Article: Tibetan Protests

Created: Mar 15, 2008
Updated: Apr 07, 2008
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Tibetan Protests

This March 10th, along with a series of protests that happened around the globe, protests INSIDE Lhasa broke out… which is VERY RARE given the strict Communist Chinese Regime that brutally controls their life.
In horrific late breaking news, Radio Free Asia reported earlier today that up to 80 or more Tibetans have been killed in today's violent clashes with Chinese military. Click here to read more:
www.rfa.org/english/tibe...ibet_protest/

A Danish tourist sent this email. . .
"Lhasa is in flames. There are tanks/armoured vehicles driving round in the streets - what's going on is crazy . . . . it looks like a war zone. Almost all Chinese shops on the main street up to the Dalai Lama's Winter Palace have been set on fire."

Chinese authorities responded with brute force today to ongoing protests in Lhasa and across Tibet. Supported by tanks, thousands of armed troops have sealed off the three major monasteries where NONVIOLENT protests were initiated on Monday the 10th. Chinese police have fired live ammunition into crowds of unarmed Tibetans and unconfirmed reports from eye-witnesses in Lhasa say that 26 Tibetans were gunned down outside Drapchi prison.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama has issued a statement calling on the Chinese to show restraint and calling on Tibetans not to resort to violence.

This appears to be by far the largest uprising in Tibet since 1989, and if unconfirmed reports are true, there may be more Tibetan casualties in the streets of Lhasa than at any time since 1959.

We fear that as I write this, hundreds of Tibetans have been arrested and are being interrogated and tortured. We are still digesting the scope of this emergency and working the phones with governments, the media and others to bring pressure to bear on Beijing.
While the international public and media have been appropriately horrified by China's clampdown, it is imperative that our national governments speak out in support for Tibet and condemn China's actions.

Please call and write to your Elected Representatives and urge them to push their governments to strongly condemn China's crackdown in Tibet. Please see at the end of this blog for a sample letter.

As I type this, I am getting news from Insiders that about 5,000 and 10,000 monks in Amdo and Lhasa province, respectively are RISING… Situations are really critical at this point.

Simultaneously, on 10th March, the Exiled-Tibetans living in India started on their historic March back to Tibet (www.tibetanuprising.org)
On the 4th day of the walk, the Indian Government forcefully arrested them- a struggle that was following Gandhian Non-violence and passive resistance tactics and now have put them under 14days of detention and trying to make them sign papers, with pressure from Beijing. They have also closed down highways from and out of Dharamsala, the Exiled-Tibetan capital and put up check-points so no Tibetan can get out and join the march. We are constantly updating our website so please check back from time to time on the progress. THEIR ONLY CRIME WAS THEY WERE WALKING HOME.
If you're on Facebook, pls join the official group page of our March to Tibet @ www.facebook.com/group.php

I was going to be in this walk, and I myself could have been in prison right now… and as I type this I cant begin to imagine the profound privileges that surround our lives.. Tibetans, at this moment, has absolutely NONE of that.. from one side they are being bashed by Beijing, and from another Mother India has now proven to be against their PEACEFUL struggle..

However, right now it is time for us to let the world know that Tibetans are NOT ALONE. And I trust and can count on each one of you. Tibet WILL be FREE.. With the spotlight on Beijing hosting the Olympic Games in August 2008, we now have greater power to positively bring changes in the lives of those oppressed inside. Those in SF, please remember April 9th is when the Olympic Torch is passing through this great city- when we need to MAKE SOME REAL NOISE!!!!

Please help us.. we badly need EACH ONE OF YOU. The Revolution has BEGUN.. with a greater momentum than we expected, but it needs to be sustained and supported by the International Community..

For additional ways to help out in Lhasa, please consider the following:
1. Contact you member of Congress and ask that they call on China to release all detainees, and allow international media access to Lhasa.
2. If you know any tourists in Lhasa, or others who may have direct knowledge of what is happening in Tibet, please contact immediately at info@savetibet.org.
3. Events of support are happening around the U.S. and Canada. To join a rally at a Chinese consulate or embassy in your area, please review the list of local Tibet Support Groups holding demonstrations.

Chinese Embassy
2300 Connecticut Ave NW
Washington D.C.
+202-328-2500
Tibet Support Group Contact:
Namkha
+703-673-8860

Chinese Consulate, Chicago
100 West Erie St
Chicago, IL
+312-803-0095
Tibet Support Group Contact:
Larry
+317-506-2249

Chinese Consulate, New York
520 12th Ave
New York, NY
+212-244-9456
Tibet Support Group Contact:
Kala
+917-595-0140

Chinese Consulate, San Francisco
1450 Laguna St
San Francisco, CA
+415-674-2946
Tibet Support Group Contact:
Thupten
+212-729-6154

Chinese Consulate, Los Angeles
443 Shatto Pl
Los Angeles, CA
+213-807-8088
Tibet Support Group Contact:
Nono
+562-243-6228
Tsetsen
+301-968-8831

Chinese Consulate, Calgary
1011 6th Ave SW
Calgary, AB
+403-264-3322
Tibet Support Group Contact:
Dermod
+514-487-0665

Chinese Consulate, Toronto
240 St. George St
Toronto ON
+416-964-7260
Tibet Support Group Contact:
Dermod
+514-487-0665

Chinese Consulate, Vancouver
3380 Granville St
Vancouver, BC
+604-736-5188
Tibet Support Group Contact:
Dermod
+514-487-0665

And please share this blog with friends that you know would like to help. We need as many people with us now as possible. IF YOU ARE CONNECTED WITH ANY MEDIA WILLING TO PUBLISH OUR NEWS, PLS CONTACT ME DIRECTLY..

For Freedom,
Wasfia Nazreen
freewastibet@gmail.com
415-259-1045
www.phayul.com

---

[Sample letter]

I am deeply disturbed to learn of the Chinese government's use of brute force against unarmed Tibetans inside Tibet. Supported by tanks, thousands of armed troops have sealed off three major monasteries near Lhasa, Tibet where nonviolent protests were initiated on Monday. Police have fired live ammunition into crowds of unarmed Tibetans and at least two people and possibly dozens are reported dead.

Please urge the United States government to demand that the
government of China:

1) Allow demonstrators to exercise their right to freedom of
expression and assembly

2) Refrain from excessive use of force against Tibetan
protesters;

3) Release all Tibetans who have been arrested or detained, and

4) Allow international media unobstructed access to Tibet.

For five decades, the Tibetan people have suffered greatly under China's brutal rule. The Chinese government has swamped Tibet with Chinese settlers, poured money into mega-infrastructure projects like the railway that solidify its control, and ruthlessly attacked Tibetan culture and religion. As the Olympics approach and the world's eyes turn to Beijing, this outpouring of frustration is the natural consequence of China's ongoing repression in Tibet.

