarism and industry, and then the Cultural Revolution to block western subterfuge. It's a wonder the PRC is as strong as it is now with all it has had to bear, and still with destabilizing propaganda about Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Meanwhile the Dalai Lama, continues to remain in exile, for no good reason, denying Tibetans their religious leadership. Phünwang’s autobiography has shed so much light on what really happened in Tibet to sour the grapes, cause discord, and set back progress. Phünwang’s story is a tragedy. 

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