Cultural Genocide in Tibet

A Report

The Tibet Policy Institute

The Department of Information and International Relations
Central Tibetan Administration
Published by the Tibet Policy Institute
Printed at Narthang Press, Department of Information and
International Relations of the Central Tibet Administration, 2017

Drafting Committee: Thubten Samphel, Bhuchung D. Sonam,

Dr. Rinzin Dorjee and Dr. Tenzin Desal
 Contents
Abbreviation

Foreword..............................................................................................i

Executive Summary............................................................................iv

Introduction.........................................................................................vi

PART ONE

A CULTURE OF COMPASSION

The Land..............................................................................................4

Language and Literature....................................................................4

Bonism..................................................................................................6

Buddhism.............................................................................................6

Sciences.................................................................................................8

Environmental Protection.................................................................9

The Origin and Evolution of Tibetan Culture...............................10

The Emergence of the Yarlung Dynasty........................................11

Songtsen Gampo and the Unification of Tibet.............................11

The First Spread of Buddhism in Tibet..........................................12

The Second Spread of Buddhism....................................................15

The Emergence of the Four Schools of Tibetan Buddhism.......17

The Nyingma Tradition......................................................................18

The Kagyu Tradition..........................................................................18

The Sakya Tradition............................................................................19

The Gelug Tradition...........................................................................19

The Monastic Education System and Its Impact on Tibet..........20

Rule by Reincarnation........................................................................22

A Culture without Boundaries..........................................................25

PART TWO

TIBETOCIDE

Cultural Genocide...............................................................................27

Destruction Documented by Scholars, Jurists and the UN.........29

Tibetan View on the Destruction: the 10th Panchen Lama .

and His Petition...................................................................................32

Why the Destruction?........................................................................49

Chinese Communist Leaders’ View of Tibetan Culture:

“Religion is Poison”............................................................................50

Eradication of Tibetan Buddhism...................................................56

Damage and Distortion in Education and .

Tibetan Language................................................................................70

The Destruction of the Nomadic Way of Life..............................83

The ‘Western Development’ Strategy..............................................92

The New Socialist Countryside and the Comfortable

Housing Campaign.............................................................................92

The Leapfrog Development Strategy..............................................93

Population Transfer and Western China ‘Development’
Programme...........................................................................................98

China’s Urbancide in Tibet ...............................................................108

Hukou Reform: An Influx of Chinese Migrants in Tibet............109

Rural Tibetans (Forced) Migration to Cities and Towns...............110

Urbanization and Social Stability .....................................................112

Land Expropriation............................................................................113

Conclusion...........................................................................................116

Recommendations..............................................................................119

NOTES................................................................................................120

BIBLIOGRAPHY..............................................................................137
Abbreviation

TIBET Tibet in this report refers to the entire Tibetan Plateau

comprising of the three traditional Tibetan provinces
of Central Tibet, Kham and Amdo. Major parts of
Kham and Amdo are incorporated into various Chinese
provinces such as Sichuan, Yunnan and Gansu by Beijing
since its occupation of Tibet. Since then Amdo has been
made into a separate province and renamed as Qinghai.
CCP Chinese Communist Party
DMC Democratic Management Committee
ICJ International Commission of Jurists
ICT International Campaign for Tibet
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
PAP People’s Armed Police
PLA People’s Liberation Army
PRC People’s Republic of China
PSB Public Security Bureau
TAR Tibet Autonomous Region
TCHRD Tibetan Centre for Human and Democracy
TIN Tibet Information Network
WRD Western Region Development
 Foreword
This report on the cultural genocide in Tibet is based on the
testimonies of individual Tibetans, the writings of Tibetan, Chinese
and foreign scholars, reports of the International Commission of
Jurists, the resolutions of the General Assembly of UN, and the
attitude of successive Chinese Communist leaders on Tibetan culture
that shaped China’s Tibet policy, which in turn contributed to the
systematic physical and institutional destruction of the foundations
of Tibetan culture.

We do not use the term cultural genocide lightly. Raphael Lemkin,

who first coined the term, genocide, in 1944 in his book, Axis Rule
in Occupied Europe, says, “By ‘genocide’ we mean the destruction
of an ethnic group ... Generally speaking, genocide does not
necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except
when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation.
It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different
actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the
life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups
themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration
of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national
feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups,
and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity,
and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups...”

Furthermore, in the initial draft of the UN Convention on Genocide

prepared by the Secretary General of the UN and ad hoc Committee
on genocide stated that “In this Convention genocide also means
any deliberate act committed with the intent to destroy the language,
religion or culture of a national or racial or religious group on grounds
of national or racial origin or religious belief of its members.” All
these apply to the case of Tibet under China.

In this report we have examined four vital areas where acts of

genocide have been and are still being committed. They are religion,

i
language, the forceful removal of Tibetan nomads and China’s
continuing population transfer onto the Tibetan Plateau. Policies
relentlessly carried out in these four areas have robbed the Tibetans
of their culture and language and have damaged their traditional way
of life. The influx of Chinese migrant workers, facilitated by the
new railway line and an administration in favour of the migrants, are
reducing the Tibetans to an increasingly disenfranchised minority in
their own land. We have also examined the Chinese authorities’ active
interference in the tulku system — the system of reincarnating lamas
who sustain the spiritual lineage — and the authorities’ disruption
of the Tibetan monastic education system that have enabled the
Tibetans to transmit the teachings of the Buddha to successive new
generation of students. All these factors have made it beyond the
ability of Tibetans in Tibet today to renew and refresh their culture.

This destruction in Tibet is borne out by prominent Tibetans,

like the late Panchen Lama who in his daring and historic 70,000
character petition to the Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in 1962
moaned the fact “religion in Tibet today has no future.” There are
many more distressed Tibetan voices, whose eyewitness testimonies
are confirmed by Chinese scholars and independent organizations in
China, who have no reason to support the Tibetans except to affirm
a gross injustice. The best example of Chinese solidarity with the
Tibetan people is Gongmeng, the Open Constitution Initiative, an
NGO based in Beijing. In 2009, Gongmeng issued a report on the
causes of the 2008 Tibet-wide peaceful protests. The report said that
the protests that spread throughout Tibet that year were triggered
by Beijing’s hardline policies. In its recommendations to the Chinese
government the report suggested that in future Beijing must base its
Tibet policies on the aspirations of the people of Tibet.

China’s genocidal policies in Tibet are tragically illustrated by the

ongoing fiery protests that engulf Tibet today. Since 2009, 149
Tibetans have set themselves on fire. All of them have called for
the return of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to Tibet and for freedom
for their homeland. Till now no attempt has been made by Beijing
to address the genuine grievances of the Tibetan people. Instead,
ii
China has increased repressive measures that have turned Tibet into
a police state. The 2017 Freedom House report says that Tibet is
one of the least free countries in the world. Beijing’s oppression of
the Tibetan people is whitewashed by white papers. The latest white
paper on Tibet was issued by the State Council, the cabinet of the
Chinese government, on 22 October 2013. Called Development and
Progress of Tibet, the white paper says, “The Tibetan people have
gained freedom, equality and dignity, and are enjoying the fruits of
modern civilization.”

If this is true, how does Beijing explain the 149 self-immolations

that say there is no freedom in Tibet or why Tibet today is burning?

We are bringing out this report before the international community

because the cultural genocide that is going on is the collective
experience of the Tibetan people. It is also because those of us
living in free societies have the moral responsibility to speak up for
the Tibetans in Tibet whose collective voice has been effectively
silenced.

We hope that this report will be a part of a larger effort by the

international community to convince the Chinese government of
the immense advantages of restoring the fundamental rights of
the Tibetan people in a manner that will meet the aspirations of
the Tibetan people. This also conforms to President Xi Jingping’s
determination to realise the China Dream.

Dr.Lobsang Sangay
Sikyong
Kashag,
Central Tibetan Administration
Dharamsala
July 2017

iii
 Executive Summary

This is a comprehensive report on the Chinese Communist Party’s

systematic destruction of Tibetan culture, traditional way of life and
Tibetan religion since its occupation of Tibet in 1949-50, which
according to Raphael Lemkin’s definition is a form of cultural
genocide, both in intent and purpose. The report is based on the
firsthand testimonials by survivors of Chinese gulags and those who
are still languishing in jails, numerous books on Tibet and its people
by foreign and Chinese scholars as well as Tibetans living in and
outside Tibet, research papers, leaked official documents from the
People’s Republic of China and reports by Human Rights Watch,
International Commission of Jurists, Tibet Information Network,
International Campaign for Tibet, Tibetan Centre for Human Rights
& Democracy and the UN resolutions on Tibet.

This report is in two parts.

Part one defines Tibetan culture. It reveals:

— the development of Tibetan civilization with its own architecture,

medical system, astrology, methods of agriculture, animal-herding,
arts and language with a monumental body of literature and rich
spiritual traditions

— the introduction of Buddhism from India in the seventh century

and how its universal values of compassion and non-violence
broadened Tibetan civilization, and the development of the
monastic education system which enabled continued renewal and
transmission of Buddhist teachings till 1959

Part two records the destruction of Tibetan culture as documented

by scholars, jurists and the UN, and details Beijing’s systematic
annihilation of traditional Tibetan culture, language and religious
traditions by pointing out:

— the intolerant views shown by the Chinese communist leaders

iv
towards Tibetan culture and religion based on a perceived threat to
their authority and legitimacy in Tibet

— the complete destruction of Tibetan Buddhism and religious

traditions leading to increased social breakdowns, lawlessness,
communal disharmony, uncontrolled greed and a high growth in sex
trade and alcoholism; and the collapse of the monastic education
system resulting in illiteracy and a total breakdown in the transmission
of Buddhist teachings from one generation to another

— the education system that is shaped by ideological viewpoint

to stifle any Tibetan character, identity and content leaving little
room for Tibetans growing up in Tibet to learn their language and
find their cultural roots, and the increased crackdown on Tibetan
intellectuals and writers because of their creative expressions

— the forceful removal of Tibetan nomads from their land and

coercing them into government-built housing colonies and fencing
off of pastures that has rendered their knowledge about Tibet’s
fragile ecosystem useless and the devastation of their lives, how the
large-scale mining and other infrastructural constructions have taken
over the land, tipping the ecological balance off to a point where the
impact will be catastrophic

— the massive exodus of Chinese population into Tibet since the

xiafang (downward transfer to the countryside) campaign and how
Western China ‘Development’ Programme expedited the population
transfer, the impact of this huge Chinese migrants have on the
Tibetan traditional values and how it undermines Tibetan culture
and marginalise the Tibetans.

v
 Introduction

China committing cultural genocide in Tibet is an accusation easy

to make and difficult to explain. The difficulty in explaining cultural
genocide in Tibet stems not from the lack of evidence. In fact, there
is a growing body of cultural genocide literature coming out of
Tibet. The difficulty arises from the way China portrays itself to the
world and how it behaves at home. China describes itself as a multi-
national state but behaves as an empire, especially to the minorities.
China scholars have commented on China as an empire pretending
to be a nation state. The contradiction between its self-portrayal and
its real imperial impulses is at the heart of China’s destruction of
Tibet’s Buddhist civilization.

No one can fault China on the rights granted to its national minorities
on paper. Article 2 of the constitution of the People’s Republic of
China declares, “All power in the People’s Republic of China belongs
to the people.”

On regional autonomy, article 4 says, “Regional autonomy is

practiced in areas where people of minority nationalities live in
compact communities; in these areas organs of self-government are
established for the exercise of the right of autonomy.”

Article 119 has this to say, “The organs of self-government of the

national autonomous areas independently administer educational,
scientific, cultural, public health and physical culture affairs in their
respective areas, sort out and protect the cultural legacy of the
nationalities and work for the development and prosperity of their
cultures.”

On the right to use one’s language, spoken and written, article 121
says, “In performing their functions, the organs of self-government
of the national autonomous areas, in accordance with the autonomy
regulations of the respective areas, employ the spoken and written
language or languages in common use in the locality.”

vi
All these rights granted to the minorities on paper will do any liberal
democracy proud. The Tibetans have no quarrel with the constitution
of the People’s Republic of China. The Tibetan argument is that
what is enshrined in the constitution should be fully implemented
on the ground.

The bigger Tibetan argument is based on the Tibetan perception of

the Chinese Communist Party’s visceral attitude to Tibetan culture.
The party leaders’ gut feeling towards Tibetan culture is expressed
in close-door meetings. The overall attitude of the party leaders
to Tibet’s distinct culture and identity is that the very existence
of Tibetan culture is a basis for Tibet spinning out of control. At
close-door meetings, some Tibet party secretaries are known to
have expressed the opinion that the autonomous region should be
incorporated into Chinese provinces like Sichuan and the very name
of Tibet should be wiped off the face of the earth. Zhang Qingli,
the Tibet party secretary from 2006 to 2011 said, “The Communist
Party is like parents to the Tibetan people and are always considerate
about what the children need. The Party is the real Buddha for the
Tibetans.” In 2011, Zhang Qingli described the Dalai Lama as “a
wolf in monk’s robes, a devil with a human face and but the heart
of a beast.”

Such virulent depiction of the Tibetan leader shapes the Party’s

overall attitude to Tibet’s Buddhist culture and this innate hostility is
demonstrated in the ongoing bout of destruction at Larung Gar, a
sprawling centre of learning in eastern Tibet. Thousands of monks
and nuns have been expelled from the academy and their homes
destroyed. Such assault on the physical manifestation of their faith
is viewed by the Tibetan people as an assault on the core values of
their spiritual heritage. The Party’s true intentions in Tibet are also
revealed in the forced re-location of millions of nomads, in the rapid
urbanisation in Tibet, the transformation of many Tibetan towns
into so many Chinatowns and the encouragement of mass tourism
from the mainland in the hope that many of these Chinese tourists
will settle in Tibet.

vii
Scholarly Debate on Ethnic Policies

China’s policy to its minorities came under scholarly discussion in

the wake of the peaceful protests that erupted throughout Tibet in
2008 and the violence that broke out in Urumqi in Xinjiang in 2009.
In the aftermath of these events, an increasing number of Chinese
academics consider China’s current minority policy too lenient
and forms the basis for the dismemberment of the country along
ethnic lines like the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Academics
like Ma Rong of Peking University and Hu Angang of Tsinghua
University recommended a “second generation” of ethnic policies
that would encourage China’s minorities to integrate more fully with
the Han Chinese majority through inter-marriage, social interaction
and the use of the Chinese language. These scholars called for the
removal of ethnic identity for each of the minorities and their fusion
with the majority Han Chinese population.

Some scholars have argued that “the policy of regional ethnic

autonomy is a disguised form of ethnic segregation.” Li Datong, a
liberal Chinese intellectual, said “the root cause of all ethnic problems
today is the way we emphasize and strengthen ethnic differences.”

In 2012, Zhu Weiqun, then the executive director of the United

Front Work Department, joined the call for the “second generation”
ethnic policies and recommended the removal of ethnic status from
identification cards, a freeze on any new ethnic autonomous units,
ethnically mixed schooling and strengthening of Chinese language
education.

Some ultra-nationalist Chinese have recommended that the Tibet

Autonomous Region is too large and should be broken into smaller
autonomous units. Some of these smaller units should be merged
into neighbouring provinces.

This open, public debate on China’s ethnic policies is unprecedented.

In all previous years since the founding of the People’s Republic
of China discussion on ethnic policies is the preserve of the party-
state. Allowing this explosion of debate on China’s ethnic policies
viii
on online platforms was perhaps to gauge public opinion on this
burning issue.

The party-state’s response to the debate for the moment is that the
eruption of protests and violence in China’s ethnic regions is not a
sign of the failure of ethnic policies but interference from outside.
At least publicly the party-state insists that its ethnic policies are
working and are successful.

China’s Real Plans for Tibet

Urbanization

However, behind the scenes, one suspects that the party-state has
big plans for Tibet. One plan is the urbanization of Tibet. According
to Tibetan researchers in exile, China has so far managed to urbanize
13 Tibetan regions. They are Lhasa, Shigatse, Nyingtri, Lhoka and
Tsethang in central Tibet. In Kham, the urbanized regions are
Chamdo, Yushu, Dartsedo and Dechen. In Amdo the urbanized
regions are Xining, Tsoshar, Gormo, Terlenkha and Tso. According
to Tenzin Dheten, formerly of the Tibet Policy Institute and now
head of the China Desk of the Department of Information and
International Relations of the Central Tibetan Administration, China
has three main objectives for the urbanization of Tibet. They are
“to encourage mass population transfer of Han Chinese into these
regions, to assimilate Tibetans and to extract rich natural resources
in these regions of Tibet.”

In this way, China is planning in Tibet what it has done so

successfully in Manchuria, Inner Mongolia and what it is currently
doing in Xinjiang - flooding these regions with Han Chinese settlers
and making them the dominant ethnic population. One report
says, “China is systematically underreporting the number of ethnic
Chinese migrant workers arriving in Lhasa every year who could be
outnumbering and overwhelming the number of Tibetans living in
the capital. The expanding railway line in Tibet, the network of all-
weather highways and improved and expanding air traffic is making
this possible. The overall objective of this strategy is to bind Tibet
ix
more closely to the Chinese mainland.

Mass Domestic Tourism in Tibet

To complement this strategy, China is encouraging mass tourism in

Tibet. Chinese government says this year alone 23 million Chinese
tourists will visit Tibet. This means 63,000 Chinese tourists arrive in
the Tibet Autonomous Region every day. Chinese authorities say the
numbers will rise to 35 million visitors by 2020.

Tourism is considered a pillar industry of Tibet. Tourism makes up

one-fifth of the total economy of the Tibet Autonomous Region. So
far, it has created 320,000 jobs.

Some reports dispute the figure of 23 million Chinese tourists visiting

Tibet this year alone. They estimate that there are not enough trains,
planes, buses to transport 23 million Chinese visitors to Tibet every
year. These reports say that there are also not enough hotels and
beds to accommodate and host 23 million visitors.

Whatever the truth, the number of Chinese tourists visiting Tibet is

massive. Media reports say that at the Lhasa train station six trains
from China arrive every day. In the peak season each train transports
800 to 1,000 passengers. In the low season one train carries 300
to 500 passengers. Likewise, there are between 53 to 58 passenger
flights arriving in Lhasa from China every day.

Tibetans in Tibet say that China’s massive and growing domestic

tourism in Tibet is helping Beijing bind Tibet more closely to China,
trivializing Tibetan culture, marginalizing the Tibetan people and
polluting Tibet’s pristine environment. China’s active encouragement
of domestic tourism in Tibet is in part sparked by the hope that many
Chinese tourists will settle in Tibet, far from the urban congestion
and pollution of the mainland.

China’s Plan to Appoint the Next Dalai Lama

However, China’s biggest plan for Tibet is one of wait and see. China
is waiting for the passing away of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and

x
to appoint the next Dalai Lama. It is confident that time is on its
side and it has the resources to impose the next Dalai Lama on the
Tibetan people and the world.

In thinking this China is making its biggest mistake. Already more

than 149 Tibetans have set themselves on fire because of China’s
refusal to allow His Holiness the Dalai Lama to visit Tibet. Till now
the Tibetan people kept their struggle non-violent in deference to
the wishes of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. In brushing aside the
present Dalai Lama and preparing to appoint the next one all in
the hope that Beijing can handle the Tibetan people, the Chinese
authorities are travelling on the road to the destabilization of Tibet.

Amidst all this doom and gloom, there is some hope that President
Xi Jinping might have one or two surprises up his sleeve.

More than the Party’s assault on monasteries and dwelling places of

monks and nuns, what is hurting and humiliating the Tibetan people
the most is the Party assault on Tibet’s spiritual space and its attempt
to dominate the Buddhist lineage tree. Like manufacturing facts on
the ground in the South China Sea, the Party is manufacturing facts
in Tibet’s spiritual space. The Party is arrogating to itself the right to
recognise and appoint Tibet’s spiritual masters.

The Party’s assault on Tibetan Buddhism is on two fronts. One

assault is on Tibetan Buddhism’s lineage tree. The unbroken lineage
tree of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism traces its sanctity to
the Buddha himself and down the centuries from masters to students
to the present Tibetan Buddhist lamas. In this process, successive
masters not only guide his students in their spiritual development
by explaining the teachings of the Buddha and the commentaries
made on these teachings by later masters but also empower their
students to pass on these teachings to others. The students’ ability to
trace what they learn right to the top of the lineage tree, the Buddha
himself, gives what they learn sanctity and spiritual potency.

By maintaining a data base of Party-approved Tibetan reincarnating

lamas and arrogating to itself the right to appoint Buddhist masters,
xi
the Party is uprooting the Buddhist lineage tree.

The Party’s second assault is on the concept of reincarnation. The

Buddhist concept of reincarnation started in India. But out of all
the countries to which Buddhism spread, Tibet was the only country
which carried out the concept of reincarnating lamas. And Tibetan
Buddhists believe enlightened beings can choose the place and time
of his or her rebirth through their own individual spiritual efforts
through many lifetimes. The ability to reincarnate and where and
when is an individual’s private choice, beyond the decision of the
Party.

At the top of the Tibetan pantheon of enlightened beings sits

Avalokiteshevara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion who Tibetans
believe is the protector of Tibet and in his human form is manifested
in the Dalai Lamas of Tibet. The Party’s plea to the 14th Dalai Lama,
couched in the language of a stern order, to reincarnate may mean the
Chinese Communist Party believes in the concept of reincarnation
which violates Party ideology. Or this blatant grab at Tibet’s spiritual
space is an implicit admission by the Party that it cannot rule Tibet
without the Dalai Lamas. The only way forward is for the Party to
take the hand extended by the Dalai Lama and resolve not only the
issue of Tibet but all the contradictions the Party has wrapped itself
in.

xii
 PART ONE

A CULTURE OF COMPASSION

The Tibetans developed a unique civilization with its own

architecture and bridge-building, astrology and calendar, medical
system, methods of agriculture and animal-herding, sciences and
arts, a monumental body of literature, both oral and written, and
rich spiritual traditions. This civilization was immensely enriched
when Tibetans from the 7th to the 12th century consciously and
comprehensively transmitted the whole body of the wisdom of
ancient India to Tibet. The incorporation of Buddhism with its
universal values of compassion and non-violence into Tibetan
culture broadened the appeal of Tibetan civilization, bringing into
its orbit non-Tibetans scattered across vast distances. This event
transformed how Tibet’s social order was organized, the nature of
its state power and how the country conducted its diplomacy.