Please speak out now to help ensure that futher violence against Tibetans is stopped.
__________________________________________________________________

Below I'm also attaching some news links over the past 2-3 days..
" Brute force can never subdue the basic human desire for freedom"- H.H the Dalai Lama

Video: Tibet in turmoil as riots grip capital
www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/a...l#cnnSTCVideo

Deaths reported in Tibet protests
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-...7296837.stm

A Tibetan Intifadeh Against China
www.time.com/time/world/...2509,00.html

A timeline of Tibetan protests
www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/a...bet.timeline/

Tibet Protests Turn Violent, Shops Burn in Lhasa
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...48.html

Deaths reported in Tibet as China blames Dalai Lama
mobile.reuters.com/mobile/m...080314/15

China Clamps Down on Tibetan Protests As Many Deaths, Injuries Reported
www.rfa.org/english/tibe...ibet_protest/

ANTI-CHINA RAGE: TIBET RIOTS
abcnews.go.com/International/popup

Chinese Police Clash With Tibet Protesters
www.nytimes.com/2008/03/15...5tibet.html

Dalai Lama urges China to stop using force in Tibet
news.yahoo.com/s/afp/2008...80314135208

U.S. tells China to use restraint in Tibet protests
www.reuters.com/article/la...USN14398845

www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx

Noisy Tibetan protest outside United Nations headquarters
www.newsday.com/news/local...03446.story

Six arrested in Tibet protest outside U.N.
sport.guardian.co.uk/breakin...,00.html

Eyewitness accounts: Tibet clashes
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-...7297248.stm

BBC on Women's Uprising and Tibetan Uprising Day
www.youtube.com/watch

China's Tibet problem:
cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/ver/256...ndex.php

Students for a Free Tibet news:
www.studentsforafreetibet.org/art....php

Comments (1 - 4 of 4)

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CheetahMama 8 months ago








The True Face Of



TheDalai Lama
by Kalovski at
4-2-8

This is a backgrounder of the struggle in Tibet and how the US has been building up Dalai Lama to pursue their ideological struggle. In the US many uninformed people had been awed by his philosophy on "peace" and "non-violence". This article will bare facts to the real color and intent of the Lama, why the US had given him a Nobel Prize and many more. - Kalovski Itim, The True Story of Maoist Revolution in Tibet, When the Dalai Lamas Ruled: Hell on Earth

Revolutionary Worker #944, February 15, 1998

Hard Climate, Heartless Society

Tibet is one of the most remote places in the world. It is centered on a high mountain plateau deep in the heart of Asia. It is cut off from South Asia by the Himalayas, the highest mountains in the world. Countless river gorges and at least six different mountain ranges carve this region into isolated valleys. Before all the changes brought about after the Chinese revolution of 1949, there were no roads in Tibet that wheeled vehicles could travel. All travel was over winding, dangerous mountain trailsby mule, by foot or by yaks which are hairy cow-like mountain animals. Trade, communications and centralized government were almost impossible to maintain.

Most of Tibet is above the tree-line. The air is very thin. Most crops and trees won't grow there. It was a struggle to grow food and even find fuel for fires.

At the time of the revolution, the population of Tibet was extremely spread out. About two or three million Tibetans lived in an area half the size of the United Statesabout 1.5 million square miles. Villages, monasteries and nomad encampments were often separated by many days of difficult travel.

Maoist revolutionaries saw there were "Three Great Lacks" in old Tibet: lack of fuel, lack of communications, and lack of people. The revolutionaries analyzed that these "Three Great Lacks" were not mainly caused by the physical conditions, but by the social system. The Maoists said that the "Three Great Lacks" were caused by the "Three Abundances" in Tibetan society: "Abundant poverty, abundant oppression and abundant fear of the supernatural."

Class Society in Old Tibet

Tibet was a feudal society before the revolutionary changes that started in 1949. There were two main classes: the serfs and the aristocratic serf owners. The people lived like serfs in Europe's "Dark Ages," or like African slaves and sharecroppers of the U.S. South.

Tibetan serfs scratched barley harvest from the hard earth with wooden plows and sickles. Goats, sheep and yaks were raised for milk, butter, cheese and meat. The aristocratic and monastery masters owned the people, the land and most of the animals. They forced the serfs to hand over most grain and demanded all kinds of forced labor (called ulag). Among the serfs, both men and women participated in hard labor, including ulag. The scattered nomadic peoples of Tibet's barren western highlands were also owned by lords and lamas.

The Dalai Lama's older brother Thubten Jigme Norbu claims that in the lamaist social order, "There is no class system and the mobility from class to class makes any class prejudice impossible." But the whole existence of this religious order was based on a rigid and brutal class system.

Serfs were treated like despised "inferiors"the way Black people were treated in the Jim Crow South. Serfs could not use the same seats, vocabulary or eating utensils as serf owners. Even touching one of the master's belongings could be punished by whipping. The masters and serfs were so distant from each other that in much of Tibet they spoke different languages.

It was the custom for a serf to kneel on all fours so his master could step on his back to mount a horse. Tibet scholar A. Tom Grunfeld describes how one ruling class girl routinely had servants carry her up and down stairs just because she was lazy. Masters often rode on their serfs' backs across streams.

The only thing worse than a serf in Tibet was a "chattel slave," who had no right to even grow a few crops for themselves. These slaves were often starved, beaten and worked to death. A master could turn a serf into a slave any time he wanted. Children were routinely bought and sold in Tibet's capital, Lhasa. About 5 percent of the Tibetan people were counted as chattel slaves. And at least another 10 percent were poor monks who were really "slaves in robes."

The lamaist system tried to prevent any escape. Runaway slaves couldn't just set up free farms in the vast empty lands. Former serfs explained to revolutionary writer Anna Louise Strong that before liberation, "You could not live in Tibet without a master. Anyone might pick you up as an outlaw unless you had a legal owner."

Born FemaleProof of Past Sins?

The Dalai Lama writes, "In Tibet there was no special discrimination against women." The Dalai Lama's authorized biographer Robert Hicks argues that Tibetan women were content with their status and "influenced their husbands." But in Tibet, being born a woman was considered a punishment for "impious" (sinful) behavior in a previous life. The word for "woman" in old Tibet, kiemen, meant "inferior birth." Women were told to pray, "May I reject a feminine body and be reborn a male one."

Lamaist superstition associated women with evil and sin. It was said "among ten women you'll find nine devils." Anything women touched was considered taintedso all kinds of taboos were placed on women. Women were forbidden to handle medicine. Han Suyin reports, "No woman was allowed to touch a lama's belongings, nor could she raise a wall, or 'the wall will fall.' A widow was a despicable being, already a devil. No woman was allowed to use iron instruments or touch iron. Religion forbade her to lift her eyes above the knee of a man, as serfs and slaves were not allowed to life the eyes upon the face of the nobles or great lamas."

Monks of the major sects of Tibetan Buddhism rejected sexual intimacy (or even contact) with women, as part of their plan to be holy. Before the revolution, no woman had ever set foot in most monasteries or the palaces of the Dalai Lama.

There are reports of women being burned for giving birth to twins and for practicing the pre-Buddhist traditional religion (called Bon). Twins were considered proof that a woman had mated with an evil spirit. The rituals and folk medicine of Bon were considered "witchcraft." Like in other feudal societies, upperclass women were sold into arranged marriages. Custom allowed a husband to cut off the tip of his wife's nose if he discovered she had slept with someone else. The patriarchal practices included polygyny, where a wealthy man could have many wives; and polyandry, where in land-poor noble families one woman was forced to be wife to several brothers.

Among the lower classes, family life was similar to slavery in the U.S. South. (See The Life of a Tibetan Slave.) Serfs could not marry or leave the estate without the master's permission. Masters transferred serfs from one estate to another at will, breaking up serf families forever. Rape of women serfs was commonunder the ulag system, a lord could demand "temporary wives."

The Three Masters

The Tibetan people called their rulers "the Three Great Masters" because the ruling class of serf owners was organized into three institutions: the lama monasteries possessed 37 percent of the cultivated land and pasture in old Tibet; the secular aristocracy 25 percent; and the remaining 38 percent was in the hands of the government officials appointed by the Dalai Lama's advisors.

About 2 percent of Tibet's population was in this upper class, and an additional 3 percent were their agents, overseers, stewards, managers of estates and private armies. The ger-ba, a tiny elite of about 200 families, ruled at the top. Han Suyin writes: "Only 626 people held 93 percent of all land and wealth and 70 percent of all the yaks in Tibet. These 626 included 333 heads of monasteries and religious authorities, and 287 lay authorities (including the nobles of the Tibetan army) and six cabinet ministers."

Merchants and handicraftsmen also belonged to a lord. A quarter of the population in the capital city of Lhasa survived by begging from religious pilgrims. There was no modern industry or working class. Even matches and nails had to be imported. Before the revolution, no one in Tibet was ever paid wages for their work.

The heart of this system was exploitation. Serfs worked 16- or 18-hour days to enrich their masterskeeping only about a quarter of the food they raised.

A. Tom Grunfeld writes: "These estates were extremely lucrative. One former aristocrat noted that a 'small' estate would typically consist of a few thousand sheep, a thousand yaks, an undetermined number of nomads and two hundred agricultural serfs. The yearly output would consist of over 36,000 kg (80,000 lbs.) of grain, over 1,800 kg (4,000 lbs.) of wool and almost 500 kg (1,200 lbs.) of butter A government official had 'unlimited powers of extortion' and could make a fortune from his powers to extract bribes not to imprison and punish people. There was also the matter of extracting monies from the peasantry beyond the necessary taxes."

The ruling serf owners were parasites. One observer, Sir Charles Bell, described a typical official who spent an hour a day at his official duties. Upper class parties lasted for days of eating, gambling and lying around. The aristocratic lamas also never worked. They spent their days chanting, memorizing religious dogma and doing nothing.

The Monasteries: Strongholds of Feudalism

Defenders of old Tibet portray Lamaist Buddhism as the essence of the culture of the people of Tibet. But it was really nothing more or less than the ideology of a specific oppressive social system. The lamaist religion itself is exactly as old as feudal class society. The first Tibetan king, Songsten-gampo, established a unified feudal system in Tibet, around 650 A.D. He married princesses from China and Nepal in order to learn from them the practices used outside Tibet to carry out feudalism. These princesses brought Tantric Buddhism to Tibet, where it was merged with earlier animist beliefs to create a new religion, Lamaism.

This new religion had to be imposed on the people over the next century and a half by the ruling class, using violence. King Trosong Detsen decreed: "He who shows a finger to a monk shall have his finger cut off; he who speaks ill of the monks and the king's Buddhist policy shall have his lips cut off; he who looks askance at them shall have his eyes put out"

Between the 1400s and the 1600s, a bloody consolidation of power took place, the abbots of the largest monasteries seized overall power. Because these abbots practiced anti-woman celibacy, their new political system could not operate by hereditary father-to-son succession. So the lamas created a new doctrine for their religion: They announced that they could detect newborn children who were reincarnations of dead ruling lamas. Hundreds of top lamas were declared "Living Buddhas" (Bodhisattvas) who had supposedly ruled others for centuries, switching to new bodies occasionally as old host bodies wore out.

The central symbol of this system, the various men called Dalai Lama, was said to be the early Tibetan nature-god Chenrezig who had simply reappeared in 14 different bodies over the centuries. In fact, only three of the 14 Dalai Lamas actually ruled. Between 1751 and 1950, there was no adult Dalai Lama on the throne in Tibet 77 percent of the time. The most powerful abbots ruled as "regent" advisors who trained, manipulated and even assassinated the child-king Dalai Lamas.

Tibetan monasteries were not holy, compassionate Shangrilas, like in some New Age fantasy. These monasteries were dark fortresses of feudal exploitationthey were armed villages of monks complete with military warehouses and private armies. Pilgrims came to some shrines to pray for a better life. But the main activity of monasteries was robbing the surrounding peasants. The huge idle religious clergy grew little foodfeeding them was a big burden on the people.

The largest monasteries housed thousands of monks. Each "parent" monastery created dozens (even hundreds) of small strongholds scattered through the mountain valleys. For example, the huge Drepung monastery housed 7,000 monks and owned 40,000 people on 185 different estates with 300 pastures.

Monasteries also made up countless religious taxes to rob the peopleincluding taxes on haircuts, on windows, on doorsteps, taxes on newborn children or calves, taxes on babies born with double eyelidsand so on. A quarter of Drepung's income came from interest on money lent to the serf-peasantry. The monasteries also demanded that serfs hand over many young boys to serve as child-monks.

The class relations of Tibet were reproduced inside the monasteries: the majority of monks were slaves and servants to the upper abbots and lived half-starved lives of menial labor, prayer chanting and routine beatings. Upper monks could force poor monks to take their religious exams or perform sexual services. (In the most powerful Tibetan sect, such homosexual sex was considered a sign of holy distance from women.) A small percent of the clergy were nuns.