A civilization is invariably a product of conquest of others. On

the other hand, Tibetan civilization that came into being, especially
after the Tibetan people’s embrace of Buddhism, is one based
on the conquest of the self. On this point, no other people have
pursued the idea of inner conquest and transformation with the
same intensity as the Tibetans did. It can be arguably stated that
Tibet was one of the few civilizations that put the resources of the
state in the service of the clergy to pursue and practice the idea of
inner transformation. After having taken this idea of self-conquest
from India, the Tibetans undertook a stupendous translation effort
and instituted monasteries all over Tibet devoted to the study and
practice of inner transformation.

The enduring contribution of this civilization to humanity is its

creation of the institutions needed to study, understand and use
the tools of inner or spiritual technology developed by the Buddha
to overcome human suffering and its ability to make available the
material means and establish the spiritual environment to transform
individuals into happier and more productive human beings. These
1
institutions were established so that every single practitioner had all
the resources available that were essential to develop and expand
compassion for the benefit of all sentient beings. These institutions
helped the practitioners to come to a better understanding of the
nature of impermanence, life and death.

The spiritual techniques taught in the monasteries and the Tibetans’

absolute devotion to the cultivation and practice of compassion
became central to their culture and shaped their subsequent historical
development. This culture of compassion has been helped in its
development by the Tibetans’ innate sense of the spiritual sanctity of
their land and their reverence for the natural environment. This has
contributed to making Tibetan civilization environmentally friendly
and economically sustainable on the world’s highest and largest and
yet ecologically fragile plateau.

It took the Tibetans about five centuries to translate, study and

disseminate the teachings of the Buddha within Tibet. In their book,
A Cultural History of Tibet, David Snellgrove and Hugh Richardson
consider this transmission “one of the greatest deliberate
importations of a foreign culture in which any country has ever
engaged.” This mighty enterprise, stretching from the 7th to 12th
century, was undertaken by countless Tibetan scholars, equipped
with unbelievable commitment and super-human energy, under the
guidance and scholarly supervision of some of the greatest Indian
masters of the day.

After having taken firm roots in Tibet, this culture of compassion,

with its exuberant and liberating message that every human being
is a potential Buddha, spread to all directions in and outside Tibet.
Scholars and students, risking life and limb, traversed enormous
distances to study Buddhism in the monasteries of Tibet. They came
from regions that today comprise of Mongolia, Buryatia and Tuva,
Kalmykia stretched along the Caspian Sea in Russia, the Buddhist
Himalayas, like Ladakh, Lahaul and Spiti, Sikkim and Arunachal
Pradesh in India, Mustang, Dolpo and Solo Kumbu in Nepal, and
Bhutan. Though the spatial spread of Tibetan civilization in itself is

2
amazing, what is more remarkable is the devotion of non-Tibetans
to the font of their cultural wellspring in Tibet. In this way, Tibet
became the centre of learning for the countries and regions in which
Tibetan Buddhist civilization took root and blossomed.

In her book, So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the

Himalayas, Barbara Crossette, a veteran reporter of the New York
Times, describes ancient Tibet in these words.

“For a few hundred years, in the seventh and eight centuries, a Tibetan
empire strong enough to box in the Tang dynasty of China on the
western flank flourished in the landlocked heart of Asia. Tibetan
armies advanced and retreated from bases on the Tibetan plateau;
Himalayan monks and soldiers traded influences with Buddhists
of other schools, reinforcing a cosmopolitan culture...From the
vantage point of our era, Tibet may appear to be a sad civilization
long stripped of the glories it enjoyed and the power it wielded more
than a thousand years ago...We who encounter Tibet at the end of
the twentieth century thus marvel at even what little we can discover
of its glorious medieval history.”

The development of Tibetan culture was a long-drawn process.

The Western stereotype of Tibet as being “forbidden,” “isolated”
and a Shangri-la, with its implication of being remote and quite out
of this world, is false. Tibet in the past was an active, sometimes a
dominant, player in the cross-cultural pollination of Asia. Ancient
Tibet energetically drew rich and diverse cultural influences as far
afield as Iran, possibly Greece and Rome, Central Asia, India, China
and Burma through present-day Yunnan province. Because of the
open-minded outlook of the ancient Tibetans, Tibet became a
culture with the ability to continually refresh and make itself relevant
to any given period and condition in its long history.

In this brief introduction, it is not possible to identify all the

elements that make the edifice called Tibetan civilization. However,
the following are some of the main building-blocks that constitute
the architecture of Tibet’s civilization and culture.

3
The Land
Tibet is the heart of Asia. Like the human heart, it is surrounded by
ribs, the mountains. Like the human heart it pumps blood, the major
river systems that sustain life in Asia. Tibet is the highest plateau in
the world. Because of its scarce and rarefied air, Tibet sucks in air
from the surrounding regions, thus in effect becoming the primary
cause for the monsoon of South Asia. Tibet is also the world’s
largest and highest plateau.

Today Chinese scientists call Tibet the ‘Water Tower of Asia”

because six of Asia’s major river systems have their source in the
Tibetan highlands to bring life-giving water to the whole of South
Asia, China and a large part of South-east Asia. The rivers from
Tibet flow through diverse countries such as Pakistan, India, Nepal,
Bhutan, Bangladesh, China, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and
Cambodia and contribute to the livelihood of millions of people in
Asia.

Even more recently Chinese scientists refer to Tibet as the “Third

Pole”, since Tibet has the largest concentration of glaciers, outside
the two Poles, which feed these rivers.

Language and Literature

Linguists assign the Tibetan language to the Tibeto-Burman group of
languages and further trace its origins to the Sino-Tibetan language
group, which is recognized as an important language group of the
world. Whatever the case, variations of the Tibetan language are
spoken in many pockets of the Himalayan region from Ladakh in
the west, Arunachal Pradesh in the east and along the Sino-Tibetan
borderlands inhabited previously by Ch’iang, Moso or Naxi and the
ancient Tanguts or the Xi Xia people.

Tibetan language as a tool of communication over this huge landmass

was strengthened when in the 7th century Thomi Sambhota invented
the written script based on the Indian Gupta and Brahmi alphabets.
According to A History of Traditional Fields of Learning: A Concise

4
History of Dissemination of Traditional Fields of Learning written by the
late Tibetan scholar Muge Samten and translated into English by
Sangye Tendar Naga, King Songtsen Gampo “sent sixteen people,
including Thonmi Sambhota and Taglo Dhetrong, to India to study
various religions, languages and literature... When he returned
to Tibet ... he devised the first Tibetan script and established the
tradition of written Tibetan...it became the root of all knowledge.”

The common written script of the Tibetan language enabled the

Tibetan people to store the whole body of the wisdom of Buddhist
India. The script also enabled the Tibetans to store and leave for
posterity non-Buddhist knowledge and sciences emanating from
other cultural realms. Above all, the script reinforced the basic
cultural unity of the Tibetan people and cemented the common
identity of the inhabitants of the Land of Snow.

R.A. Stein, the author of Tibetan Civilization, describes the

efforts made by the Tibetan people to put the script into use as
“prodigious”. He says, “Tibetan literature is absolutely vast, and we
are far from having a complete inventory of it.” He divides Tibetan
literature into written and oral, indigenous and non-indigenous. By
“non-indigenous” Stein is obviously referring to the body of work
translated into Tibetan from the Buddhist canons of India. Stein
adds that subjects dealt in the body of work of Tibetan literature are
nearly all religious and philosophical, except for a few treatises on
the traditional sciences, grammar, astrology and medicine.

Stein says that Tibet’s prolific scholars “very soon produced a

large number of original treatises on philosophy...historical works,
textbooks of grammar and prosody, dictionaries-Sanskrit-Tibetan,
or vocabularies of technical terms and old words-treatises on
chronological computation, astrology, divination and medicine,
bibliographies, geographical descriptions and pilgrims’ guides,
accounts of travel—real or mystical—treatises on the art of
government and on various techniques (agriculture, making of
statues, china, tea, etc.)

5
Then there is the literature produced within the Bonpo tradition, not
forgetting the oral literary tradition of folk stories like the epic of the
Gesar of Ling, reportedly the longest epic in the world, comparable
in its influence to the Iliad of Greece and the Mahabharata and
Ramayana of India, and the literary contributions of the Tibetan
Muslims, especially that of Kache Phalu.

Bonism
The two religions that had a profound influence on the Tibetan
people are Bonism and Buddhism. Some scholars say Bon was
homegrown in Tibet in Zhang Zhung in the neighbourhood of
Mount Kailash. Others say it came from farther afield, from Tazig,
sometimes identified as Persia, or which may be present Tajikistan.
Whatever the case, Bon was the dominant spiritual and cultural force
among Tibetans before the advent of Buddhism in Tibet.

According to Bon scholars, Bon originated in the land of Olmo

Lungring, a part of a larger country called Tazig. The founder of the
Bon tradition was Shenrab Miwo. The first Bon sacred texts were
brought to Zhang Zhung by the six disciples of Mucho Demdrug,
the successor of Shenrab Miwo. They were first translated into
Zhang Zhung language and later into Tibetan. The works included
in the Bon canon were written in Tibetan but a number of them,
especially the older ones, retain the titles and at times passages in
Zhang Zhung language.

Buddhism
The other spiritual and cultural force that fundamentally shaped
the Tibetan people was Buddhism, which was introduced to Tibet
during the reign of Songtsen Gampo in the 7th century. Buddhism
is credited with civilizing the “ignorant” Tibetans and tempering
their warlike character with the Buddhist contemplative way of life.
Buddhism was introduced to Tibet in two stages, first from the 7th
to the 9th century. This period of introduction is called the early
transmission of Buddhism. The later transmission took place from
the 11th century with the appearance in Tibet of Atisha, and other
6
Buddhist masters of India.

It took successive Tibetan Buddhist scholars from the 7th to the 12th
century to translate and absorb the whole body of Buddhist canon.
The challenge for the new generation of scholars was what to do
with this vast body of translated work. Although other scholars were
involved in this Herculean task, the Tibetan primarily associated in
this endeavour of cataloguing, systematizing and finally compiling
the Tibetan Buddhist canon of Kagyur (the teachings of the Buddha)
and the Tengyur (commentaries on the teachings) was Buton (1290-
1364). Snellgrove and Richardson consider this achievement as the
‘apotheosis’ of Tibetan scholarship and an enduring legacy of the
collective and tireless efforts of Tibetan scholars down the ages.

This absorption of Buddhism into the spiritual and cultural life of

Tibet enabled the Tibetan people to consistently produce a large
number of Buddhist masters and scholars whose teachings and
writings have enriched Tibetan civilization. This enabled the Tibetans
to establish monasteries that became centres of learning, and which
dominated the spiritual and intellectual life of Tibet and beyond.

Out of the Tibetans’ complete devotion to Buddhism and their

single-minded pursuit of the Buddhist teachings emerged two
important features that were to shape the character of Tibetan
civilization. One was the emergence of the monasteries and the
monastic education system. These monasteries not only dominated
Tibetan intellectual and spiritual life but they were soon to become a
political force to be reckoned with, either collectively or individually.
The monastic system served as magnets for the best minds of Tibet,
who consistently produced a vast amount of scholarly and spiritual
work that built upon the Buddhist spiritual heritage.

The other was putting into practice the Buddhist concept of

reincarnation, when the Karma Kagyu School started the tradition
of reincarnating lamas. Soon the other schools of Tibetan Buddhism
adopted this practice and reincarnated lamas proliferated in Tibet
and spread beyond. This had two important effects. Installing a

7
reincarnated lama in a monastery gave it enormous prestige, not the
least being the increased flow of offerings from the devotees. The
other was the practice of reincarnating lamas became a unique system
of leadership training for lamas at a very young age. Under strict
monastic discipline and the watchful eye of committed tutors, the
young reincarnated lamas blossomed into great masters. The practice
of discovering reincarnated lamas was a form of “electing” spiritual
leaders with the added advantage that this practice was sanctified
by the full weight of Tibetan Buddhism and its legitimising force.
This system is essential for the spiritual practitioners to transmit the
accumulated wisdom of the lamas to the new reincarnations who in
turn would teach these to their followers.

Sciences
Buddhism’s taking firm roots in Tibet contributed to the development
of other aspects of Tibetan culture, particularly the sciences and
arts. The Buddhist treatises on the five major and five minor sciences
informed and served as an impetus for those Tibetans specializing
in the fields of medicine, astrology, architecture, crafts, bridge-
building, performing arts, woodblock printing and other fields of
human endeavour and knowledge.

Buddhism had an important impact on the development and

evolution of the Tibetan medical system. Tibetan physicians say
that there was a native Tibetan medical system before the advent of
Buddhism. Dr Tsering Thakchoe Drungtso says, “Bon, with its own
medical tradition, was the indigenous religion of Tibet ... Master
Shenrab Miwo, the founder of Bon religion ... revealed the teachings
of the medical texts ... and other medical treatises to his son and
eight sages on their request.”

The first international conference on medicine in Tibet was held

during the reign of King Trisong Detsen (730-785 AD). This
was attended by physicians from India, China, Persia, Nepal and
Central Asia. The Elder Yuthog Yonten Gonpo (708-833 AD) was a
prominent presence at the conference. He synthesized the Tibetan,

8
Indian, Chinese and other medical systems and came up with a
treatise called Gyud-zhi (The Four Tantras), though the authorship of
this treatise is disputed. Some scholars attribute the authorship of
this treatise to the Buddha himself.

Dr Drungtso says that Lochen Rinchen Sangpo (958-1055 AD)

translated many Indian medical texts into Tibetan. Other figures
who made valuable contributions to the development of the Tibetan
medical practice and system were the Great Fifth Dalai Lama, who
established three medical schools in Tibet and Desi Sangye Gyatso
who wrote a great deal of medical treatises that are of value because
of their accuracy and depth. In short, along with their ability of
keeping intact the entirety of the teachings of the Buddha, the
Tibetan medical tradition is an important contribution of the
Tibetan people to the well-being of humanity.

Environmental Protection
One feature of Tibetan culture is the innate respect and reverence
for the natural environment that the Tibetans had been handed
down from ancient times. Bon considered lakes, rivers and other
sources of water and mountain passes sacred. This ancient respect
for nature was reinforced when Buddhism became the main faith of
the Tibetan people. Buddhism believes in the interdependence of
all things.

This respect for the natural habitat and all the creatures sustained
by it was reflected in Tibetan government policy. When the fifth
Dalai Lama assumed political power in 1642, he issued an edict for
the protection of animals and the environment. An environmental
decree issued by the reigning regent Tagdra in 1940 reads: “From
this Iron-Dragon year, the Tibetan government has decreed that in
each and every village and town in Tibet on every 8th, 15th and 30th
day of each month, the 4th day of the 6th month, the 22nd day of
the 9th month and the 25th day of the 10th month, no domestic
animals should be killed for the purpose of selling their meat for
profit or food.”

9
This shows that Tibet was one of the first countries in the world that enacted environmental
protection laws.

The Origin and Evolution of Tibetan Culture

In his book, The Necklace of gZi: A Cultural History of Tibet, Namkai
Norbu, who was a professor at the University of Naples and taught
Tibetan language and cultural history, says that Tibet as an organized
culture and society can be traced back to 3000 years. Other scholars
say Tibet’s traditional mode of farming and pastoralism is at least
two thousand years old and identify the origin of the Tibetan people
“among the nomadic, non-Chinese Qiang tribes, who herded sheep
and cattle in eastern Central Asia up to the furthest north-west
borders of China many centuries before the Christian era.”

In their work, A Cultural History of Tibet, David Snellgrove and Hugh

Richardson say, “The legacy of this origin is seen in the extensive
nature of Tibetan farming with its ever-present element of animal
husbandry...Tibetan-speaking peoples seem to have made their way
ever further westwards across the southern part of the Tibetan
uplands round about the beginning of the Christian era. This is
confirmed to some extent by literary sources which enable us to trace
the movement of certain important clans from north-eastern Tibet
to the centre of the country. The early advance of Tibetan-speaking
people westwards and southwards through the Himalayas and into
what is now northern and central Nepal is also confirmed by the
persistence in these areas of ancient dialects of Tibetan origin.”

Tibetan tradition identifies Nyatri Tsenpo (127 BC) as Tibet’s first

king. Before this, as mentioned in the previous section, there existed
an older tradition of Bon. Namkhai Norbu says in Drung, Deu and
Bon: Narrations, Symbolic Languages and the Bon Tradition in Ancient Tibet
that the kingdom of Zhang Zhung, which was the home of Bon,
had its capital at one time in Khyunglung in the vicinity of Gangkar
Tise or Mount Kailash. Namkhai Norbu writes, “The centre of the
kingdom of Zhang Zhung lay in what is now the region of Guge in
western Tibet but its dominion spread over practically all the territory
encompassed in central and eastern Tibet.” Bon’s cultural ideas and
10
beliefs shaped the mind of peoples of Sumpa, Asha, Minyak and the
Yarlung valley from which emerged the kings and emperors who laid
the foundation of the Tibetan empire.

The Emergence of the Yarlung Dynasty

The one event which had the greatest impact on the subsequent
cultural development of Tibet was the emergence of the kings of
Yarlung who over the centuries cemented the peoples of the plateau
under one single central authority and overran regions beyond Tibet.
The ability of the kings of Yarlung, headquartered in Tsethang, the
cradle of Tibetan civilization, to bring the whole plateau under
one administration provided not only the material base for Tibet’s
cultural development but also the governance that strengthened the
cohesion of the Tibetan people.

According to Buddhist historians, on this scene, emerged Nyatri

Tsenpo in around 127 BC. From this period to the 7th century AD,
until the emergence of Songtsen Gampo, who consolidated the realm
of his forefathers and then took Tibet on an expansionist mission,
Yarlung was ruled by a succession of thirty-one kings. During the
reign of these kings, Bon remained the dominant belief system,
although tentative contacts with Buddhism were made, especially
during the reign of Lhatho Thori Nyentsen, the 28th king, who in
around 233 AD received two Buddhist sutras which, though treated
with great reverence, remained a mystery because Tibetans at the
time had not mastered other peoples’ languages, including Sanskrit,
the language in which the two sutras were presumably written. This
piece of scriptural wisdom from Buddhist India remained as the
Nyenpo Sangwa, A Fragile Secret.

Songtsen Gampo and the Unification of Tibet

One of the great figures in Tibetan history, Songtsen Gampo, was
born in 617. His reign was characterized by an outburst of military
adventures within and beyond Tibet. In 634, the Tibetans subdued
the Tuyu-hun (Turco-Mongols) camped around Tso Nyonpo or
Kokonor Lake. In his study of Tibetan history, Tibet: A Political
11
History, Tsepon W.D. Shakabpa writes “Meanwhile, the Tibetans had
conquered parts of upper Burma and, in 640 occupied Nepal... In
643, Likme, King of Shangshung, became a vassal of the Tibetan
ruler.”

Commenting on Songtsen Gampo’s reign, Snellgrove and Richardson

write, “In a surprisingly short time, using their new subjects as
allies, the Tibetans were ranging from the plains of India and the
mountains of Nepal to the frontiers of China; they may even have
already established contact through their new Shang-shung subject-
allies with Khotan and the great international trade route that passed
through it on the south side of the Takla-makan. To Tang China
Srong-brtsan-sgam-po became a presence on their borders, to be viewed
with apprehension and seriously reckoned with. His friendship was
won by the grant of a Chinese princess as bride (640 AD) and his
reign, which lasted till his natural death in 650 AD, was one of
such exuberant military prowess and such personal prestige that
it established the kingship on a firm basis and prepared it for two
centuries of stable succession and almost imperial greatness.”

The First Spread of Buddhism in Tibet

Songtsen Gampo’s empire-building military operations indicate a
desire to strengthen the cohesion of the Tibetan-speaking people
and hunger for territory. These operations also indicate a far deeper
hunger, hunger for new ideas. The Tibetans’ contacts with different
peoples and cultures whetted their appetite for new ideas and
institutions that would underpin their new domain.

India welcomed the Tibetans who showed up at the feet of many

Buddhist masters and extended enormous co-operation to Tibetan
scholars and students in their study and mastery of the languages
and wisdom held in them. After Thonmi Sambhota returned to
Tibet to invent the Tibetan script, the Tibetans began the translation
effort that enabled them to introduce the whole body of Buddhist
wisdom to Tibet. The new script also enabled Songtsen Gampo to
codify and promulgate laws. Songtsen Gampo was encouraged in his

12
embrace of Buddhism by his Nepalese and Chinese queens, both
devout Buddhists, who had each brought with them a statue of the
Buddha, reportedly blessed by the Buddha himself, and constructed
the temples of Jokhang and Ramoche to house these statues. Indian,
Nepalese and Chinese Buddhist masters were invited to Tibet to
assist in the translation effort and many Buddhist temples sprung up.

Despite some court resistance here and there in the form of

individual ministers to the royal fascination with Buddhism, all the
successors of Songtsen Gampo carried out his work of the study
of Buddhism and translation of Buddhist texts. The next king who
made contribution to the dissemination of Buddhism in Tibet was
Tridey Tsugten or Mey Agzom, who reigned from 704 to 754 AD.
According to Muge Samten, “During his reign, many ordained
monks came from Khotan (Liyul), and many monk scholars arrived
from China. They translated texts on different aspects of the
dharma, healing treatises and other books...To house these texts the
king constructed five temples.”

The Tibetan attempt to master Buddhism was given a fresh burst

of energy because after Songtsen Gampo’s death, his successors
wrested the oasis towns of Khotan, Kucha, Karashar and Kashgar
in Turkestan from Chinese control. All these towns were centres of
Buddhist learning and it was along this route that Buddhism made
its way to China before it came to Tibet. Scholars and monks from
these towns assisted Tibetan scholars in the study and translation of
Buddhist scriptural wisdom.

Trisong Detsen, 755 to 798 AD, under the guidance of Shantarakshita,

the abbot of Nalanda, and Padmasambhava, constructed the great
monastic university of Samye dedicated to the study of Buddhism
and training of monks. According to Shakabpa, Tibetan troops
were dispatched to India to recover a relic of the Buddha from
Bodh Gaya, which was installed in the monastery to sanctify it.
Muge Samten says that at this monastery, “several youths studied
treatises on Sanskrit grammar as well as the languages of China,
Nepal, Zahor, Kashmir and Khotan. They were also trained in many

13
other subjects and the majority of them became great scholars. Later
many of them attained the skills of translators.” The monastery was
divided into different departments devoted to the study of different
disciplines.

Snellgrove and Richardson write, “Thanks to this new impetus,

Buddhism, hitherto suspect as a dangerous foreign influence, began
to become a truly Tibetan religion, and there followed a surge of
activity in the translation of Indian and Chinese Buddhists texts into
Tibetan.”