After liberation, Anna Louise Strong asked a young monk, Lobsang Telé, if monastery life followed Buddhist teachings about compassion. The young lama replied that he heard plenty of talk in the scripture halls about kindness to all living creatures, but that he personally had been whipped at least a thousand times. "If any upper class lama refrains from whipping you," he told Strong, "that is already very good. I never saw an upper lama give food to any poor lama who was hungry. They treated the laymen who were believers just as badly or even worse."

These days, the Dalai Lama is "packaged" internationally as a non-materialist holy man. In fact, the Dalai Lama was the biggest serf owner in Tibet. Legally, he owned the whole country and everyone in it. In practice, his family directly controlled 27 manors, 36 pastures, 6,170 field serfs and 102 house slaves.

When he moved from palace to palace, the Dalai Lama rode on a throne chair pulled by dozens of slaves. His troops marched along to "It's a Long Way to Tipperary," a tune learned from their British imperialist trainers. Meanwhile, the Dalai Lama's bodyguards, all over six-and-a-half feet tall, with padded shoulders and long whips, beat people out of his path. This ritual is described in the Dalai Lama's autobiography.

The first time he fled to India in 1950, the Dalai Lama's advisors sent several hundred mule-loads of gold and silver bars ahead to secure his comfort in exile. After the second time he fled, in 1959, Peking Review reported that his family left lots of gold and silver behind, plus 20,331 pieces of jewelry and 14,676 pieces of clothing.

Bitter Poverty, Early Death

The people lived with constant cold and hunger. Serfs endlessly gathered scarce wood for their masters. But their own huts were only heated by small cooking fires of yak dung. Before the revolution there was no electricity in Tibet. The darkness was only lit by flickering yak-butter lamps.

Serfs were often sick from malnutrition. The traditional food of the masses is a mush made from tea, yak butter, and a barley flour called tsampa. Serfs rarely tasted meat. One 1940 study of eastern Tibet says that 38 percent of households never got any teaand drank only wild herbs or "white tea" (boiled water). Seventy-five percent of the households were forced at times to eat grass. Half of the people couldn't afford butterthe main source of protein available.

Meanwhile, a major shrine, the Jokka Kang, burned four tons of yak butter offerings daily. It has been estimated that one-third of all the butter produced in Tibet went up in smoke in nearly 3,000 temples, not counting the small alters in each house.

In old Tibet, nothing was known about basic hygiene, sanitation, or the fact that germs caused disease. For ordinary people, there were no outhouses, sewers or toilets. The lamas taught that disease and death were caused by sinful "impiety." They said that chanting, obedience, paying monks money and swallowing prayer scrolls was the only real protection from disease.

Old Tibet's superstition, feudal practices and low productive forces caused the people to suffer terribly from disease. Most children died before their first year. Even most Dalai Lamas did not make it to 18 years old and died before their coronations. A third of the population had smallpox. A 1925 smallpox epidemic killed 7,000 in Lhasa. It is not known how many died in the countryside. Leprosy, tuberculosis, goiter, tetanus, blindness and ulcers were very common. Feudal sexual customs spread venereal disease, including in the monasteries. Before the revolution, about 90 percent of the population was infectedcausing widespread sterility and death. Later, under the leadership of Mao Tsetung, the revolution was able to greatly reduce these illnessesbut it required intense class struggle against the lamas and their religious superstitions. The monks denounced antibiotics and public health campaigns, saying it was a sin to kill lice or even germs! The monks denounced the People's Liberation Army for eliminating the large bands of wild, rabies-infested dogs that terrorized people across Tibet. (Still today, one of the "charges" against the Maoist revolution is that it "killed dogs"!)

The Violence of the Lamas

In old Tibet, the upper classes preached mystical Buddhist nonviolence. But, like all ruling classes in history, they practiced reactionary violence to maintain their rule.

The lamaist system of government came into being through bloody struggles. The early lamas reportedly assassinated the last Tibetan king, Lang Darma, in the 10th century. Then they fought centuries of civil wars, complete with mutual massacres of whole monasteries. In the 20th century, the 13th Dalai Lama brought in British imperialist trainers to modernize his national army. He even offered some of his troops to help the British fight World War I.

These historical facts alone prove that lamaist doctrines of "compassion" and "nonviolence" are hypocrisy.

The former ruling class denies there was class struggle in old Tibet. A typical account by Gyaltsen Gyaltag, a representative of the Dalai Lama in Europe, says: "Prior to 1950, the Tibetans never experienced a famine, and social injustices never led to an uprising of the people." It is true that there is little written record of class struggle. The reason is that Lamaism prevented any real histories from being written down. Only disputes over religious dogma were recorded.

But the mountains of Tibet were filled with bandit runaways, and each estate had its armed fighters. This alone is proof that constantdefined Tibetan society and its power relations. strugglesometimes open, sometimes hidden

Revolutionary historians have documented uprisings among Tibetan serfs in 1908, 1918, 1931, and the 1940s. In one famous uprising, 150 families of serfs of northern Tibet's Thridug county rose up in 1918, led by a woman, Hor Lhamo. They killed the county head, under the slogan: "Down with officials! Abolish all ulag forced labor!"

Daily violence in old Tibet was aimed at the masses of people. Each master punished "his" serfs, and organized armed gangs to enforce his rule. Squads of monks brutalized the people. They were called "Iron Bars" because of the big metal rods they carried to batter people.

It was a crime to "step out of your place"like hunting fish or wild sheep that the lamaist declared were "sacred." It was even a crime for a serf to appeal his master's decisions to some other authority. When serfs ran away, the masters' gangs went to hunt them down. Each estate had its own dungeons and torture chambers. Pepper was forced under the eyelids. Spikes were forced under the fingernails. Serfs had their legs connected by short chains and were released to wander hobbled for the rest of their lives.

Grunfeld writes: "Buddhist belief precludes the taking of life, so that whipping a person to the edge of death and then releasing him to die elsewhere allowed Tibetan officials to justify the death as 'an act of God.' Other brutal forms of punishment included the cutting off of hands at the wrists, using red-hot irons to gouge out eyes; hanging by the thumbs; and crippling the offender, sewing him into a bag, and throwing the bag in the river."

As signs of the lamas' power, traditional ceremonies used body parts of people who had died: flutes made out of human thigh bones, bowls made out of skulls, drums made from human skin. After the revolution, a rosary was found in the Dalai Lama's palace made from 108 different skulls. After liberation, serfs widely reported that the lamas engaged in ritual human sacrificeincluding burying serf children alive in monastery ground-breaking ceremonies. Former serfs testified that at least 21 people were sacrificed by monks in 1948 in hopes of preventing the victory of the Maoist revolution.

Using Karma to Justify Oppression

The central belief of lamaism is reincarnation and karma. Each living being is said to be inhabited by an immortal soul that has been born and reborn many times. After each death, a soul is supposedly given a new body.

According to the dogma of karma, each soul gets the life it deserves: Pious behavior leads to good karmaand with that comes a rise in the social status of the next life. Impious (sinful) behavior leads to bad karma and the next life could be as an insect (or a woman).

In reality, there is no such thing as reincarnation. Dead people do not return in new bodies. But in Tibet, the belief in reincarnation had terrible real consequences. People intrigued by Tibetan mysticism need to understand the social function served by these lamaist beliefs inside Tibet: Lamaist Buddhism was created, imposed and perpetuated to carry out the extreme feudal oppression of the people.

Lamaists today tell the story of an ancient Tibetan king who wanted to close the gap between rich and poor. The king asked a religious scholar why his efforts failed. "The sage is said to have explained to him that the gap between rich and poor cannot be closed by force, since the conditions of present life are always the consequences of actions in earlier lives, and therefore the course of things cannot be changed at will."

Grunfield writes: "From a purely secular point of view, this doctrine must be seen as one of the most ingenious and pernicious forms of social control ever devised. To the ordinary Tibetan, the acceptance of this doctrine precluded the possibility of ever changing his or her fate in this life. If one were born a slave, so the doctrine of karma taught, it was not the fault of the slaveholder but rather the slaves themselves for having committed some misdeeds in a previous life. In turn, the slaveholder was simply being rewarded for good deeds in a previous life. For the slave to attempt to break the chains that bound him, or her, would be tantamount to a self-condemnation to a rebirth into a life worse than the one already being suffered. This is certainly not the stuff of which revolutions are made"

Tibet's feudalist abbot-lamas taught that their top lama was a single divine god-king-beingwhose rule and dog-eat-dog system was demanded by the natural workings of the universe. These myths and superstitions teach that there can be no social change, that suffering is justified, and that to end suffering each person must patiently tolerate suffering. This is almost exactly what Europe's medieval Catholic church taught the people, in order to defend a similar feudal system.

Also like in medieval Europe, Tibet's feudalists fought to suppress anything that might undermine their "watertight" system. All observers agree that, before the Maoist revolution, there were no magazines, printed books, or non-religious literature of any kind in Tibet. The only Tibetan language newspaper was published in Kalimpong by a converted Christian Tibetan. The source of news of the outside world was travelers and a couple of dozen shortwave radios that were owned only by members of the ruling class.

The masses created folklore, but the written language was reserved for religious dogma and disputes. The masses of people and probably most monks were kept completely illiterate. Education, outside news and experimentation were considered suspect and evil.

Defenders of lamaism act like this religion was the essence of the culture (and even the existence) of the Tibetan people. This is not true. Like all things in society and nature, Lamaist Buddhism had a beginning and will have an end. There was culture and ideology in Tibet before lamaism. Then this feudal culture and religion arose together with feudal exploitation. It was inevitable that lamaist culture would shatter together with those feudal relations.

In fact, when the Maoist revolution arrived in 1950, this system was already rotting from within. Even the Dalai Lama admits that the population of Tibet was declining. It is estimated there were about 10 million Tibetans 1,000 years ago when Buddhism was first introducedby the time of the Maoist revolution there were only two or three million left. Maoists estimate that the decline had accelerated: the population had been cut in half during the last 150 years.

The lamaist system burdened the people with massive exploitation. It enforced the special burden of supporting a huge, parasitic, non-reproducing clergy of about 200,000that absorbed 20 percent or more of the region's young men. The system suppressed the development of productive forces: preventing the use of iron plows, the mining of coal or fuel, the harvesting of fish or game, and medical/sanitary innovation of any kind. Hunger, the sterility caused by venereal disease, and polyandry kept the birthrate low.

The mystical wrapping of lamaism cannot hide that old Tibetan society was a dictatorship of the serf owners over the serfs. There is nothing to romanticize about this society. The serfs and slaves needed a revolution!

Tibet Meets the Maoist Revolution

Through the 1930s and '40s, a revolutionary people's war arose among the peasants of central China. Under the leadership of the Communist Party and its Chairman Mao Tsetung, the revolution won overall state power in the heavily populated areas of eastern China in 1949. By then, U.S. intrigues were already starting at China's northern border with Korea, and French imperialists were launching their colonialist invasion of Vietnam along China's southern border. Clearly, the Maoist revolutionaries were eager to liberate the oppressed everywhere in China, and to drive foreign intriguers from China's border regions.

But Tibet posed a particular problem: In 1950, this huge region had been almost completely isolated from the revolutionary whirlwind that swept the rest of China. There were almost no Tibetan communists. There was no communist underground among Tibet's serfs. In fact, the serfs of Tibet had no idea that a revolution was happening elsewhere in their country, or even that such things as "revolutions" were possible.

The grip of the lamaist system and its religion was extremely strong in Tibet. It could not be broken simply by having revolutionary troops of the majority Han nationality march in and "declare" that feudalism was abolished! Mao Tsetung rejected the "commandist" approach of "doing things in the name of the masses." Maoist revolution relies on the masses.

In Part 2 of this series, we will discuss how Maoist revolution got its foothold in Tibet, and how the revolution grew into great mass storms that blew away the lamaist oppression.

Bringing the Revolution to Tibet

By 1949, Mao's People's Liberation Army had defeated all the main reactionary armies in central China. The day of the poor and oppressed had arrived! But the big powers in the world were moving quickly to crush and "contain" this revolution. French troops invaded Vietnam, south of China's border. By 1950, a massive U.S. invasion force would land in Korea with plans to threaten Chinaitself.

The western mountains and grasslands of China's border areas are inhabited by dozens of different national groupings, whose cultures are different from China's majority Han people. One of those regions, Tibet, had been locally ruled as an isolated, "water-tight" kingdom by a class of serf-owners, headed by the monk-abbots of large Lamaist Buddhist monasteries. During the Chinese civil war, Tibet's ruling class conspired to set up a phony "independent" state that was really under the wing of British colonialism.

Maoist revolutionaries were determined to bring revolution to Tibetto secure China's border regions against invasion and to liberate the millions of oppressed Tibetan serfs there. There was no doubt that Mao's hardened peasant-soldiers could defeat any army of Tibetan feudalists.

But the revolution faced a problem: The huge, sparsely populated region of Tibet had been completely isolated from the revolutionary war sweeping the rest of China. In 1949 there was no force among the Tibetan masses to carry out real liberation. There was yet no rebel underground among Tibet's serfs. There were almost no Tibetan communists or even Han communists who spoke Tibetan. The masses of Tibetan serfs had never heard that a great revolution had swept the rest of their country. Tibetan serfs had been taught that their current misery and poverty was justifiedcaused by their own sinfulness in earlier lives.