The construction of the great monastery was followed by the

holding of the great debate between Kamalashila, a student of
Shantarakshita, and the Chinese Buddhist Mahayana on the correct
path to attain enlightenment. Kamalashila advocated that the only
way to attain Buddhahood was the gradual and long process of
acquisition of knowledge and accumulation of merit. The Chinese
case of instantaneous enlightenment, according to Snellgrove and
Richardson, “concentrated upon the absolute nature of buddhahood,
which could be realized by any practitioner who established himself
in the state of complete repose. According to this, conventional
morality and intellectual endeavour are irrelevant, and in some cases
even directly harmful, if they obstruct the pure contemplation of
the emptiness of all concepts whatsoever.”

Trisong Detsen declared that Kamalashila had won the debate and
decreed that the doctrine supported and articulated by the Indians
must be studied and followed in Tibet. His edict declared Buddhism
the state religion. Since then Tibetans followed Indian monasticism
as developed and practised in Nalanda, the great Buddhist monastic
university in northern India.

Tri Ralpachen, the last of the three great kings, who according to
scholars, lived or ruled from 815 to 838 or from 817 to 836. He
signed a peace treaty with China in 821-822. He invited many
scholars from India and there was a surge of translation works. The
Indian masters and the Tibetan translators set the standard on the

14
rules and terms in translation, which facilitated the translation effort
and made the translated texts clear and comprehensible to students.
A joint effort by Indian scholars and Tibetan translators produced
the first Sanskrit-Tibetan dictionary.

Tri Ralpachen’s devotion to Buddhism and his strong support and the
favours he granted the Buddhist clergy aroused strong opposition,
culminating in his assassination. His elder brother, Langdarma, took
the throne. He was said to have suppressed Buddhism with an iron-
fist. Buddhist masters and scholars fled east and north-east to Kham
and Amdo where the teachings of the Buddha were nurtured and
kept strong. Later, Langdarma fell a victim to an assassin’s arrow.
There followed a succession dispute between competing heirs. This
internal chaos coupled with external military attacks brought the
collapse of central authority and with it the end of the Tibetans’
empire-building enterprise. The collapse of central authority in
Tibet constituted a huge setback for the propagation of Buddhism
in Tibet but this did not dampen the Tibetan people’s ardour for
the teachings of the Buddha. In fact, in a way, as we will see later,
the collapse of central authority in Tibet inadvertently allowed the
Tibetans to use the same energy and talent they displayed in creating
an empire in building a civilization.

The Second Spread of Buddhism

Although Buddhism fell into dilapidation in central Tibet, it was
the established religion in Kham and Amdo in the east and northeast
and in western Tibet. That was the reason why, three monks, when
they learned of the suppression of Buddhism in central Tibet fled
to Amdo. These three monks were Tsang Rabsel, Yo Gejung and
Mar Shakyamuni. The nomads of Amdo supplied them with all
their needs in return for spiritual instructions. The propagation of
Buddhism in eastern Tibet was also strengthened by the efforts of
the Indian teacher Smriti who “initiated the translation of new sets
of tantric texts,” according to Snellgrove and Richardson. In this
way, eastern Tibet played an important role in the renaissance of
Buddhism in Tibet.

15
Meanwhile, western Tibet was equally active in dispatching students
to India to receive teachings and inviting Indian scholars to the
country. The efforts made by Tibetans in eastern and western Tibet
to propagate Buddhism have been described, according to Shakabpa,
as “a spark rekindled in the east spread by the wind blowing from
the west.”

The towering figures in western Tibet’s attempt to revive Buddhism

were Lhalama Yeshi O and the great and prodigious translator
Rinchen Sangpo (958-1055). Lhalama Yeshe O, the king of western
Tibet, dispatched twenty-one students to Kashmir to learn Sanskrit
and study the Buddhist doctrine. Only two survived the rigours of
the journey. They were Rinchen Sangpo and Lekpe Sherab, who
became great translators and on their way back to Tibet invited Indian
scholars to accompany them home. Rinchen Sangpo, in particular,
is credited with making three visits to India, during which he spent
about 17 years, receiving teachings from various Buddhist traditions,
acquiring texts and learning the methods of spiritual practice.
Rinchen Sangpo organised the building of numerous monasteries
and temples where students studied the various disciplines of
Buddhism. Some of these monasteries, like Tabo, stand to this day.

Lhalama Yeshi O also invited Atisha, the abbot of the university

of Vikramsila in north India, to Tibet to clear up the doctrinal
confusion in Tibet and to further spread the teachings. Atisha
refused the invitation, saying he was needed at Vikramasila by his
students. Atisha, realising the huge trouble the Tibetans underwent
to take him to their country, accepted the second invitation made
at the behest of Jangchub O, the nephew of Lhalama Yeshi O.
Atisha, with his twenty-four disciples, and his attendants, travelled to
western Tibet through Nepal and visited Tholing monastery, where
Rinchen Sangpo, was the abbot.

Atisha visited Samye, the monastery established during Trisong

Detsen’s reign. According to Shakabpa, he reportedly exclaimed
that he had never seen such an extensive and thorough system
of translation of Buddhist texts even in India. Atisha also visited

16
central Tibet and throughout his travels, he and his disciples made
corrections and revisions of the Tibetan translations of Buddhist
texts. In the process of giving teachings and making revisions and
corrections of already-translated texts in western and central Tibet,
Atisha acquired a Tibetan disciple, Dromtonpa, who is credited
with establishing the Kadam tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, which
Tsongkhapa (1357-1419) transformed into the Gelug school. Atisha
passed away in Nyethang in central Tibet and his remains were
preserved in a stupa.

Tibet’s dismemberment into small principalities and domains during

this time allowed the local rulers to finance individual Tibetan
scholars to travel to India in search of Buddhist knowledge. This
was the case with Drokmi, (992-1072), whose journeys to Nepal
and India were financed by the Tibetan ruler of western Tsang. In
Vikramashila, Drokmi studied at the feet of Santipa who initiated
the Tibetan scholar to various texts, including Hevajra Tantra, which
the scholar translated into Tibetan. This text became the basic focus
of study of the Sakya school of Tibetan Buddhism which Khon
Kunchog Gyalpo, a student of Drokmi, founded.

Another scholar and traveller was Marpa, (1012-1096). He had

initially studied at the feet of Drokmi but decided to make his
own expeditions to India and Nepal and eventually came across
Naropa, with whom, according to one of Marpa’s own poems, he
stayed sixteen years and seven months. He brought back with him,
according to Stein, “the mystical songs (doha) of the Tantric poets of
Bengal, and the doctrine called Mahamudra, the Great Seal, which
he handed over to Milarepa, his chief Tibetan disciple.

The Emergence of the Four Schools of Tibetan Buddhism

These efforts by the Tibetan scholars and translators in
making arduous and numerous journeys to receive the teachings
enabled the succeeding generations to establish most of the schools
of Tibetan Buddhism. These schools and the monasteries they
spawned throughout Tibet, in the absence of a central authority,

17
acquired immense prestige and authority and paved the way for
Buddhism to acquire political authority. The emergence of the four
traditions of Buddhism stabilized Tibetan civilization and made
Tibet the centre of learning for High Asia and the Himalayan region.

The Nyingma Tradition

Nyingma is Tibetan Buddhism’s oldest school. According to the
late Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche in his introduction to the Nyingma
tradition, published in Graham Coleman’s A Handbook of Tibetan
Culture, “The Nyingma tradition has three main streams of
transmission: the distant canonical lineage, kama; the close lineage
of spiritual treasures, terma; and the profound pure visions, dagnang.”
Nyingma tradition traces its lineage to the primordial Buddha,
Samantabhadra, through Padmasambhava (Guru Rinpoche) and
other great masters.

One of the important features of the Nyingma tradition is the terma,

hidden spiritual treasures. These were hidden by Guru Rinpoche and
he predicted his disciples would reincarnate to reveal these treasures
for the benefit of all beings. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is credited
as one such treasure concealed by Guru Rinpoche. Those who find
these treasures are called tertons, or treasure masters.

This school produced many great spiritual luminaries, including

Gyalwa Longchen Rabjampa (1308-1363) who compiled the
teachings of Dzogchen, or the great completion, the ultimate
teachings of the Tantras on the nature of mind and phenomenon.

The Kagyu Tradition

The Kagyu school traces its lineage to Tilopa, who taught Naropa,
who in turn taught Marpa, the great Tibetan translator. Marpa taught
Milarepa, the poet-saint of Tibet, and he passed on the entire Kagyu
teachings to Gampopa, (1079-1153), his principal disciple. Gampopa
passed these teachings to his many disciples and the Kagyu tradition
eventually grew into four major and eight minor lineages.

18
The Kagyu lineage put into practice the concept of reincarnation.
When the great Kagyu master Karmapa Dusum Khyenpa (1110-
1193), an outstanding disciple of Gampopa, passed away his
reincarnation was discovered and duly recognized. Soon other
schools adopted this practice of reincarnation.

The Sakya Tradition

In his introduction to the Sakya lineage published in Graham
Coleman’s Handbook of Tibetan Culture, Sakya Trizin, the present
throne-holder, explains the origins of his lineage in this way.

“The Sakya Tradition originated in the eleventh century, and has

been closely connected with of one of the ‘holy families’ of Tibet,
the Khon family, since early times. One of the family members,
Khon Lui Wangpo Sungwa, became a disciple of the great Indian
saint Padmasambhava in the eighth century, being amongst the first
seven monks to be ordained in Tibet. Through the next thirteen
generations, the Khon family was an acknowledged pillar of
the ‘early propagation’ in Tibet. However, it was Khon Konchok
Gyalpo who, in 1073, built Sakya monastery and thereby established
the foundation of the Sakya Tradition in Tibet. He studied under
Drokmi the Translator (992-1072) and soon became a master of
many profound teachings. The next centuries saw the rise of the
Sakya Tradition to great heights, not only as a pre-eminent spiritual
centre but also as a political power in Tibet.”

The Gelug Tradition

The Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism was founded by Tsongkhapa
(1357-1419) based on the Kadam tradition of Atisha and his
chief Tibetan disciple Dromtonpa. Ganden Tri Rinpoche Yeshe
Dhondup, the ninety-ninth throne-holder of Tsongkhapa, in his
introduction to the Gelug tradition published in Graham Coleman’s
A Handbook of Tibetan Culture, writes, “Tsongkhapa was particularly
attracted by the Kadam’s emphasis on the Mahayana principles
of universal compassion and altruism, valuing these qualities not
only as a spiritual orientation, but more importantly, as a way of
19
life. In this regard, Tsongkhapa saw the study and practice of such
Indian classics as the Bodhisattvacaryavatara of Shantideva (The
Guide to the Boddhisatva’s Way of Life) and the Ratnavali (Precious
Garland) of Nagarjuna as highly supportive to an individual’s path
to Buddhahood. However, in Tsongkhapa’s tradition, the Kadam
approach is combined with a strong emphasis on the cultivation of
an in-depth insight into the doctrine of emptiness as propounded by
Nargarjuna and Chandrakirti.”

Tsongkhapa’s foremost disciples were Gyaltsab Je (1364-1431),

Khedrub Gelek Pelsang (1385-1438) and the first Dalai Lama, Gedun
Drub (1391-1474), who established the Tashilhunpo monastery in
Shigatse, which remains the spiritual seat of successive Panchen
Lamas.

With the establishment of Ganden monastery near Lhasa,

Tsongkhapa’s principal disciples founded many monastic institutions,
which produced extraordinary masters and scholars, generation after
generation. The Gelug school’s greatest moment came in 1642 when
the Great Fifth Dalai Lama assumed political authority of all Tibet.

The Monastic Education System and Its Impact on Tibet

The characteristic of the second spread of Buddhism in Tibet
was the profusion of great monasteries. In his book Tibet: Land of
Snow, Tucci writes, “Shalu, which was to be famous for the great
encyclopaedic scholar, Buton, was founded in 1040, Sakya in 1073,
Thil in 1158, Drigung in 1179, Tshel in 1175, Tsurphu in 1189.”

The emergence of monasteries and monastic institutions throughout

Tibet during the second propagation of Buddhism had two lasting
consequences. One was that these monasteries contributed to
the cultural unity of the Tibetan people. The other was that the
monasteries helped the Tibetan people maintain the viability and
relevance of the Tibetan Buddhist civilization, generation after
generation, down the centuries.

Cementing the Tibetan people together as one culture in a politically

20
truncated and centrally disorganised Tibet were the monasteries.
The principal spiritual seats of all the four schools of Tibetan
Buddhism were in central Tibet. These seats appointed the abbots
and re-confirmed the incarnate lamas of their branch monasteries in
far-flung areas throughout the plateau, thus investing central Tibet
with high spiritual sanctity. Lhasa became the ultimate destination
of pilgrims, which further contributed to the spiritual oneness and
cultural homogeneity of the Tibetan people. The fact that by this
time Buddhist texts were studied in the common Tibetan script
throughout Tibet helped in reinforcing the Tibetan people’s cultural
unity. In this way, the monasteries served as a centrifugal force that
checked Tibet’s fissiparous tendencies.

The education system, which these monasteries operated using

the Tibetan language as the one and only medium of instruction,
contributed to the Tibetan people’s linguistic unity. Commentaries
on Buddhism made by one scholar of a particular monastery landed
up throughout Tibet, being studied and commented on by scholars
at the other end of Tibet. For example, The Hundred Thousand Songs
of Milarepa or the love songs of the sixth Dalai Lama are on the lips
of most Tibetans, even to this day. Scholars from all over Tibet and
down the centuries, undergoing much trouble, journeyed to central
Tibet to complete their higher studies at the principal seats of their
tradition. This traffic of ideas and scholars between central Tibet and
the frontiers contributed to Tibet’s cultural and spiritual wholeness.

The monasteries in Tibet were based on the model of Indian

Buddhist universities. These monastic universities taught not only
philosophy and logic but also astronomy and medicine, ritual and
liturgy, grammar and poetry, even arts and crafts. The Tibetan
students and scholars were linguistically equipped to follow the
texts and courses. They immersed themselves in this culture and the
knowledge it provided. By the 12th century, these Tibetan students
and translators had managed to transfer onto Tibetan soil not
only the texts, but the whole way of life of Indian Buddhists. This
complete importation of Buddhism into Tibetan language made it
possible for later Tibetan scholars and masters to study Buddhism
21
and pass it on to their students without any knowledge of Sanskrit
or other Indian languages.

Rule by Reincarnation
Karmapa Pakshi was recognised as the reincarnation of the first
Karmapa Dusum Khyenpa (1110-1193), an extraordinary disciple
of Gampopa. Karmpa Pakshi was the first recognized incarnate
lama in Tibetan history. This idea of recognizing reincarnate lamas
caught on like fire among the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism.
This way of selecting Tibetan spiritual leaders made the leadership
succession smooth and by and large provided stable and, in most
cases, inspired and inspirational spiritual leadership.

Upon this scene of a spiritually productive and politically crippled

Tibet arrived Tsongkhapa, whose followers embraced the idea of
reincarnating lamas with unbridled fervour and went on to assume
the political authority of a reunited and resurgent Tibet. After the
passing away of Gedun Drub, one of Tsongkhapa’s three main
disciples, the Gelugs recognised Gedun Gyatso as his reincarnation.
Both were posthumously recognized as the first and second Dalai
Lama. Gedun Gyatso’s reincarnation was found in Sonam Gyatso,
the third Dalai Lama.

The third Dalai Lama took a step that helped propel the Gelug
lineage to assume political authority of all Tibet. He set off from
Lhasa in 1577 to visit and preach the Buddhist faith in Mongolia at
the invitation of Altan Khan, the chief of the Tumat Mongols. The
Mongol Khan converted to Buddhism. In gratitude for the Tibetan
lama’s spiritual guidance, the Mongol chief conferred on him the
title of “Dalai,” which means ocean in Mongolian.

In earlier years, Buddhism was a court religion of the Mongol khans

both in Mongolia and China. The third Dalai Lama made Buddhism
the people’s religion in Mongolia. The firm and even irrevocable
establishment of the Buddhist faith in Mongolia gave the institution
of the Dalai Lama new vigour and an expanding relevance in the
tripartite relations, also known as cho-yon, priest-patron relation,
22
among Tibet, Mongolia and China. In their book, A Cultural History
of Tibet, Snellgrove and Richardson best explain the achievement of
the third Dalai Lama. “He travelled not only through those parts
of Mongolia which were under the authority of Genghizide khans,
but also within the Oirat confederacy, establishing a new ‘religious
empire’ outside Tibet of such size and potential importance that it is
not surprising that the Chinese Emperor should be anxious to invite
him to Peking.”

A child born in 1589 in Mongolia, a son of Chokhur tribal chief,

and great-grandson of Altan Khan, was recognised as the fourth
Dalai Lama. This fact made the Mongols that much devoted to the
institution of the Dalai Lama.

The Tibetan Buddhist civilization reached its apex during the reign
of the fifth Dalai Lama, Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso, who, according
to Tucci, was “one of Tibet’s greatest figures.” Because of their
devotion to the Dalai Lamas of Tibet, Gushri Khan, the chief of
the Qoshot Mongols, and his troops put an end to the long-drawn
conflict in central Tibet. In 1642 in Shigatse, Gushri Khan offered
the fifth Dalai Lama supreme political and spiritual authority from
the borders with Ladakh in the west to Dartsedo (Ch: Tachienlu)
in the east along the border of China. Thus began the age of cho-
si zung-drel, the harmonious blend of religion and politics. The
Dalai Lama created the office of the Desi, prime minister. He made
Lhasa the capital of all Tibet and named his government Ganden
Phodrang, the name of his palace in Drepung monastery. He issued
laws of public conduct, appointed governors to different districts
and a council of ministers to run the new government. A census of
the population was conducted for taxation and taxes were collected
from all the areas in eastern Tibet.

The prestige of the new government that administered a reunited

Tibet attracted attention from Tibet’s neighbours. The rulers of
Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and Shah Suja of Bengal and other
kingdoms sent their envoys to pay their respects to the Dalai Lama.

23
At the same time the Dalai Lama sent a representative and a retinue
to advise the various tribes of Mongolia to remain united, instead of
engaging in feuds and warfare. Oaths were offered by various Mongol
chiefs to this effect to the Dalai Lama through his representative.

The un-stinted devotion of the Mongols to the Dalai Lama revitalized

the dynamics of the priest-patron relationship, which during Ming
China became defunct. This underlying unity of Mongolia created
by the Mongols’ devotion to the Dalai Lama prompted the Manchu
emperor Shunzhi to dispatch several envoys to Tibet from 1649 to
1651 to invite the Dalai Lama to Beijing. Among other reasons, the
looming one for these invitations was to persuade the Dalai Lama
to use his spiritual authority with the Mongols to deter them from
encroaching upon Manchu China. About the meeting between the
lama and emperor, Snellgrove and Richardson write, “Whatever
interpretation was placed upon this by the Chinese, it was clearly
a meeting between equals. The Emperor himself, in the hope of
winning those Mongols who were still hostile but whose devotion
to Tibetan Buddhism seemed to be un-diminished, was prepared to
disregard the protocol of his new empire and go to the borders of
his country to meet the Dalai Lama, while his Chinese advisers even
tried to prevent the meeting taking place at all, lest China’s authority
might be compromised by showing excessive respect for a foreign
ruler.”

A great new age for Tibet began with the reign of the fifth Dalai Lama.
The spiritual connections with Mongolia were strengthened. Just as
in the ages past, Tibetan students were eager to learn everything
about the Buddhist doctrine and practice from their committed and
generous Indian masters, so too were the Mongols keen to study
Buddhism from their Tibetan teachers. Mongol students flocked to
Tibet to study at the Drepung monastery, the monastery associated
personally with the Dalai Lama.

During this period, the Tibetan Buddhist civilization made its way
beyond Tibet to Bhutan, Sikkim and the whole northern belt of
Nepal. The Tibetan Buddhist civilization had already been well

24
established in Lahaul and Spiti and Ladakh. Along with Mongolia and
Kalmykia, Buryatia and Tuva, people from this vast and variegated
landmass looked to Tibet as the centre of higher learning and the
source of their cultural and spiritual wellspring.

The diffusion of Tibetan Buddhism over this landmass was greatly

facilitated when the Tibetans introduced wood block printing
technology in Narthang and Lhasa in central Tibet and Derge in
Kham. Scriptural texts authored by Tibetan scholars and printed
at one of Tibet’s three printing presses made their way to the
monasteries and temples in every corner of the landmass covered
by the Tibetan Buddhist civilization. The production of books
and scriptures went on at a furious pace right up to 1959, when
the Tibetan people rose up against Chinese communist occupation,
which resulted in the flight of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama to
India, followed by about 80,000 Tibetan refugees.

A Culture without Boundaries

Compared with the changing dynasties in China and India within
this span of time, the longevity of the institution of the Dalai Lama
is amazing. Throughout its long reign from 1642 when the fifth
Dalai Lama assumed political power to 1959 when the 14th Dalai
Lama was forced to flee Tibet, the Dalai Lama institution never lost
its legitimacy. Unlike China and India, Tibet never faced famines or
peasant uprisings that shook or toppled the reigning dynasty.

Tibet now is a culture without a home, a civilization without a

country. However, Tibet’s cultural attraction to others has never been
so deep as today. The fact that it is able to establish itself so well in
exile is a credit to the ability of the Tibetan people. It is more of a
credit to Buddhist universalism, with its values of compassion and
non-violence, incorporated into Tibetan culture. This has attracted
and continues to attract the attention, sympathy and admiration of
many non-Tibetans who help the Tibetans to study and sustain this
culture in many foreign shores and in traditional Tibetan cultural
areas outside of Tibet. This has enabled the Tibetans to retain the

25
basic legitimacy and relevance of their culture and the core values of
their civilization just as they adjust to the forces of globalization into
which they have been thrown.

26
 PART TWO

TIBETOCIDE

Cultural Genocide
“Genocide” comes from Greek genos meaning race/tribe and the
Latin cide meaning killing. Genocide in other words is annihilation
of a group. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish law professor who escaped
the Nazi occupation of his homeland, first used the term in his
book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation - Analysis of
Government - Proposals for Redress (1944).

Lemkin stated that the term signifies “a coordinated plan of different

actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national
groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of
such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions,
of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of
national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health,
dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide
is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are
directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of
the national group.”

The Convention on the Crime of Genocide, a draft prepared by the

Secretary-General of the United Nations in 1947 in pursuance of
the resolution of the Economic and Social Council, states that “In
this Convention genocide also means any deliberate act committed
with intent to destroy the language, religion or culture of a national
or racial group on grounds of national or racial origin or religious
belief of its members.”