Mao Tsetung taught that a true revolution must rely on the masseson the needs, wishes, and actions of the oppressed people themselves. Maoism calls this principle the Mass Line. Mao said: "It often happens that objectively the masses need a certain change, but subjectively they are not yet conscious of the need, not yet willing or determined to make the change. In such cases, we should wait patiently. We should not make the change until, through our work, most of the masses have become conscious of the need and are willing and determined to carry it out. Otherwise we shall isolate ourselves from the masses. Unless they are conscious and willing, any kind of work that requires their participation will turn out to be a mere formality and will fail."

In October 1950 the People's Liberation Army (PLA) advanced into the grasslands and mountains of southwest China. At Chamdo, they easily defeated an army sent against them by the Tibetan ruling class - and then they stopped. They sent a message to the Tibetan capital, Lhasa.

China's new revolutionary government offered Tibet's rulers a deal: Tibet would be reattached to the Chinese republic, but for the time being the regime of Tibetan serf-owners (called the Kashag) could continue to rule as a local government, operating under the leadership of the Central People's government. The Maoists would not abolish feudal practices, or challenge the Lamaist religion until the people themselves supported such changes. The People's Liberation Army would safeguard China's borders from imperialist intervention, and foreign agents would be expelled from Lhasa. About half of the Tibetan population lived in regions of Tsinghai and Chamdo that were not under the political rule of the Kashag. These regions were not covered by the proposal.

The Tibetan serf-owners signed this special "17-point agreement" and on October 26, 1951, the People's Liberation Army peacefully marched into Lhasa.

Both sides knew that struggle would eventually break out. How long could the aristocrats and monasteries continue to enslave "their" serfswhen everyone could now see Han peasants who had liberated themselves from similar conditions using guns and Maoism?

The most powerful serf-owning families started to plan an armed uprising. The Dalai Lama's brother traveled abroad to cement ties with the CIA, to get arms and request political recognition. Monasteries organized secret conferences and spread wild rumors among the masses: like saying Han revolutionaries fueled their trucks with the blood of stolen Tibetan children. Long mule-trains of U.S. arms started winding their way from India to key Tibetan monasteries. The CIA set up combat training centers for its Tibetan agents, eventually based in the high altitude of Camp Hale, Colorado. CIA planes dropped weapons into Tibet's eastern Kham region.

Applying Mao's Mass Line to the Special Conditions of Tibet

Meanwhile, Mao instructed the revolutionary forces to win over the masses for the coming revolutionwithout provoking an early polarization in which the masses might be against the revolution. Mao wrote: "Delay will not do us much harm; on the contrary, it may be to our advantage. Let them [the lamaist ruling class] go on with their senseless atrocities against the people, while we on our part concentrate on good deedsproduction, trade, road-building, medical services and united front work (unity with the majority and patient education) so as to win over the masses."

One red soldier later said, "We were given much detailed instructions as to how to behave."

The Tibetan masses were too poor to spare any grain for the revolutionary troops. So the PLA soldiers often went hungry until their own fields were ready for harvest. They were taught to respect Tibetan cultures and beliefseven, for now, the intense superstitious fears that dominated Tibetan life.

During those first years, the PLA worked as a great construction force building the first roads connecting Tibet with central China. A long string of workcamps stretched thousands of miles through endless mountains and gorges. Alongside these camps, the Han soldiers raised their own food using new collective methods. Serfs from surrounding areas were paid wages for work on the road.

The rulers of old Tibet treated the serfs like "talking animals" and forced them to do endless unpaid laborso the behavior of these PLA troops was shocking to the Tibetan masses. One serf said, "The Hans worked side by side with us. They did not whip us. For the first time I was treated as a human being." Another serf described the day a PLA soldier gave him water from the soldier's own cup, "I could not believe it!" As serfs were trained to repair trucks, they became the first proletarians in the history of Tibet. One runaway said: "We understood it was not the will of the gods, but the cruelty of humans like ourselves, which kept us slaves."

The PLA road camps quickly became magnets for runaway slaves, serfs, and escaped monks. Young serfs working in the camps were asked if they wanted to go to school to help liberate their people. They became the first Tibetan students at Institutes for National Minorities in China's eastern cities. They learned reading, writing, and accounting "for the agrarian revolution to come"!

In this way, the revolution started recruiting activists who would soon lead the people. The first Communist Party member from central Tibet was recruited in the mid-1950s. By October 1957, the Party reported 1,000 Tibetan members, with an additional 2,000 in the Communist Youth League. (See "Recruiting Young Rebels to the Revolution.")

All through Tibet's eastern rural areas and the valleys around Lhasa, the People's Liberation Army acted as a huge "seeding machine" of the revolutionjust as it had during Mao's historic Long March of the 1930s.

Any Hint of Change Shook the Water-tight Kingdom

Once the first white-sand road was completed, long caravans of PLA trucks arrived, carrying key goods like tea and matches. The expanded trade and especially the availability of inexpensive tea improved the diet of ordinary Tibetans. By the mid-'50s, the first telephones, telegraphs, radio station and modern printing had been organized. The first newspapers, books and pamphlets appeared, in both Han and Tibetan. After 1955, Tibet's first real schools were founded. By July 1957 there were 79 elementary schools, with 6,000 students. All this started to improve the life of poor people and infuriated the upper classes, who had always monopolized all trade, book-learning and contact with the outside world.

When revolutionary medical teams started healing people, even monks and the upper classes started showing up at the early clinics. The first coal mine opened in 1958 and the first blast furnace in 1959. This undermined superstitions that condemned innovation and preached that diseases were caused by sinful behavior.

Starting in 1956, increasingly intense armed revolts organized by feudal landowners started in Han-Tibet border areas. These areas were not covered by the 17 points, and the serfs there were being encouraged by the revolutionaries to stop paying land rent to the monasteries and estates. In 1958 a communist leader in Tsinghai wrote, "The great socialist revolution in the pastoral areas has been a very violent class struggle of life and death."

Some forces within the Communist Party urged compromise. They suggested slowing down the land reform and closing down the schools and clinics that were opposed by the lamaists. Teachers and medical teams were withdrawn. But this did not stop the conspiracies of the lamaists.

In the late '50s, the Tibetan ruling class pressed ahead with a full-scale revolt. They believed that the intense struggles breaking out in central Chinacalled the Great Leap Forwardmight give them an opening to drive out the PLA. CIA support was increasing, and trained agents were in place.

Serf-Owners' Revolt Triggers Revolution

"Historically, all reactionary forces on the verge of extinction invariably conduct a last desperate struggle against the revolutionary forces."Mao Tsetung

In March 1959, armed monks and Tibetan soldiers attacked the revolutionary garrison in Lhasa and launched a revolt along the Tibet-India border. One monk later said, "All of us were told that, if we killed a Han, we would become Living Buddhas and have chapels to our name." Without much support among the masses, the lamaists were soon dug in at some shrines. The main revolt was over within a few days.