According to the UN Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples

adopted by the UN General Assembly on 12 September 2007,
genocide involves attempts by a more powerful group to dilute the
integrity of another group, dispossess them of their lands, assimilate
or absorb them into the more powerful culture, or to seek to malign

27
or diminish the minority culture through propaganda. Declaration
defines “forced assimilation or the destruction of their culture” as:

a. Any action which has the aim or effect of depriving them of

their integrity as distinct peoples, or of their cultural values or ethnic
identities;

b. Any action which has the aim or effect of dispossessing them of

their lands, territories or resources;

c. Any form of forced population transfer which has the aim or

effect of violating or undermining any of their rights;

d. Any form of forced assimilation or integration;

e. Any form of propaganda designed to promote or incite racial or

ethnic discrimination directed against them.

An individual right to cultural existence was recognized in the 1948

Universal Declaration of Human Rights and later affirmed in the
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
stating that “All peoples have the right of self-determination. By
virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and
freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.”

However, cultural genocide extends beyond attacks upon the physical

and/or biological elements of a group and intends to eliminate its
wider institutions. This is done by abolishing a group’s language,
restrictions on its traditional practices, destruction of religious
institutions and objects, the persecution of spiritual teachers, and
attacks on cultural figures and intellectuals. Cultural genocide includes
suppression of artistic, literary, religious and cultural activities.

The case in point is the International Criminal Tribunal for former

Yugoslavia, which held the Serbian destruction of Muslim libraries,
mosques and attacks on cultural leaders established genocidal intent
against Muslims.

The Chinese government’s actions in Tibet go even further with

28
forceful removal of 2.5 million Tibetan nomads from traditional
pastoral lives into state-built houses thus destroying over 9000 years
of mobile civilization; imposition of language policies which denies
the coming generations of Tibetans the right to learn their language,
crackdown on Tibetan intellectuals, banning religious festival and
restricting cultural activities; the destruction of Tibetan Buddhism
by curbing the numbers of monks in monasteries, by subjecting
them to intense political campaigns such as ‘Patriotic re-education’
and by limiting the role of spiritual teachers and forcing the monks
into intense ideological studies; and population transfer into Tibet.

Thus Lemkin’s original conception of genocide, which expressly

recognized that a group could be destroyed by attacking any of
these unique aspects, as well as the original UN ad hoc Committee on
genocide, which defines genocide as “any deliberate act committed
with intent to destroy the language, religion or culture of a national
or racial group on grounds of national or racial origin or religious
belief of its members”, applies in the case of Tibet. The Chinese
authorities’ actions in Tibet may keep the Tibetans biologically
intact, but the collective Tibetan identity suffers in a fundamental
and irremediable manner.

Destruction Documented by Scholars, Jurists and the UN

If we start from the 7th century, it took the Tibetan people more than
1,300 years to develop and sustain their culture, which, according
to Barbara Crossette in her book, So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing
Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas, “is still one of the world’s most
appealing civilizations.”1 It took the Chinese Communist Party only
about 60 years since its invasion of the country in 1949 to stifle
Tibetan culture in its homeland by destroying, among others, the
monastic education system that helped the Tibetan people to sustain,
refresh and re-energize their culture, century after century.

David Snellgrove and Hugh Richardson explain the reason why they
jointly wrote their book, A Cultural History of Tibet. “We have taken
upon ourselves to write this book at this time because the civilization

29
of the Tibetan people is disappearing before our very eyes, and apart
from a few gentle protests here and there the rest of the world lets
it go without comment and without regret. Many civilizations have
declined and disintegrated in the past, but it is rare that one has the
opportunity of being an informed witness of such events.”2

These two scholars’ comment on the Chinese communist destruction

in Tibet in the following words: “Since 1959 the Chinese rulers
have completely destroyed the main springs of Tibetan civilization.
They attacked first the religion and aristocratic social order with
a fury unequalled by Cromwell’s henchmen in England, and their
subsequent devastating onslaughts against the material and religious
well-being of ordinary Tibetan farmers, herdsmen and traders
may perhaps be compared in methods and results with Cromwell’s
invasion of Ireland.”3

The conclusion of these two scholars is supported by the International

Commission of Jurists (ICJ), based in Geneva and later by the General
Assembly of the United Nations. The International Commission of
Jurists (ICJ) published three reports on Tibet. They are The Question
of Tibet and the Rule of Law, published in 1959, Tibet and the People’s
Republic of China: A report to the International Commission of Jurists by its
Legal Inquiry Committee on Tibet, published in 1960, and Tibet: Human
Rights and the Rule of Law, published in 1997. The conclusion of
the first ICJ report is “These inferences were drawn by people who
know as no-one outside Tibet can know the full extent of Chinese
brutality in Tibet. They are in a better position than any outsider
to assess the motives behind the Chinese oppression, including the
slaughter, the deportations and the less crude methods, all of which
there is abundant evidence. It is therefore the considered view of
the International Commission of Jurists that the evidence points to:4

“ (a) a prima facie case of acts contrary to Articles 2 (a) and (e) of the
Genocide Convention of 1948;

“(b) a prima facie case of a systematic intention by such acts and other
acts to destroy in whole or in part the Tibetans as a separate nation

30
and the Buddhist religion of Tibet.”

In 1960 ICJ published its second report, Tibet and the Chinese People’s
Republic: A Report to the International Commission of Jurists by Its Legal
Inquiry Committee on Tibet. The findings of this report, in the words of
the ICJ Secretary-General, “constitute a detailed condemnation of
Chinese rule in Tibet.”5 In its third report, ICJ says that the second
report “examined the evidence relating to genocide, finding that
‘acts of genocide had been committed in an attempt to destroy the
Tibetans as a religious group.’”6

The ICJ presented its findings on Tibet to the United Nations

General Assembly. The UN General Assembly passed a resolution
on Tibet in 1959, which called on China to ensure “respect for
the fundamental human rights of the Tibetan people and for their
distinctive cultural and religious life.”7 In its 1961 General Assembly
resolution, the UN called upon China to stop “practices which
deprive the Tibetan people of their fundamental human rights and
freedoms, including their right to self-determination.”8

In 1965, the UN General Assembly passed a third resolution,

which expressed its grave concern “at the continued violation of
the fundamental rights and freedoms of the people of Tibet and
the continued suppression of their distinctive cultural and religious
life.”9

As late as 1991, the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of

Discrimination and Protection of Minority Rights passed a
resolution in Geneva on 23 August of that year. This resolution
expressed its concern “at the continuing reports of violations of
fundamental human rights and freedoms which threaten the distinct
cultural, religious and national identity of the Tibetan people.” It
called on China to “fully respect the fundamental human rights and
freedoms of the Tibetan people.”10

The third ICJ report, published in 1997, in the words of its

Secretary-General, Adama Dieng, “documents a new escalation of
repression in Tibet, characterised by a ‘re-education’ campaign in
31
the monasteries, arrests of leading religious figures and a ban on the
public display of photos of the Dalai Lama. It also examines the
increasing threats to aspects of Tibetan identity and culture through
the transfer of Chinese population into Tibet, the erosion of the
Tibetan language and the degradation of Tibet’s environment...The
report concludes that Tibetans are a ‘people under alien subjugation,’
entitled to but denied the right of self-determination.”11

The third ICJ report called “on the United Nations and on nations
everywhere to pay heed to the plight of Tibet and to come to the
defence of the fundamental principles of international law which
have been trampled upon. In particular, the ICJ calls for a referendum
to be held in Tibet under United Nations supervision to ascertain
the wishes of the Tibetan people.”12

The third ICJ report found that “repression in Tibet has increased
steadily since the 1994 Third National Tibet Work Forum, a key
conclave at which senior officials identified the influence of the
exiled Dalai Lama, the leading figure in Tibetan Buddhism, as
the root of Tibet’s instability, and mapped out a new strategy for
the region. The Forum endorsed rapid economic development,
including the transfer of more Chinese into the Tibet Autonomous
Region (TAR), and a campaign to curtail the influence of the Dalai
Lama and crackdown on dissent. The results of the Forum included
heightened control on religious activity and a denunciation campaign
against the Dalai Lama unprecedented since the Cultural Revolution;
an increase in political arrests; stepped up surveillance of potential
dissidents; and increased repression of even non-political protest.”13

Tibetan View on the Destruction: the 10th Panchen Lama

and His Petition
The views mentioned above are by informed foreign observers
of Tibet. However, Tibetans who have lived through the entire
experience and who even today still continue to suffer in the country
are blunt about the conditions in Tibet. They say Tibet today is a hell
on earth and a form of cultural genocide is going on in Tibet. They

32
say the country is still under martial law in everything but in name.

No Tibetan critique of the nature of Chinese rule in Tibet can match

that of the late 10th Panchen Lama’s in depth, breadth and meticulous
detail. Known as the 70,000 character petition, it was addressed to
the top Chinese leadership, including Mao Zedong. In his capacity
as the vice-chairman of the National People’s Congress, in 1962, the
Panchen Lama travelled extensively throughout Tibet and wrote his
observations of the conditions of the people and places he visited.
With the help of the United Front, he set up a team to write the
petition. When completed, after much cross-checking and having
the petition translated from the original Tibetan into Chinese, the
Panchen Lama presented his opinion to the Chinese premier Zhou
Enlai on 18 May 1962. The Chinese premier took the criticism in the
document seriously to the extent that he summoned Zhang Guohua
and Zhang Jingwu, the two top Chinese leaders in Tibet, to Beijing
and told them to address the mistakes in their Tibet work.

However, that summer at the central committee conclave at the

seaside resort of Beidahe, Mao Zedong called the Panchen Lama’s
70,000 character petition “a poisoned arrow” and labelled the
Tibetan leader as “a class enemy.” The Panchen Lama was struggled
or publicly criticised and humiliated before thousands of angry
crowds. He was thrown in prison and served 14 years under some
form of detention.

Though the Panchen Lama’s critique of the nature of Chinese rule

in Tibet was made in 1962, more than 55 years ago, it remains valid
today, mainly because the Chinese authorities, despite a tentative foray
into liberalisation in Tibet, have largely refused to address the core
concerns raised by the Tibetan leader. As such this critique remains
as relevant today as it was for the Tibetan people more than 55 years
ago. The bulk of Tibetan criticism, both within and outside Tibet,
against Chinese rule in Tibet echoes the Panchen Lama’s petition.
But his petition, first of its kind still remains the most detailed,
comprehensive and on the spot investigation of China’s rule in Tibet
that continues to devastate the way of life of the Tibetan people.

33
The Panchen Lama’s 70,000 character petition remained a top secret
document for many years. In 1996 a sealed envelope was delivered
to the office of the Tibet Information Network (TIN), a London-
based news agency focused on Tibet. The envelope contained a
Chinese translation of the petition. TIN had the petition translated
into English and in 1997 published the document as A Poisoned
Arrow: The Secret Report of the 10th Panchen Lama.

The Panchen Lama based his critique on the nature of the Chinese
rule in Tibet on the assaults made by the party on Tibetan Buddhism,
culture, language and the ethnic identity of the Tibetan people.
These assaults were made worse by the unfair and arbitrary land
distribution, erroneous practices introduced in the new methods
of agriculture and animal husbandry, and arbitrary arrests which
swelled the prison population in the case of the Tibet Autonomous
Region to more than 10% of the region’s total human population.
All of this, the Panchen Lama wrote, amounted to “taking medicine
for one’s head for a foot ailment.”

In saying this, the Panchen Lama, one of Tibet’s highest lamas and
China’s closest Tibetan ally, fell one breath short of accusing China
of deliberate and systematic genocide of the Tibetan people. The
case he constructed included the excesses in the suppression of
the 1959 uprising, the thousands who were arrested on the mere
suspicion of being involved in the Tibetan resistance movement, the
rude prison conditions and the inhuman treatment of prisoners, and
the famine that followed the introduction of the commune system
in all Tibetan areas.

On page 102 of A Poisoned Arrow, the Panchen Lama wrote, “We

have no way of knowing in detail the number of prisoners who were
arrested after the rebellion, but from appearance of things it may be
inferred that the number of people who were locked up reached
about ten thousand or more than ten thousand in every area (diqu).
Therefore, if we say that all these people were the enemy, then we
can affirm that hardly anyone is left over amongst us Tibetans, apart
from women, old people, children and a very small number of young

34
men. Now, if we say that there are both enemies and those dear to
us among those who were locked up, that is even more absurd. To
arrest and lock up all people without distinguishing between good
and bad contravenes every just law in the world.”

On page 36 of A Poisoned Arrow, the Panchen Lama made these

comments on the treatment of the prisoners. “In addition, the guards
and cadres threatened prisoners with cruel, ruthless and malicious
words and beat them fiercely and unscrupulously. Also, prisoners
were deliberately transferred back and forth, from the plateau to the
lowlands, from freezing cold to very warm, from north to south, up
and down, so that they could not accustom themselves to their new
environment. Their clothes and quilts could not keep their bodies
warm, their mattresses could not keep out the damp, their tents
and buildings could not shelter them from the wind and rain and
the food could not fill their stomachs. Their lives were miserable
and full of deprivation, they had to get up early for work and come
back late from their work; what is more, these people were given
the heaviest and most difficult work, which inevitably led to their
strength declining from day to day. They caught many diseases, and
in addition they did not have sufficient rest; medical treatment was
poor, which caused many prisoners to die from abnormal causes.
All prisoners in their fifties and sixties, who were physically weak
and already close to death, were also forced to carry out heavy and
difficult physical labour. When I went back and forth on my travels
and saw such scenes of suffering, I could not stop myself from
feeling grief and thinking with a compassionate heart ‘Why can’t
things be different?’”

On the advice of his senior attendants, tutors and colleagues,

the Panchen Lama held back from his petition many of the more
gruesome findings he saw during his travels in Tibet in 1962. Later,
after his release and rehabilitation, in the more relaxed political
environment that prevailed in China he made the following comments
in his address to the TAR Standing Committee of the National
People’s Congress held in Beijing in March 1987. This address was
smuggled out of Tibet, transcribed and translated into English by
35
the Department of Information and International Relations of
the Central Tibetan Administration and first published in 1998 and
reprinted in 2003 as From the Heart of the Panchen Lama. On page
66 of this booklet, the Panchen Lama used stronger language to
describe China’s past mistakes in Tibet. He said, “In Qinghai, for
example, there are between three to four thousand villages and
towns, each having between three to four thousand families with
four to five thousand people. From each town and village, about 800
to 1000 people were imprisoned. Out of this, at least three hundred
to four hundred people died in prison. This means almost half of
the prison population perished. Last year (1986), we discovered that
only a handful of people had participated in the rebellion. Most
of these people were completely innocent. In my 70,000 character
petition, I have mentioned that about 5 percent of the population
had been imprisoned. According to my information at that time, it
was between 10 to 15 percent. But I did not have the courage to state
such a huge figure. I would have died under thamzing if I had stated
the real figure.”

In the address, the Panchen Lama recounted an incident from the

1960s. “There was one woman, a wife of one of my staff, who was
also arrested. One day, when she was called into the interrogation
chamber, she muttered, ‘this man called Panchen had caused me so
much suffering that I will die of depression.’ This utterance led the
authorities into believing that she would say something incriminating
about me, a much-awaited chance for the authorities to take punitive
measures against me. They immediately called the scribes to record
her testimony. Then she went on, ‘We made a big mistake by
following this man called Panchen and not participating in the fight
against the Chinese. If he had led us in rebellion against the Chinese,
our condition today would be better than this. Because, initially, we
would have killed as many Chinese as possible and then fled to India,
which would have been easy since India is near our village. But this
man told us to be progressive and patriotic. And this is what we get
for following his advice. Now it is not possible for us to flee to India.
Our people, both men and women, are being persecuted here. We

36
are experiencing hell on earth.”

In the same address, the Panchen Lama said, “If there was a film
made on all the atrocities perpetrated in Qinghai province, it would
shock the viewers. In Golok area, many people were killed and their
dead bodies rolled down the hill into a big ditch. The soldiers told
the family members and relatives of the dead people that they should
all celebrate since the rebels had been wiped out. They were even
forced to dance on the dead bodies. Soon after, the family members
and relatives were also machine-gunned. They were all buried there.”

One topic the Panchen Lama returned to frequently in his petition

was the famine which swept Tibet and the starvation that followed.
His petition is replete with accounts of Tibetans, lacking grains and
meat, being forced to eat tree barks, grass and grain husks. Starvation
swept Tibet. In some places, the Panchen Lama said the spectre of
whole families starving to death was a common experience.

On page 29 of A Poisoned Arrow, the Panchen Lama wrote,

“Consequently, in some places in Tibet, a situation arose where
people starved to death. This really should not have happened. It
was an awful business and very serious. In the past, although Tibet
was a society ruled by dark and savage feudalism, there had never
been such a shortage of grain. In particular, because Buddhism was
widespread, all people, whether noble or humble, had the good habit
of giving help to the poor, and so people could live solely by begging
for food. A situation could not have arisen where people starved to
death, and we have never heard of a situation where people starved
to death.”

However, Tibet was not alone to suffer from the twin curse of
famine and starvation. The whole of China was blighted. Chairman
Mao’s the Great Leap Forward, and herding more than 90 percent
of the entire population of China into communes was the direct
cause of the famine that lasted from 1958 to 1962, which, according
to some scholars, claimed at least 20 million lives. Others say about
40 millions died in the great famine.

37
But before the great famine was the great confusion, precipitated by
the introduction of collectives and communes. On page 106 of his
book, Hungry Ghosts: China Secret Famine, Jasper Becker recounts the
great confusion. “The Party Secretary of Paoma town announced
in October 1958 that Socialism would end on November 7 and
Communism would begin on November 8. After the meeting,
everyone immediately took to the streets and began grabbing goods
out of the shops. When the shelves were bare, they went to other
people’s homes and took their chickens and vegetables home to
eat. People even stopped making a distinction as to which children
belonged to whom. Only wives were safe from this sharing because
the Party secretary was unsure about this. So he asked the higher-
level authorities for instructions on whether people should continue
to be allowed to keep their own wives.”

But in all fairness the famine in Tibet, though unprecedented and

unheard of in Tibetan history, was relatively mild. The one in China
decimated the country. On page 545 of his book, Why the West
Rules – For Now, Ian Morris recounts this story. “The worst thing
that happened during the famine was this: parents would decide to
allow the old and the young to die first… A mother would say to
her daughter, ‘You have to go and see your granny in heaven.’ They
stopped giving the girl-children food. They just gave them water…”

But more than the loss caused by the famine in Tibet, the Panchen
Lama was most concerned about the fate of Tibetan culture, identity
and language and Tibetan Buddhism. The Tibetan people can
recover from the loss in their ranks. However, the Panchen Lama
argued in his petition that if Tibetan identity, language and Tibetan
Buddhism and culture were lost, they would be lost forever.

On the fate of Buddhism, the Panchen Lama wrote the following

anguished comments. “But what if you took a very lovable, much in
demand, vigorous and innocent youth and deliberately put them to
death? In just the same way, this is the reason why we, all the people
of Tibet, feel that it is unendurable that Buddhism has suffered such
a huge decline that it is near extinction.”

38
 The Panchen Lama was profoundly pessimistic about the future
of Tibetan Buddhism under China’s authoritarian rule. In the
petition he said, “As for the future without religion, in Tibetan areas
in brother provinces, after suppression of the rebellion, owing to
various types of direct and indirect obstructions by lower level
Party and government cadres, even the names of the activities of
‘teaching, debating, writing’ of Buddhist scriptures, which were as
vast as the ocean, are no longer heard; needless to say, even the
name of religious culture can be seen to be disappearing. Under
these actual circumstances, the future of religion has in reality been
destroyed; therefore, in fact, religion has no future.”

What if the top Chinese leadership had listened to the Panchen

Lama’s pointed criticism and implemented his suggestions? Would
China have avoided the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution which
nearly tore the country apart? Could this have made China jump-
start its resurgence more than two decades before Deng Xiaoping’s
reform and opening up of the late 1970s?

The tragedy of the Panchen Lama and perhaps for China and
certainly for Tibet was that his criticism of the nature of Chinese
rule in Tibet was made at a time when an intense power struggle was
developing within the topmost ranks of the party. It was a time when
Mao decided to smash the party to re-orient China to his vision of
a permanent revolution. Any criticism of party policy towards the
minorities was considered criticism flung at Mao and his leadership.
In this way, a view expressed by one of the highest Tibetan lamas
and whose loyalty to China was beyond question on what was wrong
with China’s Tibet policy was swallowed in the drum beat of war
Mao launched on his party and in the chaos and confusion of the
Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution resulted in, according
to Henry Kissinger, a faithful friend of China,“spectacular human
and institutional carnage, as one by one, China’s organs of power
and authority – including the highest ranks of the Communist Party
– succumbed to the assaults of teenage ideological shock troops.”

But the Tibetan leader wasn’t done as yet. During 14 years of his

39
disappearance, many in Tibet did not know whether he was alive
or dead. This doubt was cleared away when on 26 February 1978,
Xinhua announced his presence at the 5th National Committee of
the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference in Beijing.
In 1980, the Panchen Lama was reinstated as Vice-Chairman of
the National People’s Congress. The Panchen Lama’s political
rehabilitation was complete.

The years of public humiliation, solitary confinement and overall

suffering inflicted on him had not dimmed his trenchant views of
China’s Tibet policy or sapped his energy and courage of conviction.
Given the new relative freedom and his old official posts restored to
him, the Panchen Lama bounced back in the political fray as never
before. Speaking to a gathering of Tibetans during the Monlam
Festival (the Great Prayer Festival) in Lhasa in 1985, the Panchen
Lama said, “His Holiness the Dalai Lama and I are spiritual friends.
There are no difference between His Holiness the Dalai Lama and
me. Some people are trying to create discord between us. This will
not succeed.”

At the TAR Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress,

held in Beijing in March 1987, the Panchen Lama openly criticised
the Chinese government’s policy in Tibet regarding education,
economic development, population transfer and discriminatory
treatment of Tibetans.

On 9 January 1989 the Panchen Lama arrived in Shigatse, Tibet’s

second largest town and the traditional fief and parish of Tibet’s
Panchen Lamas, to consecrate the newly-renovated mausoleums of
the Fifth through the Ninth Panchen Lamas at his main monastery
of Tashi Lhunpo. On 24 January in his address to the monks of
Tashi Lhunpo and the people of Shigatse, the Panchen Lama said
that the Chinese rule in Tibet had brought more destruction than
benefit to the Tibetan people.

The Panchen Lama survived his 70,000 character petition. But this
his last judgment of Chinese rule in Tibet cost the Panchen Lama

40
his life. On 28 January, four days after delivering this blistering and
historic condemnation of Chinese rule, the Panchen Lama was
found dead at his monastery. His death followed the drama of two
Panchen Lamas. But that is another story told in riveting detail by
Isabel Hilton in her The Search for the Panchen Lama.