During the fighting, the Dalai Lama fled into exile. This flight is portrayed by lamaists as a heroic, even mystical event. But it is now well documented that the Dalai Lama was whisked away by a CIA covert operation. The Dalai Lama's own autobiography admits that his cook and radio operator on that trip were CIA agents. The CIA wanted him outside of Tibetas a symbol for a contra-style war against the Maoist revolution.

Defeated in their revolt, large sections of the upper clergy and aristocracy followed the Dalai Lama south into Indiaaccompanied by many slave-servants, armed guards and mule-trains of wealth. In all, 13,000 went into exile, among them the most hard-core feudal forces and their supporters. Suddenly, many of Tibet's Three Mastersthe rich lamas, the high government officials, and the secular aristocratswere gone!

Revolutionary forces mobilized to root out the feudalist conspiracy. And a thousand Tibetan students rushed back from the National Minorities Institutes to help organize the first great wave of revolutionary change in Tibet.

The Dalai Lama's Kashag government had largely supported this counterrevolutionary revolt and was dissolved. New organs of power were created in every region called "Offices to Suppress the Revolt." The new regional government was called "Preparatory Committee for the Autonomous Region of Tibet" (PCART)in it, new Tibetan cadres and veteran Han cadres worked together.

This first stage of the revolution was called "the Three Anti's and the Two Reductions." It was against the lamaist conspiracy, against forced labor, and against slavery. In the past serfs had paid three-quarters of their harvest to the masters, now the revolution fought to reduce that "land rent" to 20 percent. The other reduction eliminated the massive debts that serfs "owed" to their masters.

This campaign attacked the heart of Tibet's feudal relations: Forced ulag labor was abolished. The nangzen slaves of the nobles and monasteries were freed. The masses of slave-monks were suddenly allowed to leave the monasteries. Arms caches were cleaned out of the main monasteries, and key conspirators were arrested.

Some people like to talk about "struggle for religious freedom in Tibet"but throughout Tibetan history, the main struggle around "religious freedom" has been for the freedom not to believe, not to obey the cruel monks and their endless superstitions. The sight of thousands of young monks eagerly getting married and doing manual labor was a powerful blow to superstitious awe.

Women's liberation got off the groundunder the then-shocking slogan "All men and women are equal!" Revolutionary property changes helped ease old pressures for polygamy. With a large new pool of eligible men, there was no longer the same pressure for women to accept a situation where one man could have many wives. With the redistribution of the land, women were no longer under the same pressure to marry several brothers in one familya practice that had been used to limit the population who depended on small plots of land.

Without the land rent, the huge parasitic monasteries started to dry up. About half the monks left them and about half the monasteries closed down.

In mass meetings, serfs were encouraged to organize Peasant Associations and fight for their interests. Key oppressors were called out, denounced and punished. The debt records of the serf-owners were burned in great bonfires. Women played a particularly active role. They are seen in the photographs of those days leading such meetings and denouncing the oppressor. Soon, the serfs seized the land and livestock. Ex-serfs, former beggars, and ex-slaves each received several acres. Serfs received 200,000 new deeds to the land and herdsdecorated with red flags and pictures of Chairman Mao.

Serfs said: "The sun of the Kashag shone only on the Three Masters and their landlord henchmen, but the sun of the Communist Party and Chairman Mao shines on usthe poor people."

Sharp Class Struggle

These revolutionary moves took intense and often bloody class struggle. There was all the complexity, heroism, mistakes, advances and setbacks of real-life revolution.

The revolutionaries aroused the class hatred of the serfs. The serf-owners countered by accusing revolutionary Tibetans of being foreign collaborators and destroyers of holiness. Sometimes the revolutionary forces had the upper handand huge changes happened in the lives of the people. In other places the feudal forces gained the upper handand tried to wipe out any challenge. For years, there were pitched battles, raids, and executions by both sides. As Mao Tsetung teaches: "A revolution is not a dinner party. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. Without using the greatest force, the peasants cannot possibly overthrow the deep-rooted authority of the landlords which has lasted for thousands of years."

The revolutionary army was a powerful force backing the upsurge, and many eager serfs volunteered to join the People's Liberation Army. But Tibet is a huge land of isolated valleys. Organizers in the widely scattered settlements were largely on their own. They risked everything for the people and were often killed by feudal gangsjust like the early Klan killed freed slaves in the days after the U.S.civil war.

Sharp struggle also broke out in the new Institutes of National Minoritiesoften along class lines. Some Tibetan students from aristocratic background intended to become a new elitesome resented it when land reform affected their serf-owning families back in Tibet. They also rejected moves toward social equality: demanding to have servants who would make their beds and clean their rooms, and they refused to mingle with fellow students from slave and serf backgrounds. Similar issues divided the new schools in Lhasa itself: aristocrat-students demanded that slave-students carry their "master's" books. Lamas were sent in to "oversee education" and conduct prayers before and after study sessions. These early struggles prepared the students from serf, slave and beggar classes for the day when such issues would be struggled out throughout Tibet's society.

Even as most land was divided into individual plots, far-sighted experiments tried out socialist, collective forms in the countryside. Mao taught that the road to liberation in the countryside required new forms of cooperation among the people. In Tibet, new "mutual aid teams" shared farm implements and animals, worked the fields together and pooled their labor to dig canals, dam streams, collect fertilizer and build new roads.

Through these great storms of struggle, the Maoist revolution created a wide base for itself among the newly freed serfs of Tibet.

In Part 3: The Revolution Within the Revolution

Tibet's storm of class struggle displeased some powerful forces inside the Chinese Communist Party itself. These forces, called revisionists, opposed Mao's revolutionary line. These forces were grouped around the party leader Liu Shao-chi, the top general Lin Piao, and Deng Xiaoping (who rules China today.) They had a completely different (and quite capitalist) view of what should be done with Tibet.

The revisionists did not see much reason to mobilize the masses to overthrow the feudal landlords. They were "Han chauvinists" who looked down on the masses of Tibetan peopleconsidering them hopelessly backward and superstitious. They thought the Tibetan students in the Institutes of National Minorities should be trained as administrators, not as revolutionary organizers. They thought Tibet should be ruled through the educated upper classes, while relying on military means to keep the region "under control."

To these revisionists, Maoist class struggle was just "disruption" of their plans for exploiting Tibet. When they looked at Tibet, they saw only a border that needed defending, mineral resources to be exploited, and a potential "breadbasket" that could help feed the rest of China. They thought that developing independent industries or diversified agriculture was "inefficient" and a waste of time. The revisionists imagined that they could reach a long-term arrangement with the Lamaist ruling classthat would be profitable for them both.