However, the Panchen Lama’s critique of the nature of Chinese

rule in Tibet both in his 1962 petition and after his release from
prison forms the intellectual framework of Tibet’s essential
argument against China. The issues the Panchen Lama raised with
growing vehemence and alarm have become the core concerns of
the Tibetan people in Tibet and elsewhere. These issues of core
concern to the Tibetan people cover the destruction of the spiritual
institutions that maintained the vitality of Tibetan Buddhism in
Tibet, the unremitting assault on Tibetan culture, the growing
marginalisation of the Tibetan language, China’s population transfer
policy which is reducing Tibetans to a minority in their own land and
the degradation of Tibet’s environment in the name of development
which essentially is aimed at attracting more Chinese settlers onto
the plateau. To these arguments, China still does not provide either
convincing answers or effective policy remedies.

Since the Panchen Lama’s death, voices within Tibet and the Chinese
communist establishment that call on China to change its hard line
Tibet policy are growing in both volume and urgency. One critically
important voice is that of the late Phuntsok Wangyal’s, or Phunwang
as he is popularly known, an insiders’ insider of a Tibetan within
the Chinese communist establishment. But he was one of the
towering figures in modern Tibetan history and in Tibet’s interface
with a revolutionary, resurgent and unified communist China. He
founded the Tibetan Communist Party whose aim was to reform
Tibet’s outdated political and social structure under a re-unified
administration of the three provinces of central, eastern and north-
eastern Tibet. He took his plea for reforming Tibet’s political system
to some of the progressive officials within Tibet’s ruling aristocracy.
To one of them, Yuthok Tashi Thondup, the governor-general
of eastern Tibet based in Chamdo, Phunwang said, “The world is
41
changing very quickly. I think if we do not reform ourselves, we
will destroy ourselves. We won’t have to worry about the Chinese
or anyone else. We will be our worst enemy.” These thoughts are
recounted in his fascinating autobiography as told to Melvyn
Goldstein in A Tibetan Revolutionary: The Political Life and Times of
Bapa Phuntso Wangye. Though he received a sympathetic hearing from
Tibetan aristocrats like Yuthok, the Tibetan government in Lhasa
brushed off Phunwang’s ideas of the need for political and social
reform. In the end, Phunwang merged his Tibetan Communist Party
with the Chinese Communist Party and on 9 September 1951 led the
advanced troops of the People’s Liberation Army into Lhasa.

But even this devoted son of the Chinese communist revolution,

whose vital contributions to China’s “liberation” of Tibet were
acknowledged by the likes of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, was
not spared the xenophobic wrath of the Chinese communists. In
1958 he came under suspicion for advocating Tibetan independence.
He was bundled off to prison where he remained for nearly 20 years.
In 1978 he was released and rehabilitated. Like the late Panchen
Lama, the late Phunwang continued to advocate equality between
the Tibetans and the majority Chinese. In his three letters sent to
Chinese President Hu Jintao, the veteran Tibetan revolutionary
urged the Chinese leadership to resolve the issue of Tibet with the
Dalai Lama based on the Tibetan leader’s idea of the Middle-Way
Approach of Tibet enjoying total internal autonomy within the
scope of the Chinese constitution.

In his letter of 29 October 2004 addressed to President Hu Jintao,

Phunwang said, “Comrade Hu Jintao, you were the leader of Tibet,
you understand Tibet, the feelings and hearts of the common
Tibetans, you are aware of the facts about the Tibet issue. Today,
once the Tibet issue is satisfactorily solved, you and the central party
leaders can meet the Dalai Lama with affection in the capital of
the People’s Republic of China, which will make a stir in the whole
world and in China – especially in every corner of the Land of Snow,
there will be great rejoicing.”

42
In the same letter to President Hu Jintao, Phunwang said, “Life
experience shows us that an excessive emphasis being placed on one
side will mask the extreme partiality of the other side. In light of
the political phenomenon that ‘stability overrides all’, the horrible
words ‘Free Tibet’ have become a ‘phobia’ to some people for whom
even ‘Tibetans demanding to study the Tibetan language, to use the
Tibetan language, would lead to Tibetan independence activities’.
On the other side, the words have become a ‘money-earning tree’
for some departments to keep on asking for funds from the Central
Government, thereby setting an example for some autonomous
prefectures in inland China of how to develop the knack for making
money. There is even such a saying: ‘Inner Mongolia is asking for
money, they are denied; Xinjiang is asking for money, sometimes
they are given; Tibet is not asking money, they are given’.”

Blaming China’s hard line policy on Tibet on the vast anti-splittism

bureaucracy, he said, “There is also another saying: ‘These people live
on anti-separatism, are promoted due to anti-separatism, and they
hit the jackpot by anti-separatism’. To summarise the sayings above:
‘The longer the Dalai Lama keeps on staying abroad, and the bigger
his influence, the more long-lasting the period of high ranks and
great wealth for those anti-separatism groups; on the contrary, when
the Dalai Lama restores relations with the Central Government,
these people will be terrified, tense and lose their jobs’.”

His legacy of having worked for the Chinese establishment in Tibet

made Phunwang hold back many of his punches. But those who are
not so constrained are much more critical of the nature of Chinese
rule in Tibet. In his book The Line Between Sky and Earth, Shogdung,
then 47-year-old editor at the Qinghai Nationalities Publishing
House in Xining in Northeastern Tibet, who was arrested on 23
April 2010, writes that after the overwhelmingly peaceful protests
in Tibet in 2008, the Chinese authorities have heavily cracked down
and used their guns on unarmed Tibetans “hunting them down like
innocent wild animals, like pigs, yaks and sheep killed in slaughter-
house and scattered them like a heap of peas” and turned Tibet into
“a 21st century place of terror.”1
43
Similarly in his book The Fierce Courage by Gartse Jigme, the author
living in Tibet whose grandfather died of starvation during Mao’s
Great Leap Forward campaign, writes about the arrest of Jigme, a
monk from Labrang monastery in northeastern Tibet in 2008. Gartse
Jigme writes that the monk was handcuffed, shackled and was tied to
a chair with a black cloth covering his face. One of the four Chinese
soldiers while pressing his gun over the monk’s head said, “This
gun was made to kill Tibetans, especially the monks. If I kill and
dump your body in a gutter no one will even find out!”2 Gartse Jigme
further writes that “the psychological pain from crackdowns and the
sufferings that Tibetans are forced to undergo are unbearable.”3

Arjia Rinpoche, the abbot of Kumbum Monastery and a survivor

of ‘reform through hard labour’ campaign, who later held many
important posts in the Chinese Buddhist Association, fled China in
the late 1990s. In his memoir Surviving the Dragon: A Tibetan Lama’s
Account of 40 Years Under Chinese Rule published in 2010, Arjia
Rinpoche says, “Modern Chinese history can be characterized as a
‘Tail of Three Fish.’ Taiwan is still swimming in the ocean. No one
has caught that fish – at least not yet. Hong Kong is alive but on
display in a Chinese aquarium. Tibet, the third fish, is broiled and on
the table, already half devoured: its language, its religion, its culture
and its native people are disappearing faster than its glacial ice.”4

The conditions in Tibet today are getting worse, though the situation
in the past was no less difficult. Tibet experienced its first famine
in its recorded history in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In their
testimonies, Lama Karma Tenzin and seven other Tibetans who
came into exile in 1969 and 1970, write in Tibet Under Chinese
Communist Rule: A Compilation of Refugee Statements 1958-1975 that
in Zurmong, a small town in eastern Tibet, “...all young men had
died either in battles or of starvation. The women and children
were hedged together to work in the communes and all goods and
animals were collectivised. Only a few old men were left in town.
The workers were given only one spoonful of tsampa each day which
they had to supplement with wild plants and the flesh of dead horses
and goats.”5
44
They further state that “the produce of the commune, grains, meat,
butter, etc. are mostly siphoned off to meet the needs of the ‘State
Grain Reserve’, ‘War Preparation Reserve’, etc. and only a small
fraction is left for consumption by commune members.”6

In the same book, Yeshi Choephel, who came into exile in 1970,
says that “most of the produce was collected as ‘Patriotic Grain
Tax’ and taken away without compensation. The remaining harvest
is ‘purchased’ at a nominal price which is again never paid ... Since
then many died of starvation, some hanged themselves and some
jumped into rivers.”7

Dr Lobsang Wangyal, the former personal physician to His Holiness

the Dalai Lama and a survivor of the Chinese gulag, writes in his
autobiography My Land My Culture that “Each day six to ten prisoners
died of starvation. The surrounding areas of Samye were full of
buried corpses and, when a strong wind blew, the sand got blown
away and dead bodies became exposed…Lack of food and hunger
drove us to pick up the smallest insects that crawled on the earth.
Carcasses of dead horses, donkeys, dogs and rats became novelties
for us. I saw many prisoners dig in toilets in search of insects. A
father and son from Gyangtse collected insects in a tin can as we dug
canals and ate them in the evenings after boiling them. Many were
too exhausted to do anything; they just sat in the toilet and ate the
worms that came from their excrement.”8

In his book Nagtsang Zhilui Kyiduk or Suffering of Nagtsang Boy,

Nuden Lodoe, who was 10-years-old in 1958, writes: “In the three
communes of Dekyiling [a small village in north-eastern Tibet],
there were about a thousand children and about six hundred elder
people…now there are only about 50 children and ten elderly people
in the three communes. Rest all died in about six months. In fact,
they all died in about a couple of months.”9

Tibetans record that 1.2 million Tibetans died since the early 1950’s
to 1984 through starvation, in the fighting, in prison, by torture and
execution, and because of suicide. A confidential official Chinese

45
document Tibet’s Status and Basic Duties and Education published by the
TAR Military’s Political Bureau in October 1960 states that “from
March 1959 [to 1960] 87,000 enemies were exterminated.”10 Another
official document Tibet’s Rebellion Quelled published by TAR People’s
Publishing House states that from 29 February to 15 April 1960, over
18,000-strong PLA soldiers surrounded the ‘rebellions’ and “killed
1100, injured 4800, arrested more than 4100 and exterminated all
the enemies in these areas11 [Tengchen, Lhari Dzong, Ngamda and
Shopamdo]”

Likewise, in 1956 Golok in eastern Tibet had over 140,000 people,

“but by 1964 census, their numbers had dropped to 70,000.”12 Most
died during the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward (1958-
1961) and others killed by the occupying Chinese forces. In his book
In Exile from the Land of Snow, John Avedon writes “according to one
survivor who spent twenty-one years in five separate [labour] camps,
roughly 70,000 Tibetan were imprisoned in north of Lanzhou,
35,000 of whom perished from starvation in 1959-61.”13

Arjia Rinpoche was forced to undergo 16 years of forced labour.

In 1998, unable to “stand the dishonesty that was being forced (on
him) to experience on a daily basis,”14 he came into exile. In Surviving
the Dragon he writes that Yang Qing Xi, a veteran Chinese cadre,
told him about an incident in 1958. “One night the cadres of the
People’s Liberation Army called the villagers [Gomang County in
Amdo] to a meeting held in a local barn. After about 20 minutes,
they announced that they had to execute all counterrevolutionaries
and rebels. The cadres left the building, locking the door behind
them, and then tossed grenades into the barn. The military had
already surrounded the area, prepared to shoot anyone who tried to
escape. About 200 people, including women, children, and elders,
perished…their corpses were tossed into the fields where dogs and
wild animals set upon them. The next year, when farmers planted
their crops, they found arms and legs scattered everywhere.”

The physical destruction was equally immense. In the early 1980’s,

of the reported 6,000 monasteries and temples throughout Tibet,

46
only 13 were standing intact. The rest were razed to the ground,
their treasures and invaluable statues and religious artefacts looted
and carted away to China. Many of them found their way in the art
markets of Hong Kong and Tokyo. These monasteries were centres
of higher learning. Their complete obliteration means that the
institutions and tradition that continuously produced outstanding
scholars, practitioners and masters who enriched Tibetan culture
and the lives of millions of non-Tibetans came to an end within the
homeland. This situation is like India or America waking up one fine
day to discover that all their universities and institutions of higher
learning and the members of the faculty and student population
have vanished overnight.

All these are taking place in Tibet today. Under Den Xiaoping’s
liberalization, Tibet enjoyed a brief spell of relaxed policy as Hu
Yaobang took charge as China’s party chief. Hu visited Tibet in May
1980 and at a major conference of cadres, both Tibetan and Chinese,
Hu blasted them for their failure to improve the livelihood of the
Tibetan people. He said the Chinese Communist Party had let down
the Tibetans. In some areas, he said, the livelihood of the Tibetan
people had deteriorated below the pre-1959 level.

Hu Yaobang said, “Our present situation is less than wonderful

because the Tibetan people’s lives have not been much improved.
There are some improvements in some parts, but in general, Tibetans
still live in relative poverty. In some areas the living standards have
even gone down. We comrades in the Central Committee, Chairman
Hua, as well as several vice-chairmen, were very upset when we
heard about this situation. We feel very bad! The sole purpose of
our communist party is to work for the happiness of the people, to
do good things for them. We have worked nearly thirty years, but the
life of the Tibetan people has not been notably improved. Are we
not to blame? If we don’t make this clear, people won’t let us off the
hook; party members won’t let us get away with it.”15

He then outlined a six-point plan that was to allow Tibet to exercise

full regional autonomy, Tibetans would be exempted from taxes

47
for a period of three years, a liberal economic policy suited to
Tibet’s special characteristics would be adopted, more of Tibet’s
share of the state subsidy would be pumped into agriculture and
animal husbandry, Tibetan culture, language and education would
be improved and the party’s policy on minority cadres would be
implemented. There was also the talk that about 85% of the Chinese
cadres based in Tibet would be withdrawn in phases.

These measures allowed Tibet partly to recover culturally and

economically. Destroyed monasteries were allowed to be re-built
and those damaged repaired. Tibet opened to tourism, which
strengthened the economy. The Tibetan people’s religious life re-
surfaced, which added to the attraction of international tourists.
This period of liberalization allowed Tibet to partially recover from
the earlier devastation.

However, this liberalization was shorted-lived. Hu was toppled from

power in 1987. One reason for getting rid of him was his liberal
Tibet policy. That year Lhasa was rocked by protests. The authorities
retaliated by arrests and imprisonment. Bigger and more sustained
protests shook Lhasa in 1988 and 1989.16 Hu Jintao, the former
Chinese president, then the party boss in Tibet, imposed martial law
in 1989, the first martial law in the country since the founding of
the People’s Republic of China. It lasted more than a year. In the
same year the Panchen Lama suddenly died amid deep suspicion and
misgiving. But these protests were dwarfed by the Chinese students’
mass protest at the Tiananmen Square that shook China. Zhao
Ziyang, the liberal prime minister who advocated reconciliation
and dialogue with the students, was put under house arrest and the
conservatives in the leadership closed ranks and militarily crushed
the student movement.

These events boded ill for Tibet. With the conservatives in charge,
the leadership’s attitude and policy to Tibet changed dramatically.
This is reflected in the tone and shift of emphasis in the policy
directive that came out of the Third Tibet Work Forum held in 1994.
A policy known as “grasping with both hands”17 was announced,

48
which pushed for rapid economic development for Tibet while
coming down hard and mercilessly on Tibetan nationalists. Tibetan
separatism was considered the major cause of instability in Tibet
and a campaign was carried out to extirpate Tibetan nationalism.
A denunciation campaign was launched against the Dalai Lama to
root out his influence. Thus began the subtle but equally damaging
second Cultural Revolution against the core values of the Tibetan
people, which Tibetans consider as cultural genocide.

Why the Destruction?

The reason for this destruction is not found in the Chinese
people, who repeatedly proved themselves and their culture to be
cosmopolitan, inclusive and embracing. Note the tolerance shown,
down the centuries, to Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and other
non-Chinese faiths. Confucian China might have exhibited a degree
of condescension, but not intolerance, to the non-Chinese world,
dismissing many in the imperial periphery as “barbarians,”1 from
whom the Middle Kingdom had nothing to learn but had much to
teach in the ways of developing and operating a civilized society.
Though China was dismissive of the cultural development of the
peoples who operated outside its imperial fringes, there was one
and the only one country to which China sent students to learn and
invited masters to teach. That country was India. That was because
of Buddhism, the spiritual tradition that had established itself in
India, and which fanned out from the country and embedded itself
as the core value of many cultural and national identities in large
parts of Asia, including China.

China’s admiration for Buddhism is best expressed by Xuanzang,

the 7th century Chinese traveller to India who spent many years in
Nalanda studying Buddhism and other related subjects. His journey
to India along the Silk Road is immortalised in the Chinese epic,
Journey to the West. In response to the pleas of the teachers and
students of Nalanda not to return to China, Xuanzang, as quoted
in Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian Culture,
History and Identity, responded by saying, “Buddha established his

49
doctrine so that it might be diffused to all lands. Who would wish to
enjoy it alone and forget those who are not yet enlightened?”2

The spread of Buddhism to China made a major contribution to

correcting Chinese self-centredness and opening Chinese mind to
a higher and wider appreciation of cultures and wisdom emanating
from other realms. This means that Buddhist Tibet’s destruction at
the hands of communist China does not lie in either the Chinese
people or their culture. It lies in the intolerance China imported in
the form of communism from the West. More specifically, it lies in
the Leninist state structure in China that considers Tibetan culture
and identity as a fundamental challenge to the party’s rule in Tibet.

Chinese Communist Leaders’ View of Tibetan Culture:

“Religion is Poison”
During his final meeting with the Dalai Lama in 1954, Mao Zedong
edged closer to the Tibetan leader and whispered: “... but of course
religion is poison. It has two great defects: it undermines the race,
and secondly it retards the progress of the country. Tibet and
Mongolia have been both poisoned by it.”1

Four decades later, in his speech at the 1993 Working Meeting of the
United Work Front Department, Jiang Zemin, the then President of
China said, “[We are] asking them [monastic community] to love the
motherland, to support the socialist system and the leadership of the
Communist Party. We don’t allow religion to be used to confront the
leadership of the Party and the socialist system.”2

Later, Mao’s animosity to Buddhism and Jiang’s demands re-surfaced

as China’s official policy. Beijing held the Third Work Forum on
Tibet in 1994, which recommended putting an end “to the unbridled
construction of monasteries and nunneries as well as to the unbridled
recruitment of monks/nuns.”3 The forum further advocated that
“the struggle between ourselves and the Dalai Clique is neither a
matter of religious belief, nor a matter of question of autonomy, it
is a matter of securing unity of our country and opposing splittism...
This is a life-and-death struggle.”4
50
The forum initiated a campaign of ‘striking relentless blows’ against
‘the Dalai clique’ and ‘separatists’ as one of the “important elements”
of the comprehensive management of public security.

Jiang Zemin, who presided over the forum, said that “ it is necessary
[for Tibetan culture] to absorb the fine cultures of other nationalities
in order to integrate the fine traditional culture with the fruits of
modern culture. This will facilitate the development of a socialist
new culture in Tibet.”5

On 14 May 1996, Chen Kuiyuan, who in January 1992 succeeded

Hu Jintao as the party secretary of TAR said, “There are a few die-
hard reactionaries in the monasteries who are hell-bent on following
the Dalai,”6 and that “In order to beat the splittists and sabotage
activities of the Dalai Clique and protect the normal religious life
of the masses of religious devotees, we must carry out a carefully
differentiated rectification of the monasteries within our region.”7

On 23 July 1996, Chen launched the so-called spiritual civilization

campaign and declared its main thrust in Tibet. He said, “One of
the most important tasks in facilitating the spiritual civilization drive
is to screen and eliminate Dalai’s influence in the spiritual field. If
we fail to accomplish this task, we cannot claim to have attained any
great results in facilitating the spiritual campaign drive.”

On 14 May 1996 in a speech to the Party Section Meeting in Tibet,

Chen said, “Communists are atheist. If we see the Dalai as a religious
ideal and avoid denouncing him in the process of the anti-splittist
campaign, then politically we will not be able to lead the masses
to fight effectively against the splittist group headed by him. We
must denounce him fundamentally and not recognise his religious
authority.”8

On 8 November 1997, in a speech to the “TAR” Party Committee,

Chen said, “Religious believers, and even some Party members and
cadres, are not able to free themselves from the shackles of their
outlook on the world as seen from the religious idealism.... They
waste their precious time in futile efforts in praying for individual
51
happiness in the next world; instead of using their limited financial
resources to improve their economic condition, they unrestrictedly
donate their money to monasteries; instead of letting their children
receive a modern education, they send them to monasteries to
become a monk or a nun. Such negative thinking and behaviour
prevents science and technology from spreading...”9

In 1997, Li Ruihuan, a Politburo member said, “Expanding Tibet’s

economy is not a mere economic issue, but a major political issue
that has a vital bearing on Tibet’s social stability and progress. This
work not only helps Tibet, but is also related directly to the struggle
against the Dalai Lama’s splittist attempts.”

In 1998 during a televised dialogue with the then US President Bill

Clinton during his China visit, Jiang Zemin said, “Last year when
I visited the USA and also some European countries, I found that
many well-educated people actually believed in the doctrines of
Lamaism. I think this is a problem which needs to be studied. Why?
Why?”10

In his March 1999 speech to ethnic and religious leaders at the

Ninth Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, Jiang
Zemin announced, “To correctly handle religious problems, first
we should completely and correctly implement the party’s religious
policy; second, we should strengthen management of religious
affairs according to the law; third, we should actively guide religions
to adapt to the socialist society.”11

On 19 July 2001, in a speech at the rally in celebration of the 50th

‘peaceful liberation’ of Tibet, the then Vice-President Hu Jintao
said, “The PLA Garrison, PAPF units and the law enforcement
departments in Tibet are the strong pillars and loyal guards in
defending the frontier of the motherland and maintaining stability
in Tibet. They are an important force in building of both material
and spiritual civilization,”12 and that China “ushered in a new era in
which Tibet would turn from darkness to light, from backwardness
to progress, from poverty to affluence and from seclusion to

52
openness.”13

The impact of these kinds of intolerance, arrogance and chauvinism

of the Chinese leaders on Tibetan culture has been devastating for
Tibet. Tibet suffered under policies such as ‘democratic reform’ and
‘patriotic re-education’ campaigns that Beijing initiated in Tibet, and
the Great Leap Forward, anti-rightist campaign and the Cultural
Revolution that Beijing launched throughout China to enforce its
ultra-leftist policies.

These campaigns are carried out by a vast bureaucracy entrenched

in the party, military and government. It includes social apparatus
controls such as ‘democratic management committee’ in the
monasteries, neighbourhood watch committees and ‘work teams’
that the Chinese authorities have set up. Beijing has also established
a network of security personnel, including People’s Liberation
Army (PLA), People’s Armed Police (PAP), Public Security Bureau
(PSB) and a complex and vast network of paid informers. This anti-
splittism bureaucracy employs at least about 400,000 cadres. The
party through its bureaucracy has also issued various documents,
directives and guidelines to control creative expression with
systematic procedures to destroy and to sinocize Tibetan culture.

The communist party’s inherent intolerance and repressive nature is

shown in its appointment of party secretaries since its occupation
of Tibet. Beginning with Zhang Jingwu (1951-1965) as the first
secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in Tibet to Wu Yingjie,
the current party secretary, all were Chinese, except Wu Jingua. Wu
is of Yi nationality and was reportedly fired from his position in
1988 for ‘right deviationism’. According to the Kashag’s statement
on Tibetan Democracy Day on 2 September 2000, during a closed-
door meeting on Tibet in December 1999 in Chengdu, Sichuan
Province, Chen Kuiyuan recommended to the Chinese government
to “...eradicate Tibetan Buddhism and culture from the face of
the earth so that no memory of them will be left in the minds of
coming generations of Tibetans, except as museum pieces.”14 He
stated that the main cause of instability is the existence of the Dalai

53
Lama and his government in exile and these must be “uprooted.”
He recommended that Tibet, Tibetan people and Tibetan Buddhism
must be destroyed and the Tibet Autonomous Region be merged
with Chinese provinces like Sichuan.

In his article China’s Gaping Wound published in The New Statesman

on 14 June 2007, Jonathan Mirsky writes that Hu Jintao, the former
Chinese President, told him that he disliked Tibet, its lack of culture
and its ‘dangerous people’. Hu imposed martial law in Tibet in 1989
after a spell of peaceful protests by Tibetans in Lhasa. It was during
his reign that the 10th Panchen Lama suddenly and mysteriously
died in Shigatse in 1989.

Zhang Qingli, the former party boss in Tibet, described the Dalai
Lama as “a wolf in monk’s clothes, a devil with a human face.” On
16 August 2006, during an interview with Der Speigel, he wondered,
“I have never understood why a person like the Dalai Lama was
honoured with this prize. What has he done for peace? How much
guilt does he bear toward the Tibetan people! How damaging is he
for Tibet and China! I cannot understand why so many countries are
interested in him.”15

He said, “The Communist Party is like the parent to the Tibetan

people, and it is always considerate about what the children need.
The Central Party Committee is the real Buddha for Tibetans.”

More recently in 2010, he said, “If there were no anti-China forces

or no Dalai to destroy and create chaos, Tibet would be better off
than it is today,”16

Such intolerance of successive Chinese leaders to Tibetan culture

deviates sharply from official policies spelled out on paper.

In principle, Beijing has sound policies on the preservation and

promotion of Tibetan culture and religion as stated in the ‘17-Point
Agreement’ which says that Tibetans “shall have the freedom to
develop their spoken and written language and to preserve or reform
their customs, habits and religious beliefs...”17 And the constitution

54
of the PRC states that “all ethnic groups have the freedom to use
and develop their own spoken and written languages and to preserve
or reform their own folkways and customs.”18

However, in practice due to intolerance and the Chinese leaders’

perception of the existence of Tibetan culture and identity as a
threat, the Chinese authorities have put together a systematic plan
and execution of various campaigns and policies to annihilate
Tibetan culture. These measures of social control, suppression and
eventual eradication of Tibetan tradition and culture are recorded
in official documents, directives and guidelines. Some of these
documents are cited below.

In 1982, Beijing issued The Basic Viewpoint and Policy on the Religious
Question during Our Country’s Socialist Period (popularly known as
Document 19). This was the most authoritative and comprehensive
statement issued by China on the permissible scope of religious
freedom. The document “declared religious tolerance to be a
necessary step in the path towards eradication of religion.”19

Work Plans of the Regional Party and the Regional People’s Government
for Resolutely Striking Splittists and Other Serious Criminals Through
Screening and Investigation (referred to as Document No. 13) issued in
July 1989, included sections on “reorganizing and strengthening the
management of the monasteries” and increasing propaganda in
monasteries.20

A Golden Bridge Leading to a New Era published by “TAR” Party in

1994 ordered a halt to any further expansion of Buddhist institutions
in Tibet, and identified opposing the Dalai clique as the lifeline of
TAR’s struggle and advocated that ‘to kill a serpent, its head must
be crushed.’21

Document No. 5 of the Sixth Enlarged Plenary Session of the Standing

Committee of the Fourth Congress of TAR Branch of the Chinese
Communist Party issued on 5 September 1994, include a section
on “cutting off the serpent’s head,” encouraging Chinese migration
[into Tibet], closing monasteries, intensifying political education, and
55
punishing people who sing so-called counterrevolutionary songs.22

Order No. 5 issued by the State Religious Affairs Bureau in July

2007 requires recognition of all reincarnate lamas be authorized by
Beijing.23

Order No. 2 from the People’s Government of Kardze (Ch. Ganzi)

in Kham in eastern Tibet in June 2008, which, amongst many
things, stated that monks and nuns “who show stubborn attitude
will be counseled, strictly given warning, stripped of their rights as
religious practitioners and expelled from their monasteries, and held
in custody doing re-education,” and that tulkus “will be stripped of
their right to hold the incarnation lineage.”24

The drastic impacts of these views and policies are explained and
explored below.

Eradication of Tibetan Buddhism

“Religion is the opium of the people,”1 wrote Karl Marx. “Religion
is a spiritual oppression ... [a kind] of spiritual booze,”2 Lenin wrote.
As mentioned above in 1954 when Mao met the Dalai Lama for the
last time, he whispered, “Religion is poison.”3 For this communist
trinity, based on whose theories and principles the People’s Republic
of China operates, religion is a social toxin.

The Chinese Communist Party once stated that “since religion is

harmful to the socialist construction of the mother country, it will
inevitably prove harmful to the progress and development of the
minority nationalities ... All national characteristics unfavourable to
the socialist construction and national progress can and should be
changed.”4

These clearly indicate that the Chinese leaders view Buddhism as

the biggest hurdle to their control over Tibet. In the 1950s and 60s
under ‘democratic reform’, land and other assets were seized from
the monasteries. In A Short History of Tibet, Hugh Richardson writes,
“Attacks on religion became more violent. Lamas were assaulted and

56
humiliated; some were put to death. The ordinary people who refused
Chinese orders to give up the practice of religion were beaten and
had their goods confiscated.” By 1959 the occupying Chinese forces
killed a large number of monks and civilians and numerous religious
structures were demolished, prompting International Commission
of Jurists to comment that “they [Chinese] have systematically set
out to eradicate this religious belief in Tibet,” and that “in pursuit of
this design they [Chinese] have killed religious figures because their
religious belief and practice was an encouragement and example to
others.”5

Rick Fields in his book, How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative
History of Buddhism in America, says, “The Chinese had swiftly and
brutally suppressed the revolt of 1959, a half million people lost their
lives, and Tibetan culture had been nearly eradicated. Monasteries
had been transformed into barracks, and many of the ancient texts
of Tibetan and Indian Buddhism burned, or used as fodder for
mules. To the Chinese, Buddhism and feudalism were one and the
same, and both had to be destroyed.”6

Jung Chang and Jon Halliday add, “Mao was bent on destroying
religion, the essence of most Tibetans’ lives. When he met the Dalai
Lama in 1954-5 he told him there were too many monks in Tibet,
which he said, was bad for reproducing labour force. Now lamas and
nuns were forced to break their vows of celibacy and get married.”7

Arjia Rinpoche says that in 1958 the occupying Chinese army “forced
[the monks of his monastery] to assemble at Yar Nang Choedra” and
“in a public accusation meeting, more than 500 monks were beaten
and arrested. More cycles of arrests took place and by the end of
1958, the Three Red Flags symbolizing the Great Leap Forward,
Socialism, and People’s Communes were flying above Kumbum.
Women were urged to come live inside the monastery’s walls and
marry the monks who lived there.”8

In his historic 70,000 character petition, submitted to the Chinese

Premier Zhou Enlai in 1962, the 10th Panchen Lama, writes that

57
“the democratic campaign, which was carried out in conjunction
with suppression of the rebellion, was a large-scale, fierce, acute and
life-and-death class struggle, which overturned heaven and earth,”9
during which the cadres “carried out in a muddled fashion all types of
half-baked directives”10 to arrest, accuse, lockup and heavily subject
people to unfair interrogations and political education. The first task
of the ‘reform’ was to attack religion by destroying the statues of
the Buddha and burning the scriptures in the name of ‘eliminating
superstition’. Work teams forced monks to return to their homes
and to marry. In monasteries ‘democratic management committees’
were set up, whose members engaged in immoral and totally anti-
religious acts such as going with prostitutes, drinking excessively, and
kept their hair long and as a result “religious activities were as scarce
as stars in the daytime.”11

The petition adds that Tibet in the past had “total of about 110,
000 monks and nuns ... After the democratic reform was concluded,
the number of monks and nuns living in the monasteries was about
7,000 people, which is a reduction of 93% ... Due to this, the sweet
dew of ‘teaching, debating and writing’ and ‘listening, thinking and
contemplating’ has dried out.”12

In the spring of 1956, Athar Norbu tells in Buddha’s Warriors: the

Story of the CIA-backed Tibetan Freedom Fighters, the Chinese Invasion and
the Ultimate Fall of Tibet by Mikel Dunham, after the PLA stormed
Lithang Monastery, “three Russian Ilyushin-28 warplanes circled ...
and bombed Lithang. By the time they had dropped all their bombs,
nothing was left ... totally gone in a matter of minutes ... all the ancient
texts, the famous art, the holy relics, the stupas, the largest statue of
the Buddha in Tibet ... everything was gone.”13 Over three thousand
monks, nuns and lay people were killed in the siege. “Those same
bombers flew to other monasteries that day, in Ba and Markham
area, and destroyed them just as they had destroyed Lithang.”14

In his essay The End of Tibetan Buddhism, published in The Struggle

for Tibet, the Chinese author Wang Lixiong, who lives in Beijing,
writes that a tulku educational group was established in Lhasa in

58
1964, “where more than ten tulkus under the age of twenty were
gathered for thought reform and labour — specifically as butchers
and hunters of wild animals. Some of the things learned from the
study group became lifelong addiction the tulkus later had trouble
shedding.”15

Wang further writes that after 1959, the Chinese communist

authorities disrupted religious activities that led to “an entire
generation within the monastic community [to] become polluted
in their views on religion, [and] a new generation had grown up
completely in an atheist environment.”16

On 25 August 1966 the Cultural Revolution was launched in Tibet.

Two days later, Red Guards from TAR’s teachers’ training college put
up posters and handed out leaflets ordering the eradication of feudal
culture, which listed that all books praising idealism and feudalism
should be prohibited; all mani walls, prayer flags and incense burners
should be destroyed; no one should recite prayers, circumambulate,
prostrate; and that all monasteries and temples apart from those that
are protected by the government should be converted for general
public use; and monks and nuns should be allowed to marry and that
they must engage in productive labour.17 This systematic campaign
of destruction was carried across Tibet. The Cultural Revolution
reached even a tiny remote village like Rivoche, where the monastery
and the 13-story stupa built in the village by Thangtong Gyalpo, the
14th century Tibetan social reformer, were destroyed. Statues were
broken down and scriptures burnt. Monks of the monastery were
forced to throw the physical remains of Thangtong Gyalpo into the
nearby Yarlung Tsangpo River.

In his book Search For Jowo Mikyoe Dorjee, Ribhur Tulku, who lived
through the Cultural Revolution and underwent struggle sessions
and later recovered the statue of Jowo Rinpoche from China in
1982, stated that all the scriptures in Jokhang, Tibet’s holiest shrine,
in Lhasa, and other monasteries were burned, and sacred objects
were taken away to China either for melting or to be sold to art
dealers in black markets outside of China.18 During the Cultural

59
Revolution, Jokhang was turned into a pigsty.

The late Dr Lobsang Wangyal writes that during the height of the
Cultural Revolution, prisoners were struggled against and routinely
beaten for engaging in anything resembling Tibetan habit or custom.
“Prisoners were subjected to struggle sessions for even using spoons
and wooden bowls. Using a traditional Tibetan belt earned public
humiliation and beating,” he says.19

Tsering Shakya, a contemporary Tibetan scholar and historian,

writes in Dragon in the Land of Snow: the History of Modern Tibet Since
1947 that the Cultural Revolution aimed to create a ‘socialist man’.
“Those who held on to old values and traditions were said to possess
a ‘green brain’, while the progressive man had a normal ‘white brain.’
The new brain would be filled with the teachings of Chairman
Mao. As food provided nourishment to the body, so that teachings
of Mao would bring ideological transformation. It was said that
without studying the Thoughts of the Chairman Mao, the brain would
be empty.”20

Tibet had more than 6,259 religious institutions with about 592,558
resident monks and nuns in the monasteries and nunneries, which
housed hundreds and thousands of statues and religious artefacts.
When Mao’s Cultural Revolution ended with his death in September
1976, Chinese government was responsible for the destruction of
more than 6000 monasteries.21 The contents of these monasteries
were destroyed, looted and millions of ancient and priceless
manuscripts burnt.

Ribhur Tulku writes that “during the Cultural Revolution, most of

the Tibetan cultural artefacts were carted to China and destroyed.
The statues and ritual objects of pure gold and silver were never
seen again. Those of gilded copper, bell-metal, red copper, brass,
etc., were ferried to Luyen, from where they were eventually sold to
foundries in Shanghai, Sichuan, Tai Yuan, Beijing etc. The foundry
called Precious Metal Foundry, situated about five kilometres to the
east of Beijing city, alone purchased about 600 tonnes of Tibetan

60
crafted metals.”22 Of the 600 tonnes only 50 tonnes were later
salvaged. The rest were melted and sold. This was one of the many
foundries in China that purchased, melted and sold Tibetan religious
artefacts.

High lamas and monks were jailed, forced into labour camps and were
killed for their belief. Keutsang Tulku Jampel Yeshi, whose former
incarnation led the search party that was responsible for identifying
the present Dalai Lama, writes in Memoirs of Keutsang Tulku that once
in jail he was forced to transport human excrements from toilets to
the fields under ‘reform through hard labour’ campaign. Keutsang
Tulku was beaten, forced to undergo intense political education
and during the later years in prison he and inmates were made to
repair bicycles and knit sweaters which were either exported or sold
in markets by the authorities. His monastery was destroyed and
students were either jailed or defrocked.23

Palden Gyatso, a monk, who spent more than three decades in jail,
was also tortured, forced to undergo ideological education and put
under ‘reform through hard labour’ campaign in the gulag in Tibet .
He writes in his autobiography Fire Under Snow: True Story of a Tibetan
Monk that he was handcuffed, legs shackled and was interrogated
for days to force him to denounce his spiritual teacher, Gyen Rinzin
Tenpa, who was a member of 1946 Tibetan delegation sent to India
to congratulate British India on their victory in the Second World
War. The Chinese authorities forced Palden Gyatso to confess that
his teacher was a spy sent by the Indian Government.24

The measures to control and to annihilate religion stem from the

fact that religion is considered the biggest threat to party rule. The
various policies on religion are overseen and authorized by China’s
highest bodies, the Central Committee, Politburo and the State
Council. The party sits at the top of a tightly controlled system that
implements policies and directives in Tibet.

Through this chain of unbroken command, the Democratic

Management Committee (DMC)25 that China set up in each of the

61
monasteries throughout Tibet implements the policies. Jin Wei,
the author of 100 Questions about Tibet, says that DMC “receives
guidance and support from relevant government departments
in charge of religious affairs, and keeps them informed of any
problem in implementing state policies...” Through this system, the
government imposes maximum economic and political control over
monasteries. One of DMC’s important functions is to inform the
PSB of the ‘identities of counter-revolutionaries’. The local DMC
operates with ‘work teams’, a specially formed unit of government
personnel sent to conduct ‘patriotic re-education’ in an institution or
locality, to conduct political education and investigation. The ‘work
teams’ routinely move into monasteries and nunneries sometimes
for months “to carry out investigations, hold meetings, conduct
surveillance and identify candidates for arrest.”26 Thus the traditional
role of the lama or the abbot, who is the spiritual teacher and the
final authority on all monastic issues, is undermined and the entire
religious establishment is turned into a political battlefield to bend
monks’ and nuns’ loyalty towards the party.

In 1994, A Golden Bridge Leading to a New Era was issued. This is the
guidelines on religious policy announced at the Third Work Forum
on Tibet, which gave strict orders to curtail religious activities.

A Golden Bridge states that “there are too many places where
monasteries have been opened without permission from the
authorities, and having too much religious activity ... the waste of
materials, manpower and money has been tremendous ... sometimes
leading to interference in administration, low education, marriage,
birth control and daily life,”27 and that “each monk and nun [must]
give declarations of their absolute support for the leadership of the
Communist Party and the integrity of the motherland.”28

This was aimed at reshaping the thinking of the monks and nuns
through political education requiring them to “draw a clear line of
demarcation with the Dalai clique.”29

The Fourth Work Forum held in 2001 concentrated on strengthening

62
“Party building” as one of the focuses to gain support and legitimacy.
Jiang Zemin said at the forum that it is important to “strengthen
the administration of religious affairs, strike those who use religion
to carry out splittist criminal activities, and vigorously lead Tibetan
Buddhism to adapt to socialism”30

Beijing launched campaigns such as ‘Strike Hard’ and ‘Patriotic Re-

education’ through which the government heavily interferes in the
religious institutions and to introduce “Marxist outlook to Buddhism
or reshaping of Buddhism to suit the needs of socialist China.”31

A Golden Bridge states that “religious tenets and practices which do

not comply with socialist society should be changed,”32 strengthening
Beijing’s assertion that there cannot be two suns in the sky. There can
be only one sun and that is the Communist Party. This has always
been the central focus of China’s policy on Tibetan Buddhism,
forcing the monks and nuns ‘to love the Communist Party of China;
to love the motherland; to love socialism; and to love the people.’33

On 15 February 1996, a statement by Tibet’s Commission of

Nationalities and Religious Affairs issued in Tibet Daily stated that
“we must close the doors of the lamaseries which have serious
problems or where political problems often occur for overhauling
and consolidation and set a time limit for correction.”34

On 18 April 2001, after sending ‘work team’ officials to conduct the

‘patriotic re-education’ campaigns, Larung Gar Buddhist Institute
in Kham in eastern Tibet was issued a notice putting a ceiling on
the number of resident monks and nuns. This sprawling spiritual
establishment, which was started as a hermitage in the early 1980s
in order to bypass China’s restrictions on the construction of
new monasteries, was founded by the respected Khenpo Jigme
Phuntsok. At its height Larung Gar Institute had more than 10,000
students, including more than 1000 Chinese followers. The ‘work
team’ officials evicted over 7,000 students. In June of the same
year, thousands of security officials camped on the outskirts of
the Institute and destroyed the monastic residences of the evicted

63
students. The institute’s founder, Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok, was
arrested. He died on 7 January 2004.35

Since its first demolition in 2001, Larung Gar Buddhist Institute

attracted thousands of more students throughout Tibet, China,
Hongkong, Taiwan and Malaysia in the subsequent years and grew
to its former size in terms of students’ population. Now, it is once
again being subjected to the same demolition. Thousands of monks
and nuns are being expelled from the academy and their homes
destroyed. This ongoing demolition of the academy in eastern Tibet
has been widely covered by the international media and is a cause of
serious concern to Tibetans in Tibet and outside.

In December 2002, Tenzin Delek Rinpoche,36 the founder of Kham

Nalanda Monastery in eastern Tibet, was sentenced to death with
a two-year reprieve on false charges of having been involved in a
bombing case. The Chinese authorities de-recognised him as an
incarnate lama and ordered him to become a common monk, and
denied confirmation of the two reincarnations that Tenzin Delek
Rinpoche had earlier recognized. Because of his work to benefit the
people, Tenzin Delek Rinpoche commanded widespread respect
and trust among both Tibetans and Chinese in his area. The local
authorities saw this as a threat to their legitimacy and power, and
had been looking for a way to remove him.That year Tulku Tenzin
Delek Rinpoche was arrested and put in prison. In July 2015 he died
under Chinese policy custody. The Chinese police refused to return
his body to his grieving relatives for proper cremation, fearing that
a respectful cremation of the body of this dynamic Tibetan spiritual
leader would attract thousands of his devoted followers and this
might cause social unrest in the locality.

According to the Annual Report 2009 by United States Commission

on International Religious Freedom, Tulku Phurbu Tsering, a highly
respected tulku of Tehor Kardze Monastery in eastern Tibet , “was
detained on 19 May 2008 after police detained more than fifty of his
students for staging a peaceful protest against requirements that they
denounce the Dalai Lama and their teacher.”37

64
In 1999 Bangri Rinpoche and Nyima Choedron, who founded an
orphanage in Lhasa called Gyatso Children’s Home, were arrested
on charges of espionage and activities endangering national security,
and were sentenced to 15 and 10 years in jail respectively.38

Many other contemporary Tibetan religious leaders such as Geshe

Sonam Phuntsok39 of Dargay Monastery in Kardze in eastern Tibet
were arrested and jailed on trumped-up charges.

These lamas and tulkus have moral authority and a role as unofficial
community leaders who champion the welfare of Tibetans. People
turn to them for guidance and advice on both religious and secular
matters. This is seen as undermining the party’s authority.

In mid May 2007 the Chinese authorities demolished a colossal

statue of Guru Rinpoche near Samye Monastery in central Tibet
and rubbles from the destroyed statue were transported to unknown
locations.

According to a report by the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and

Democracy “a convoy of Chinese PAP came to Samye Monastery,
Dranang County, Lhoka Prefecture, TAR, and forcibly demolished
a nearly completed gold and copper plated statue of Guru
Padmasambhava [Rinpoche]. The statue was constructed with the
fund of about 800,000 Chinese Yuan generously donated by two
Chinese devotees from the highly industrialized Mainland city of
Guangzhou in Guangdong Province.”40

In 2007, the State Religious Affairs Bureau issued the so-called Order
No. 5 that requires recognition of all reincarnate tulkus or lamas to
be authorized by Beijing. This is a clear and direct interference in
Tibetan people’s spiritual domain. In this way Beijing choose to
employ religion as a tool not only “to transform Tibetan national
identity and loyalty to the Dalai Lama into Chinese national identity
and loyalty to China”41 but also as a kind of legal measure to put
their people in positions that control and supervise the Tibetan
people’s spiritual activities.