But at that time, these capitalist-roaders did not have overall power. Mao was determined to lead the masses of people in all-the-way revolution. He fought to have a revolutionary approach carried out in Tibet and other national minority areas.

As early as 1953, Mao wrote in the essay Criticize Han Chauvinism: "In some places the relations between nationalities are far from normal. For Communists this is an intolerable situation. We must go to the root and criticize the Han chauvinist ideas which exist to a serious degree among many Party members and cadres, namely, the reactionary ideas of the landlord class and the bourgeoisiewhich are manifested in the relations between nationalities. In other words, bourgeois ideas dominate the minds of those comrades and people who have had no Marxist education and have not grasped the nationality policy of the Central Committee."

In 1956 Mao again raised the issue in his famous speech "On The Ten Major Relationships": "We put the emphasis on opposing Han chauvinism. Local-nationality chauvinism must be opposed too, but generally that is not where our emphasis lies. All through the ages, the reactionary rulers, chiefly from the Han nationality, sowed feelings of estrangement among our various nationalities and bullied the minority peoples. Even among the working people it is not easy to eliminate the resultant influences in a short time. The air in the atmosphere, the forests on the earth and the riches under the soil are all important factors needed for the building of socialism, but no material factor can be exploited and utilized without the human factor. We must foster good relations between the Han nationality and the minority nationalities and strengthen the unity of all the nationalities in the common endeavor to build our great socialist motherland."

The storms of revolution in Tibet after 1959 were a great step forward for Mao's line. While the serfs were fighting for their land, struggle intensified within the Communist vanguard itself over how far such movements should go. In many places in Tibet there were still rich and poor, even after the land was distributed. Feudal customs and practices of all kinds were still strong. New revolutionary organizations were just getting started. The revolution still had a long way to go.

In the early '60s, revisionist forces called for "five years of consolidation" within Tibetwhich to them meant a cooling-out of the struggle. Socialist experiments in Tibet, like the early rural communes and many new factories, were disbanded.

The revisionists did not get "five years of consolidation" to suppress the people in Tibet. In 1965 the sharp line struggle came to a head within the Central Committee of the Communist Party itself. Chairman Mao unleashed an unprecedented "revolution within the revolution" called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Fertile Soil in Tibet for Mao's Cultural Revolution

One sun-filled day in August 1966, Mao Tsetung stood in front of a million young Red Guards who had flooded into Pekingand he put on one of their red armbands. Mao Tsetung did something no other head of state in history had done: he called on the masses of people to rise up against the government and the ruling party that he himself headed. "Bombard the Headquarters!" he said. The intense and historic struggle he unleashed was to rage across China for the next ten yearsfrom 1966 until 1976. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was on.

Within a couple days of that great rally, some Red Guards flew into Lhasa, Tibetwhere their radical message found an eager audience. The new high school in Tibet had graduated its first senior class in 1964. A core group of youth from serf and slave backgrounds now knew how to readand had learned basic Maoist principles about revolution.

Immediately, students of Lhasa High School and the nearby Tibet Teacher's Training School formed their own Red Guard organizations. They were in no mood to wait for orders. They debated how to push the revolution forward. And they immediately took action.

Here, in Part 3 of this series, we will tell what we know about the ten years of struggle that followed in Tibet. It is not easy to uncover the truth. These were wild, complex events in a large and isolated region.

On one hand, those class forces who were targets of the Maoist revolution portray the Cultural Revolution as a senseless nightmare of fanaticism and destruction. The Publicity Office of the Dalai Lama, based in India, offers "eyewitness accounts"told by ultra-conservative, mainly upper-class Tibetan exiles. The men who rule China today talk of "ten wasted years" filled with the "excesses of the Gang of Four." ("Gang of Four" is the name they give to Mao Tsetung's closest supporters.) Such anti-revolutionary accounts are highly unreliable.

On the other hand, the revolutionary activists in Tibet have themselves not found a way to make their own story heard. Many of them are undoubtedly in prison or dead.

To write this article we examined leaflets written by Tibetan Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution itself. We read the writings of different observers and progressive scholars and even critically examined the claims of Maoism's enemies. There are major gaps in the story. But it is possible to piece together a basic picture of what the revolutionaries in Tibet were trying to accomplish in these intense ten years.

Real Communists vs. Phony Communists in Tibet

Mao unleashed the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution because he saw a great danger for the people: The Chinese revolution that came to power in 1949 had stalled.

Powerful forces in the government and the Communist Party of China called for building a "modern" China by focusing on orderly production. Though these forces called themselves "communists," they really had no intention of going farther than abolishing feudalism and building a powerful national state. They wanted a halt to revolutionary change.

Mao saw that their imitation of "efficient" capitalist methods would leave the masses of people powerless. Their road would create a soulless, de-politicized, state-capitalist system similar to the one that came to power in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev. Mao labeled such forces "revisionists" and "phony communists." He said they were "bourgeois democrats turned capitalist roaders." Their main national leaders in the mid-'60s were Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping.

In Tibet, this conflict between the revisionist line and Mao's line was not widely known among the peoplebut it had been very sharp.

Mao's line called for a continuing revolutionary process conducted one step after anothera process that fundamentally relied on and organized the masses of Tibetan people themselves.

Mao had urged patiently building revolutionary organization in Tibet during the 1950s. By the early 1960s, a great alliance of Tibet's serfs and the People's Liberation Army (PLA) had shattered the heart of the old oppressive societyliberating the masses from serfdom and slavery, seizing land from the ruling class, and forbidding many old oppressive practices. It was a great advance and application of Mao's line.

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boatsie 8 months ago

Source for latest news: Katmandu March 24 -In separate incidents, Nepal Police arrested over 400 Tibetans from Bouda, Pulchowk and Maitighar in Kathmandu today. Heavy security forces have been deployed in Bouda, Swayambhu and Jwalakhel, where many Tibetans live, since early morning
http://www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=20035

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CheetahMama 8 months ago

BrillianT!!!

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frankpatton 8 months ago

There are many ways to work this, confront China by raising the awareness of Tibet with the corporations that do business with China - WalMart for example. Working with unions like SEIU who stand in opposition of WalMart and do massive business with China might be a place to start.

The Olympics is a massive opportunity to go after all the corporate sponsors, NBC is a good place to start, VISA, General Motors, GE, Adidas, Anheuser Busch Charles Schwab, just to name a few.

It's important to shame these multi-nationals, that's where the power is and that's where we need to be and the Olympics is a fine place to start. The pocket book of China is where we can get results, but cutting a hole in that pocket so the money leaks out, will get their attention.

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