65
This was clear from the way Beijing involved itself in the selection
of the 11th Panchen Lama. Arjia Rinpoche, the former abbot of
Kumbum Monastery who now lives in exile in the US, says that he
“was forced to play a part in the selection of the 11th Panchen Lama
by the Chinese government. Since the government wished to use
this event as a precursor to their future election of the 15th Dalai
Lama, they made up their own rules and carefully choreographed
the Golden Urn Ceremony. I was an eyewitness to the fact that the
ritual was a farce and that the selection was rigged. It was totally
manipulated.”42

The Chinese author, Wang Lixiong, writes in The End of Tibetan

Buddhism that the “local political power has become the only
controlling force, one that obviously demands the surrenders of
monks and nuns to its authority. It has nothing to do with respecting
the dharma or observing monastic vows.”43

As a result, anything to do with religion in Tibet today, including

building, renovation, admission to monasteries, the limit of the
number of monks in monasteries, religious festivals, and pilgrimages,
has to be authorized by the Commission of Nationalities and
Religious Affairs.

Beijing’s systematic policies have led to executions, destruction of

religious institutions, political indoctrination, expulsion of monks
and nuns, imprisonment, banning religious ceremonies, restricting
the number of monks in monasteries and enforcing loyalty to the
party. The systematic destruction of and severe control on religion
has led to the collapse of the Tibetan Buddhist civilization in Tibet.

This destruction is clearly revealed in the report issued by Beijing-

based Gongmeng Law Research Centre, an organisation of
independent Chinese lawyers. In the aftermath of the widespread
unrest in Tibet in 2008, Gongmeng sent researchers to Tibet to find
out the causes of these protests. Their findings were made public in
May 2009. Gongmeng Report points out that Buddhism “is not only
an important constituent part of Tibetan culture, it is also the main

66
source of thinking for how Tibetan religious culture comports with
the logic of historical development.”44 The report adds, “Having
been through the Cultural Revolution, there’s now a gap in the ages
of the inheritors of religious culture in Tibetan areas, with a lack of
middle-aged monks leaving a weakness in influence and transmission
from older monks to younger monks.”45

This breakdown in the transmission of Buddhism from the old to

the new generation is the most fatal assault on Tibetan Buddhist
culture. This in turn has led to the collapse of the special bond
between spiritual masters or the lamas and their students. This
special bond or dam-tshig is the sacred commitment that consists of
maintaining harmonious relationship between masters and students
and at the same time fosters the continuity of the true teachings and
their practice. Dam-tshig consists of the vows of integrity, pledge,
loyalty, and the word of honour between teachers and the students.
Since the introduction of Buddhism to Tibet in the 7th century, the
entire corpus of Buddhist philosophy and knowledge on astronomy,
language, law and ethics were passed from one generation to the
next through this unique system of learning. This becomes especially
important in the practice of Buddhist tenets as many essential
teachings, initiations and transmissions are orally passed from the
root masters to their students.

The most respected spiritual master is the Dalai Lama, who Beijing
describes as a ‘separatist’ and more scathingly by the former party
boss in Tibet, Zhang Qinglin, as “a wolf in monk’s clothes, a devil
with a human face,” is the supreme temporal and spiritual leader
of all Tibetans. Tibetan people’s devotion to, faith and trust in him
are unblemished, attesting to the fact that the Dalai Lama provides
spiritual guidance and able leadership when Tibet and Tibetans are
facing the most pressing circumstances.

However, Beijing considers this special relationship between the

Dalai Lama and his people based on complete trust, loyalty, devotion
and faith as the key threat to their power and legitimacy in Tibet. The
Communist Party has heightened its attacks on the Dalai Lama in

67
the hope of severing this special bond. Tibetan monks, nuns and lay
people, who display any loyalty to or show faith in the Dalai Lama
are described as “the scum of Buddhism” and “the loyal running
dogs of the Dalai clique.”

“The influence of our enemies in foreign countries, especially

the ‘Dalai clique,’ is slipping into the monasteries of our region
more than ever”46 states A Golden Bridge Leading to a New Era. In
its counterattack to undermine such influence, Beijing initiated
Tibet-wide ‘patriotic re-education’ campaign in almost all religious
institutions. This has replaced traditional religious education. Now
monks and nuns are forced to undergo political re-education under
the strict supervision of DMC and ‘work teams.’

DMC and ‘work teams’ conduct written exams for the monks and
nuns after ‘patriotic re-education’ sessions. The questions in the tests
include: What are the reasons to oppose separatists and the Dalai
clique? What is the number one political responsibility of the TAR?
What are the ways to show your love for the motherland?47

These questions must be answered according to the political and

ideological education which the monks and nuns are forced to
undergo. There are a few books on ‘patriotic re-education’ such as
a book on opposing separatism; a book on [the Chinese version]
Tibetan history; a book on conduct of citizens; and a book on
government policies.48 These books are mandatory study material in
religious institutions.

Notices, the Marxist view of religion, are put on the walls of

monasteries. These notices say, for example, “In a socialist society
such as our own, the Marxist religious viewpoint is the theory and
guide for how to understand and handle religion and questions of
religion.”49 Monks and nuns are made to recite — I oppose the Dalai
clique; I will not keep the Dalai’s photo in my house; my thinking will
not be influenced by the Dalai clique; I love the Communist Party; I
will follow the Party no matter what, etc.50

DMC has taken the place of khenpos (abbots, whose responsibility

68
before 1959 was like an academic dean of a university) and lamas
who are traditional heads of monasteries. Political indoctrination
has replaced religious education. The special bond between spiritual
teachers and students has been severed and rules are enforced to limit
the number and age of students. The new mandatory registration
of monks and nuns does not allow students outside of the locality.51

In an official documents titled Cheng Guan Qu Fa Lu Chang Shi Pu Ji

Du Ben states that the DMC must report to the local security branch
about any ‘activity harmful to the national security’ and ‘public
stability’ carried out by the monastery’s lamas, khenpos, chant and
discipline masters.52

On 28 June 2008, Li Zhangping, head of the so-called Kardze

Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, which has more political and
religious prisoners than any other Tibetan region outside of the
TAR, has issued an Order No. 2. The order instructed monks and
nuns, “who do not agree to be registered and photographed, who
leave the monastery premises as they please and refuse to correct
themselves despite repeated re-education, will be completely expelled
from the monastery, will have their rights as religious practitioners
annulled, will be sent back to their native places, and their residential
cells will be demolished,”53 and “any tulku, khenpo and geshe who does
not abide by the order will not be allowed to participate in religious
activities” and “in the case of tulkus, they will be stripped of the
right to hold the incarnation lineage.”54

Voice of Tibet radio broadcast on 23 July 2010 says that Lama Dawa
of Rongpo Chojey Monastery in Nakchu was arrested in April that
year with the accusation of having links with the Dalai Lama. The
Chinese authorities stripped Lama Dawa of his religious position
and the right to hold the incarnation lineage. According to the same
radio broadcast, 17 other monks from the same monastery were
arrested under the ‘patriotic re-education’ campaign and ordered
them to oppose the Dalai Lama and Lama Dawa. As a result a
70-year-old monk named Ngawang Gyatso committed suicide on 20
May 2010 and later all 17 monks were kicked out from the monastery.

69
The authorities labelled this event as ‘5-20 Incident’ and branded the
monastery as ‘criminal monastery’ that must be watched constantly.55

At the same time, Wang Lixiong writes that in Tibet today, “all famous
monasteries have to be transformed into tourist sites, while high-
ranking tulkus are utilized as attractions for commercial investment
... That is how they became a valuable commodity.”56

Similarly, Ma Jian, the Chinese author and painter who widely

travelled in Tibet writes in his book Stick Out Your Tongue that “Tibet
was a land whose spiritual heart had been ripped out. Thousands
of temples lay in ruins, and the few monasteries that had survived
were damaged and defaced. Most of the monks who’d returned
to the monasteries seemed to have done so for economic rather
than spiritual reasons. The temples gates were guarded by armed
policemen, and the walls were daubed with slogans instructing the
monks to ‘Love the Motherland, love the Communist Party and
study Marxist-Leninism.’”57

The 10th Panchen Lama clairvoyantly wrote in his 70,000 character

petition in 1962 that “the future of religion has in reality been
destroyed; therefore, in fact, religion has no future.”58

The Communist Party’s destruction of Tibetan Buddhist tradition

and religious institutions has had a chain impact on education,
Tibetan values, language and communal harmony. Tibet today
experiences increased social breakdown, lawlessness, communal
disharmony, illiteracy, uncontrolled greed and a high growth in sex
trade and alcoholism,59 which in turn contribute to the deterioration
of Tibetan society.

Damage and Distortion in Education and Tibetan

Language
Beijing’s fundamental education policy in Tibet since its occupation
has been to win over the loyalty of generations of Tibetans. To
fulfil this task, the education strategy has been shaped by ideological
viewpoint to stem any Tibetan character, identity and content.

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In early 1960s the Chinese authorities started to ‘reform’ Tibetan
language by making grammatical changes to make it closer to the
so-called proletarian language as spoken by the people. The most
pronounced example was the elimination of three of the five del-
dra or genitive particles gi, kyi, gyi, yi ‘i.1 These were considered
redundant. The standard written Tibetan requires all five.

In her book Education in Tibet: Policy and Practice since 1950, Catriona
Bass writes that “during the Cultural Revolution, all concessions to
culturally specific education for China’s nationalities were abolished;
the political nature of education during this period meant that it
consisted almost entirely of launching attacks on the traditional
Tibetan culture, the prime target being the Tibetan language.”2

The Tibetan scholar, Muge Samten, who had first-hand experience

of the occupation and had lived through the terrible decades of the
Cultural Revolution, said that “almost all the universities and schools
in Tibet were shut down, Tibetan language classes were banned, bits
of Tibetan used in propaganda material were so-called ‘reformed
language’ created in the name of destroying the ‘four olds,’ opposing
the bourgeoisie and to be closer to ‘people’s language’. This ‘reformed
language’ was devoid of standard Tibetan grammatical usage and
was far removed from the colloquial language spoken by ordinary
people. Anyone using the standard Tibetan language was attacked by
having them branded as ‘revisionists’ and counter-revolutionary.”3

The campaign to smash the ‘olds’ led to the complete destruction

of traditional learning centres, banishment of intellectuals to labour
camps and carrying out mass struggle sessions to cleanse people’s
memories of the past.

In her book Life In the Red Flag People’s Commune, Dhondup Choedon,
as a young Tibetan woman attended The Red Flag People’s
Commune School in Nyethang Dzong in Lhoka, southern Tibet.
Later she escaped into exile in 1973, and in her book she writes,
“there is a meeting once in every week where the children engage
in criticism and self-criticism ... The children were asked to report

71
any anti-Chinese remark or act they see ... The Chinese lecture
them constantly about the prosperity and happiness brought by the
Chinese liberation and condemn the old society, where the ‘crimes
committed by the three big serf-owners cannot fit the sky.”4

Catriona Bass writes in her book that when the TAR Teachers’
College was established in 1975, Tian Bao, deputy secretary of the
TAR party committee announced: “Students should be selected
from among the workers and peasants with practical experience, and
they should return to production after a few years of study”5 and
that “the major topic of the new college was to be class struggle,
and the curriculum was to focus on the ‘ideological transformation’
of the students.”6

Liberal policies initiated in the early 1980s by Hu Yaobang and

encouraged by the late Panchen Lama were emasculated by the
decade’s end when leftist hard-liners regained power in Tibet. Hu
Jintao replaced Wu Jingua, who was widely perceived as a liberal. Hu
was followed by Chen Kuiyuan, the firebrand party boss in Tibet and
the “pendulum swung back to promote ideological education over
academic education.”7 Chen ruled Tibet from 1992 to 2000. Robert
Barnett, a Tibet scholar and a professor at Columbia University,
remarked during a seminar on Tibet held in St Andrew’s University
in Scotland in August 2001 that Chen increased attacks on Tibetan
scholars and intellectuals and played an important role in reshaping
“the pedagogy of Tibetan history and culture in the University of
Tibet.”8

In his speech at the Fifth Regional Meeting on Education in the

TAR on 26 October 1994, Chen announced that ideological goals
must be the top priority in schools:”The success of our education
does not lie in the number of diplomas issued to graduates from
universities, colleges, polytechnic schools and middle schools. In the
final analysis, in whether our graduating students are opposed to or
turn their hearts to the Dalai clique and in whether they are loyal to
or do not care about our great motherland and the great socialist
cause. This is the most salient and the most important criteria for

72
assessing right and wrong, and the contributions and mistakes of
our educational work in Tibet. To successfully solve the problem,
we must improve political and ideological work in schools, and have
political and ideological work run through all the teaching, study and
work at schools.”9

In the same speech Chen stated that “...schools are not a forum
on ‘freedom’. Schools should be captured by socialism. We should
not allow the splittist elements and religious idealism to use the
classrooms to poison people’s sons and daughters ... This is an issue
which deserves our utmost concern. This is a test.”10

Chen further made this clear. “Scriptures have entered some schools
and become textbooks in the classrooms. Some students have
joined the ranks of monks. Some people purposely interpret this
phenomenon as a national feature in an attempt to legalise religious
interference in educational affair ... Therefore, we have arduous tasks
in political and ideological work as well as heavy responsibilities in
training constructors (sic, perhaps instructors) and successors who
possess deep love for the Motherland and socialist undertakings.”11

Not only was there a shift in packing the curriculum with ideological
content but Chen even suggested discarding subjects such as science
and technical studies. This went counter to the claims by Beijing that
literacy level had gone up and that all-round education was given
to Tibetans. Chen said, “Ethnic education cannot be regarded as
successful if it successfully maintains the old culture and traditions,
but fails to suit the need of present social development.”12

In 1994, a TAR government report instructed that “schools of all

categories at various levels should firmly put the correct political
orientation above all else and strive to train qualified personnel who
have lofty ideals, moral integrity, a good education and a strong sense
of discipline.”13 This was reiterated in A Golden Bridge Leading to a
New Era which states that teachers “should have some professional
skills, but most of all, they must be determined revolutionaries,”14
which reveals a clear official preference for “red” over expert.

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Along the same line selected Tibetan children are sent to China for
secondary education and teachers from various Chinese provinces
are sent to work in schools and colleges in Tibet. “The programme
has a number of side effects which are likely to a negative impact
...[and] implications for the development of Tibetan language and
culture ... Furthermore, since these [Chinese] teachers do not speak
Tibetan (many of them are unable to speak even standard Chinese,
putonghua), additional learning difficulties are created for Tibetan
students.”15

This lack of real education is confirmed by the fact that a large

number of young Tibetans, risking their lives, continue to come to
India to receive a decent education. Since the 1980s hundreds of
thousands of Tibetans have come out of Tibet into exile, most of
them are young monks, nuns and students to study in Tibetan exiles’
monasteries, nunneries and schools.16

Gongmeng Report states that “majority of Tibetans born in the

1980s were educated to the level of elementary schools, the levels
of education among the young people of our [researchers] own
generation are far lower than Han areas.17” The report said that
according to 2007 statistics, “the average term of education in
Tibetan areas is less than four years, and the high-school enrolment
rate is extremely low18” and that “majority of adults at the grass-
roots are illiterate.19” The report states that the quality of teachers
and standard of education are also low and children of nomads and
farmers have difficulty in having access to education.20

In the beginning of 2010 the Chinese education department issued

a new notice, writes Woeser, a Tibetan writer living in Beijing,
which instructed “all the schools in the country to organise their
students to participate in an event during Spring Festival ‘wishing
the beloved motherland a happy and prosperous New Year.21’” At
the “congratulating the motherland22” event, the students were told
to praise the legendary early ancestors, Yan and Huang Emperors;
and to praise the revolutionary martyrs. The education department
instructed all schools to organise the worshipping of the Yan and

74
the Huang Emperors. Yan and Huang are considered by the Chinese
to be their earliest ancestors.

At the same time, the Chinese authorities made it mandatory in

schools in Tibet to have a flag-raising ceremony each morning.
Peter Hessler, a veteran reporter and the author of Country Driving:
A Chinese Road Trip, who travelled to Tibet, writes in his essay Tibet
Through Chinese Eyes published in The Atlantic Online in February 1999
that he witnessed a “flag-raising ceremony at a middle school, where
students and staff members lined up to listen to the national anthem,
after which, in unison, they pledged allegiance to the Communist
Party, [and] love for the motherland.”23

Such systematic programming and structured methods of education

leave little room for Tibetans growing up in Tibet to learn their
language and find their cultural roots. As a result, generations of
Tibetans grow up as hybridised species uprooted from their cultural
origin and unable to adjust to the new cultural and social milieu
created by the authorities.

Gongmeng Report states the “largest shortfall of teachers in Tibetan

areas today is in Tibetan language.24” Through its research in many
Tibetan areas Gongmeng found that the students find it easier to
learn Chinese than Tibetan simply because of lack of qualified
teachers and teaching aids. “Even though they could speak Tibetan,
there were however extremely few teachers who could undertake the
teaching of Tibetan, and give in-depth explanations of the Tibetan
language to the students,25” says the report.

This lack of competent Tibetan teachers is made worse by intentional

suppression of Tibetan language as testified by the detained Tibetan
author Tashi Rabten or Theurang in his book Written in Blood. He
was released after four years in April 2014. Theurang says in his book
that when he was a student at Northwest University for Nationalities
in Lanzhou in 2008, he and his friend put up notices about a book
sale written in Tibetan on the campus walls and near the dormitories.
Later they found out that all their notices were taken down while

75
similar notices written in Chinese were left untouched. He writes,
“I later found out that it was the government order to not allow
any notices written in Tibetan to be put up. If any notice written in
Tibetan is put up, the school police were given the authority to take
them down.”26

The late professor Dungkar Lobsang Trinley, a leading Tibetan

intellectual, remarked that “all hope in our future, all other
developments, cultural identity, and protection of our heritage
depends on this [Tibetan language]. Without educated people in all
fields, able to express themselves in their own language, Tibetans are
in danger of being assimilated.”

Other Tibetans are equally concerned about the fate of the Tibetan
language and education system in Tibet. Tibet Under Communist
China: 50 Years, published by the Department of Information and
International Relations in 2001 carries a long note of anguish by the
late Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok, the founder and abbot of Larung Gar
Buddhist Institute in Serta in eastern Tibet. In 1996, Khenpo Jigme
Phuntsok wrote:

“Actually, the Tibetan language has no value in present-day Tibet. For

instance, if a letter were mailed with an address written in Tibetan,
it wouldn’t reach its destination even within Tibet, let alone outside.
In case of travels, no matter how literate a person is in Tibetan, he
would not be able to know the bus timing or read the seat number
on his ticket. Even if one has to look for a hospital or a shop in the
county headquarters or a city, the knowledge of Tibetan is useless.
A person who knows only Tibetan will find it difficult even to buy
daily necessities.27

“If our language is useless in our own country, where else will it have
any use? If the situation remains like this much longer, the Tibetan
language will become extinct one day... Rare in Tibet are schools
where one can study Tibetan language and culture ... Moreover,
parents have developed the habit of not sending their children to
school. This is because the primary school teaches Chinese rather

76
than Tibetan. Even if the students learn Chinese and graduate from
the middle school, there is no employment scope in Tibet. There is,
of course, a slight opportunity for learning Tibetan. But the parents
know that Tibetan language is useless in day-to-day life. Therefore,
they have no motivation to send children to school.28

“In the cities and county headquarters there are serious cases of
people being unable to speak Tibetan, although both their parents
are Tibetans. Many of them have lost their Tibetan characteristics.
Moreover, Tibetan officials cannot speak pure Tibetan. One-fifth or
two-thirds of the words they use are Chinese. That’s why ordinary
Tibetans can’t understand their speech.”29

A report by Human Rights in China titled China: Minority Exclusion,

Marginalization and Rising Tensions says that Tibetan children are
“subjected to an educational system systematically designed to
deny them the opportunity and ability to learn their own histories
and languages”30 and “to indoctrinate children and instil a sense of
inferiority regarding Tibetan culture, religion and language relative
to Chinese culture.”31

Such negative impacts of the Chinese government-sponsored

education are made worse by Beijing’s persecution of Tibetan
scholars and intellectuals through torture, arbitrary arrests and
lengthy jail sentences. This trend, which decreased in the early 1980s,
was reinstated and intensified during Chen Kuiyuan’s rule.

In January 1996, Chen made a statement at an internal meeting saying

that Tibetan nationalism was rooted in Tibetan religion, and that
Tibetan religion was rooted in Tibetan culture and language. In his
paper The Chinese Frontiersman and the Winter Worms - Chen Kuiyuan in
the TAR, 1992-2000 presented at St Andrews University in Scotland
in 2001, Robert Barnett writes that “this theory implied that Tibetan
culture and language had to be restricted,”32 and that “shortly
afterwards, the experimental Tibetan-medium school classes that
had been started by the [late] Panchen Lama some six years earlier in
four secondary schools were closed down.”33

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Such attitude to Tibetan language and culture was followed by
crackdown on any assertion of Tibetan identity by Tibetan intellectuals
and writers. In 2004, the Tibetan author and poet Woeser’s book
Notes on Tibet was banned by the Chinese authorities and she was
dismissed from her position as the editor Lhasa-based Chinese
language journal Tibetan Literature.34 The authorities instructed that all
her working hours would be devoted to political re-education. Later
her blog was hacked and shutdown. International PEN writes on its
website that Woeser has suffered repeated and sustained harassment
since 2004, including brief detentions, periods of house arrest,
travel restrictions, loss of work, denial of access to information and
communications, heavy surveillance and censorship.35

A Raging Storm: The Crackdown on Tibetan Writers and Artists after Tibet’s
Spring 2008 Protests, a report released by the International Campaign
for Tibet, a Tibet advocacy group based in Washington, DC, in
May 2010 details “the cases of more than 50 Tibetans, including
13 writers, involved in the arts and public sphere who are either in
prison, have been ‘disappeared’ or have faced torture or harassment
due to expressing their views.”36

These intellectuals and writers include eighty-one-old Paljor Norbu,

a professional printer and prominent Tibetan cultural figure in Lhasa,
who was sentenced to seven years in prison for allegedly printing
prohibited materials, Rinchen Sangpo, the author of No Retreating
Path and two unpublished books The Story of Blood and The Story of
Lhasa, who was beaten and tortured by the Chinese authorities in
August 2006, and Kunchok Tsephel, the founder of the influential
Tibetan literary website, Chomey or Butter Lamp who was sentenced to
15 years in prison by the Intermediate People’s Court of Kanlho in
Tso, northeastern Tibet, on charges of disclosing state secrets after
a closed-door trial.37

Other persecuted Tibetan writers include Drogru Tsultrim, Jamyang

Kyi, Dolma Kyab, Kunga Tsayang or Gangnyi and Tashi Rabten or
Theurang.

78
Drogru was accused of sedition and supporting ‘motivations of Dalai
supporters’ in his articles and the authorities banned the publication
of his Tibetan-language journal Khawai Tsesok or Lifeline of the Snow.
Jamyang Kyi, a writer and singer, was detained by PSB in April
2008. Dolma Kyab, the author of Restless Himalayas, is believed to
be held in Chushul high-security prison near Lhasa. Kunga Tsayang
or Gangnyi, a writer, photographer and blogger, was sentenced to
five years in jail in a closed-door trial on 12 November 2009 by the
Kanlho Intermediate People’s Court in Tso, northeastern Tibet.
Tashi Rabten or Theurang, the author of Written in Blood and the
editor of Eastern Snow Conch Mountain (Tib. Shar Dungri), a collection
of essays about 2008 peaceful protests in Tibet, is believed to be in
detention in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in China.

A Tibetan writer to be arrested is Shogdung (Morning Conch) or

Tagyal, who was arrested on 23 April 2010. He was a staff at the
Nationalities Publishing House in Xining and authored many books,
including his latest The Line Between Sky and Earth, which is about
the 2008 protests in Tibet. According to the ICT’s report, “his
detention followed the publication of a book about the meaning
of what he terms ‘peaceful revolution’ and the significance of the
protests across Tibet since March, 2008, which he describes as: ‘a
sign of the rediscovery of the consciousness of nationality, culture
and territory.’”38

The same report says that “for the first time since the end of the
Cultural Revolution in 1976, singers, artists and writers have been
the target of a drive against Tibetan culture in which almost any
expression of Tibetan identity not validated by the state can be
branded ‘splittist’” and banned.”39

There is a clear historical precedent in Manchuria, after the Qing

dynasty collapsed in 1911, where “the teaching of Manchu was
abolished”40 by the Chinese authorities in the same year. “The current
population of Manchu in China is nearly 10 million”41 and yet “fewer
than 100 people can speak Manchu,”42 and scholars believe that “oral
Manchu will disappear in five to 10 years.”43

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Tibet is likely to suffer the same fate with arbitrary arrests, torture,
detention and long jail terms given to Tibetan writers and intellectuals
getting increasingly frequent especially after 2008 uprising in Tibet.
These systematic and sustained assaults stifle Tibetan language and
identity, and thwart any assertion of Tibet’s distinct civilization and
culture based on creative expression, individual talent and collective
voice.

Tibetan language is increasingly marginalized due to shrinking space for

its use and China’s policies are threatening to make it redundant beyond
cultural and literary spheres. According to linguist, Nocolas Tournadre,
associate professor of linguistics, University of Paris 8, at a roundtable
before the Congressional Executive Commission on China on teaching
and learning Tibetan, voiced his concerns about the future of Tibetan
language, he said: “By excluding Tibetan from the administrative spheres
and giving Chinese a predominant position at school and university, by
offering only a handful of professional openings based on the command
of Tibetan, the authorities have contributed to giving Tibetan the image
of a “useless” language. The Tibetans, who have a very pragmatic
approach and a great sense of adaptation, have quickly turned away from
their own language.”44

This has placed many Tibetan parents in deep dilemma, where on

one hand they would want their children to be the guardian of Tibet’s
culture and its heritage. On the other hand, shrinking space to use
Tibetan language and sheer lack of opportunities makes learning
Chinese language the only way to seek employment in almost all
avenues of employment.

The problem was illustrated in a widely shared blog by a celebrated

Tibetan educator and social entrepreneur, Jigme Gyaltsen, during
a speech he gave at the annual Political Consultative Conference
held in Xining. His efforts in educating rural Tibetans earned laurels
and was profiled in the state-sponsored broadcasting channel,
CCTV, describing him as a “teacher nonpareil.” In his speech he
conveyed his thoughts on Tibetan language, education and society.
In extraordinary detail, Jigme Gyaltsen outlines what he saw as

80
problems with education in Tibet today, from the shortage of
teachers to the language of instruction. 45

During the six-day long conference, two expanded meetings in

today’s Qinghai province, Jigme Gyaltsen, a teacher, expressed some
opinions on education. He said: “It’s a mistake that in most schools
in Tibetan areas, only Tibetan language class is taught in Tibetan
and other subjects such as maths, natural and social sciences etc,
are taught in Chinese. The goal of a student’s study is to attain a
knowledge of the subjects he has learnt and to be able to put this
knowledge to use. Whatever race you may be, being taught in your
mother tongue instead of two languages leads to a much easier
personal experience.”

He further argues, “for example, if all Chinese students in Xining

were taught maths, natural and social sciences etc, from textbooks
written in English, we can estimate they would not pass. Furthermore,
students from Tibetan areas will in future generally go on to serve
Tibetans living in Tibetan areas. And because of this the production
and expansion of these students who have been educated in Tibetan,
is the sole means of developing education, economy and philosophy
in Tibetans areas in the future.”

Relying on China’s census data published in the year 1990, in certain

regions predominantly populated by Tibetans, even in regions where
95.46% of its population being Tibetan, medium of instruction used
in most of the schools in the region are in Chinese.46 Moreover, the
fate of Tibetan language was further jeopardized after the demise
of the tenth Panchen Lama, who had been championing for the
rights of Tibetan people and was at the forefront of a movement
to persevere Tibetan language.47 Since 1997, Tibetan language came
under yet another assault from a policy to implement the introduction
of Chinese language even as early as grade one, which was earlier
deemed appropriate even for grade three by the authorities in the
Tibet Autonomous Region. 48

A blanket approach to marginalize Tibetan language in regions

81
inhabited by Tibetans had compelled young students to take to the
streets to protest. In a meeting of the Education Department of Qinghai
province, the Communist Party Secretary and the Chairman ordered that
the language used in textbooks should be changed to Chinese.

The statement was given by the then Party Secretary of Qinghai province,
Qiang Wei, made available in English by the International Campaign for
Tibet, speaking at a conference in education in September he was quoted
saying : “Qinghai province has vigorously implemented state common
language [Chinese] teaching in compulsory education while extending the
‘bilingual’ teaching of minority languages and scripts, making people of
all minority nationalities grasp and use the Chinese language and script,
thereby achieving ‘intercommunication between ethnics and Han’ [minhan
jiantong].” He added that strengthening ‚bilingual’ education, which asserts
the importance of the Chinese language, is “an important political duty.”

This sparked a spontaneous protest on 20th October 2010, where at least

1,000 Tibetan students in Tibet protested against the erosion of their
culture and language.49 The scale and geographical spread of protests took
the authorities by surprise. The same concerns were echoed in a series
of protests staged in different Tibetan regions. Following these protest,
reports emerge of similar protests staged in other regions of Tibet.50

The Guardian on 20 October, 2010 ran a piece, citing a former teacher from
the region, and now based in exile, he was quoted saying: “The Chinese
are enforcing reforms which remind me of the Cultural Revolution. This
reform is not only a threat to our mother tongue, but is in direct violation
of the Chinese constitution which is meant to protect our rights.”51

The Tibetan protests struck right at the heart of China’s

administration, in Beijing, when a group of Tibetan students in
Beijing raised their concerns over threats posed to Tibetan language
in tandem with other protests in Tibetan regions. On 22 October in
the same year, several hundred Tibetan students in Beijing’s Central
University for Nationalities held a peaceful demonstration, which The
Guardian described the incident as “rare” as it took the concerns to
China’s capital.

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On 27th of January, 2016, Tashi Wangchuk, a shopkeeper was picked
up by the Chinese authorities from his home. He was sharing his living
space with his elderly parents in Kyegudo in northeastern Tibet. In
May 2015, he took it upon himself to file a formal complaint against
the authorities in his region for failing to support Tibetan language
education by making a trip to Beijing. During his visit, he met with
Times journalists and insisted on doing -- according to the paper -- “on-
the-record interviews.”52

The journalists from the Times followed it up by visiting Tashi Wangchuk

in his hometown in September 2015 and published articles detailing his
efforts along with a nine-minute video in November 2015.53 In the video
he is shown travelling with the journalists and airing his views about the
status of Tibetan language.

Instead of giving a fair hearing to his concerns, he was charged in

March 2016 for “inciting separatism,” and faces up to 15 years in
prison. Although in his interviews with the Times he explicitly stated
that he was not advocating for Tibetan independence, and that he
was mainly concerned about cultural preservation. “My goal is
to change things a little bit, to push to preserve some of our
nation’s culture,” he told the Times.
A defense lawyer for Tashi Wangchuk later told the New York Times
that the case against his client focused on the interviews with the
paper and that “the police were especially incensed by the video.”

The Destruction of the Nomadic Way of Life

In the spring of 1956, Zhu De, Commander-in-Chief of
the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the Vice-Chairman of the
Communist Party, ordered that “all nomadic herdsmen [in Tibet]
should settle in order to facilitate socialist transformation and socialist
construction.”1 This was during the height of enforcing ‘democratic
reform’ in eastern and north-eastern Tibet, where majority of the
agricultural sector was ‘collectivised.’ Massive propaganda was done
to promote policy of ‘mutual aid and co-operation’ in the pastoral
areas. The principal objective was neither to improve the lives of
83
nomads and farmers nor to bring a positive social transformation as
idealised in socialist theory. It was to enforce control, to manage and
to implement the ‘democratic reform’ across Tibetan society. This
was apparent from the official document Outline of the Propaganda for
CCP Tibetan Working Committee Concerning the Policy of Not Implementing
Democratic Reforms in Tibet Within Six Years. This document states that
“to be able to live happily, the Tibetan people must take the road
of socialism; and to enforce democratic reform is the unavoidable
path the Tibetan people have to follow.”2 To make the nomads to
settle in permanent homes and to prevent them from pasturing their
herds of yaks across vast distances depending on where the grass
was greener were done so that the Chinese communist authorities
could better control these nomads.

In Communalization in a Single Stride, Xie Zhanru, first secretary, CCP

Committee, Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Zhou in present Gansu
stated that by 15 September, 1958 “46,000 Tibetan herdsmen, who
only a short time ago still basically lived in a feudalistic society, have
now, on the basis of having scored victories in the suppression of
counter-revolutionaries and carried out a social reform, ... singing
and dancing, have reached heaven in one stride, taking them into
People’s Communes in which are carried the seeds of communism.”3
Xie added that “the culture of the pastoral people is quite backward,
and their level of science and technology even lower,”4 and claimed
that “after a few years of socialist ideological education by the Party,
they abolished their superstitions, liberated their thoughts, promoted
their class consciousness, determined to follow the socialist road.”5

However, the dark side of the revolution imposed in the pastoral

areas was that it was ‘a very violent class-struggle of life and death.’6
For Tibetans the commune system was as alien a concept as the
coming of the Chinese communists who destroyed the way of life
of the Tibetan nomads, who pastured their herds with the change
of seasons and lived in harmony with the natural environment.
These fiercely independent nomads in their new circumstance
found it hard to operate as everything was imposed from top down.
“In the people’s commune,” Tibetans said to one another, “every
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person only has three personal belongings, a set of clothes, a set of
bedclothes, and a bowl with a pair of chopsticks.”7

Since ancient times, Tibetan nomads and farmers engaged in barter

system in which nomads gave salt, butter, meat, dried cheese and
wool in exchange for barley, clothes and other items of daily use.
By the end of 1950s this way of life was replaced by the commune
system, which allowed the authorities to operate a more efficient
system of taxation. The taxes included, as stated elsewhere in this
report, the Patriotic Grain Tax, State Grain Reserve, War Preparation
Reserve8 etc., resulting in grain shortage, and the people had to
slaughter and eat much of their livestock. The late Panchen Lama
writes in his 70,000 character petition that “most of the households
were ransacked, and almost all of the residents’ own stores of grains,
meat and butter were taken away ... many of the residents were short
of grain; some ran out of grain, and were very short of meat, butter,
oil and so on; there was not even any lamp oil. Even firewood could
not be bought.”9

Like other Tibetans, the nomads suffered through the next three
decades, which saw one political campaign after another. These
campaigns culminated in the Cultural Revolution. However, the
biggest threat to the way of life of Tibetan nomads is their permanent
resettlement that the Chinese authorities are pushing forward with
such revolutionary vigour these days.

The permanent settlement of Tibetan nomads that seriously began

in the 1990s is associated with the ‘Western Development’ campaign.
Claiming environmental protection as the reason for the fencing
off of pastureland and of sedentarization of nomads, the Chinese
government carried out policies such as “convert farmland to
forest”10 and “revert pasture to grassland.”11 The Chinese authorities
wanted to reverse the supposed degradation in pastoral regions by
imposing ban on grazing. Official policy blames the supposed crisis
in the grassland on the ‘primitive’ and ‘unscientific’ way of life of
the Tibetan nomads.12

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An estimated 2.25 million nomads live on the Tibetan Plateau.
For ages the Tibetan nomads skilfully managed their livestock and
sustained the land while adapting to the realities of Tibet’s fragile
ecological system.13 The current crisis in the pastoral regions grows
out of Beijing’s policies in the past 50 years, such as compulsory
collectivization, imposition of production quotas, and collectivised
herding which led to famine, degradation of grasslands and
destruction of the traditional sustainable methods of pasture
management.

In June 2007, the New York-based Human Rights Watch issued a

report on the permanent re-settlement of the nomads in Tibet titled
No One Has the Liberty to Refuse. This report explains China’s nomadic
resettlement project. It says, “Since 2002, the Chinese government
has been implementing resettlement, land confiscation, and fencing
policies in pastoral areas inhabited primarily by Tibetans, drastically
curtailing their livelihood. The policies have been especially radical
... many Tibetan herders have been required to slaughter most of
their livestock and move into newly-built housing colonies in or near
towns, abandoning their traditional way of life.14

“These requirements are part of a broader policy associated with

the ‘Western Development’ campaign. Since this campaign got
underway in 1999 many Tibetan agricultural communities have had
their land confiscated, with minimal compensation, or have been
evicted to make way for mining, infrastructure projects, or urban
development.”15

The Human Rights Watch report quotes a Tibetan who assesses the
impact of this scheme on the nomadic way of life. He says, “They
are destroying our Tibetan (herding) communities by not letting
us live in our area and thus wiping out our livelihood completely,
making it difficult for us to survive in this world, as we have been
(herders) for generations. The Chinese are not letting us carry on our
occupation and forcing us to live in Chinese-built towns, which will
leave us with no livestock and won’t be able to do any other work.”16

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In 2003 a total ban was imposed on grazing in Golok in north-
eastern Tibet and nomads were forced to move into government-
built houses. A case in point that illustrates the compulsory change
in land use is Tang Karma project in Amdo (Ch. Qinghai) province,
where nomads are forced to resettle at a disused prison site, where
there is no drinking water and electricity.17

The site of this project is a mixed farming settlement where nomads,

who have no experience in cultivating fields and growing crops, are
to engage in farming with no drinking water. A Tibetan interviewed
by Human Rights Watch said in No One Has the Liberty to Refuse
that the order came directly from the central government and not
something made up [at lower levels] and that “not a single household
can stay behind.”18

Removal and relocations are also taking place to make way for
large-scale infrastructural projects such as dams, mining and other
undertakings like Lhasa-Xining highway. According to the research
paper Constructing A Green Railway on the Tibet Plateau: Evaluating
the Effectiveness of Mitigation Measures by Zhou Jinxing, Chinese
Academy of Forestry Sciences, Yang Jun, Department of Landscape
Architecture and Horticulture, Temple University in Philadelphia
and Peng Gong, Beijing Normal University, the construction of the
Lhasa-Xining highway was done “without an environmental impact
assessment or any environment protection plan”19 which resulted in
“the destruction of the vegetative mat on the route of the highway,
the adjacent vegetative mats were damaged as the soil was scraped
up to build the road.”20 They add that “the damaged vegetation has
led to the loss of organic matter in the soil and the melting of the
permafrost layer under the topsoil.”21

These development plans and infrastructural projects are urban-

centric and finance is channelled in such a way that “Tibetans
find it hard to compete with Chinese migrants.”22 In Perversities of
Extreme Dependence and Unequal Growth in the TAR, Andrew Fischer,
a development economist who specialises on Tibet, writes that “this
situation arises precisely because of who controls the subsidies and

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investments and where the money is spent.”23

Fencing off of pastures, limit imposed on herds and relocation

in permanent settlements have forced the nomads to seek other
sources of income for which they either do not have enough skills
or lack opportunities.24 The relocation of the nomads in permanent
settlements has severed their intimate connection with their animals,
and rendered their knowledge of animal and grassland management,
inherited from one generation to another, useless.

The officially stated reason for the permanent settlement of the

nomads, from the time Zhu De ordered that “all nomadic herdsmen
should settle”25 in 1956 to the total ban on grazing in Golok and
resettlement of nomads in Tibet today, is to transform the ‘backward’
nomads and to bring them ‘scientific development’.

This assertion of bringing ‘scientific development’ to the nomads

is particularly odd given the fact that Tibet had a long history of
environment protection and respect for the land, animals and natural
resources.26

According to Katherine Morton, a China specialist at the Australia

National University, over 700,000 nomads have been resettled since
2000.27 The official Chinese media mention that 226, 302 houses
were built for Tibetan herders and farmers since early 200628 and
that by the end of 2009 over 80 percent of herdsmen and farmers
will live in houses, and the projected figure for 2009 is about 1.32
million people, or 220,000 households.29

The nomads were often either made a one-time payment for their
livestock and are given houses with no job prospect and steady
source of income.30 As a result they resort to collecting and selling
yartsa gunbu (summer grass and winter worm)or caterpillar fungus,
a medicinal root that has high demand and very high market value.
During the summer almost the entire population in nomadic area
scour the grasslands for this plant.31 In some areas local leaders issue
passbooks that allow people to collect the root and then officials
act as middlemen in selling it to make huge profits. Some officials
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organize video nights in the mountains for root collectors during
which adult films are shown and cheap alcohol is sold. There were
also cases of violent and often fatal conflicts over trading and scarcity
as Jonathan Watts reports in the 17 June 2010 issue of The Guardian
that “in July 2007 eight people were shot to death and 50 wounded
in one such conflict.”32

Another assault on nomads’ traditional values and religious

sentiments is the building of series of slaughter houses33 in pastoral
areas by the Chinese government and setting quotas for each
household to provide animals to these houses. Punishments are
meted out by local officials if herders fail to comply with the order
to slaughter animals. In Sershul county in Kardze in eastern Tibet,
people petitioned the local authorities against the slaughter house
built in the locality. When the petition was rejected some monks of
Bumnyak Monastery and people wrote an appeal saying that “there
is no greater harm to Buddhist religion than this. Even if we don’t
protect living creatures, slaughtering them without mercy is against
Buddhism. This is the heartfelt wish of the people.”34 The official
response was to arrest the three people, who went to submit the
appeal.

Summary solutions like arrests, imprisonment and coercions are

compounded by large-scale resource extractions and rampant
commercialisation of livestock such as yak sperm bank35 to breed
bigger yaks at a shorter time. Yaks are restricted in barbed-wire
fences and herders in state-built houses.36 The fundamental problem
is the failure to acknowledge and understand the wisdom and
sophistication of Tibetans’ traditional livestock management, which
has allowed nomads to thrive for centuries.

Wu Ning, a rangeland expert at the Chengdu Institute of Biology

writes that “simply focusing on pasture or livestock development
fundamentally ignores the tight linkages between culture and the
land.”37 In this current policy from Beijing, nomads are at the
receiving end. Chinese government has little or no experience in
pastoral production and management beyond a simplistic and risky

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policy of reliance on overstocking, and in more recent years, on
accelerated slaughter.

Traditionally in Tibet the nomads were regarded as the naturally well

off. They, like most Tibetans, fervently engaged in religious activities
by inviting monks and lamas, and were generous in their offerings
to the monasteries. However, as the resettlement has driven them
into poverty and desperation, social linkages are broken down and
traditional values abandoned for immediate and the urgent need to
survive.

Beijing accuses that “their [Tibetan nomads] way of life is

threatening the environment” and that they live a ‘primitive’ life’
bound by traditional concept’ of self-sufficiency and “did not know
how to make money by selling their domestic animals.”38 What is
actually being threatened and driven into extinction is the nomads’
way of life, their culture, religion and who they are as people who
have successfully survived on the Tibetan Plateau for thousands of
years.39

According to China’s 2010 census report, the population of

“Tibetans in China” is about 6.2 million. Out of which 2.7
million now live in the so-called Tibet Autonomous Region,
and the rest, 3.5 million live in today’s dismembered Tibet in
provinces of Sichuan, Gansu, Qinghai and Yunnan.39

The Chinese government started implementing various policies

to build “New Socialist Countryside” in Tibetan areas aimed at
increased control of Tibetan farmers and sedentarizing Tibetan
herders. In the Tibet Autonomous Region, under the policy of
“Comfortable Housing,” a large scale rehousing of Tibetans
is carried out. And in another policy which is predominantly
carried out in Amdo and in the historical eastern parts of Tibet
to sedentarize nomadic herders. The Chinese government
claims that these policies to all intents and purposes are to
improve the quality of life and improve domestic economy.40
Likewise, under “Environmental Migration Schemes,” in
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northeastern Tibet alone, the Chinese government had relocated
and resettled over 300,000 Tibetans since early 2000s. Plans are afoot
to resettle over 90% of nomads in the region.41

On November 2012, Xinhua, the official news agency of the Chinese

government carried a report, citing official sources that over 737,000
nomads have been resettled out of the “headwaters region of the
Yellow River over the past five years as part of efforts to protect
China’s “mother river” from over-grazing.” 42

A similar report on the Chinese state-run media, CCTV on

13 September, 2012 reported that: “according to the statistics,
over one million Tibetan herders have bid farewell to their
centuries-old nomadic lifestyle and settled down in towns and
cities during the past few years…. Tibet plans to invest 400
million Yuan more in nomads’ settlement of 13.4 thousands
households in the approaching five years during the “Twelfth
Five-Year” plan period of China.”43

The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De

Schutter, in his report Mission to China, highlighted the issues
surrounding the nomadic resettlement in Tibet. On the estimate
of Tibetans affected by this policy he writes: “Assessing the precise
number of resettled herders and rural residents is difficult, both
because local authorities are encouraged to overestimate their
achievements compared to official targets, and because a number
of resettled herders move back to their pastures after recognising
the impossibility of sustaining a decent livelihood in resettlement
camps, while others migrate to cities in the hope of finding better
livelihood opportunities.

“However, it was reported in 2010 that between 50 and 80 percent

of the 2.25 million nomads on the Tibetan plateau were being
progressively relocated.”44

In a comprehensive report published by the Human Rights Watch

in June 2013, titled They Say We Should be Grateful : Mass Rehousing
and Relocation in Tibetan Areas of China, it details the staggering scale
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and speed of mass relocation in Tibet. In the course of China’s
modern history, the report describes, Tibetan rural population being
remodelled by these policies is “unprecedented in the post-Mao
era.”45

The ‘Western Development’ Strategy

Since its first announcement in 1999,46 the ‘Great Opening of the
West’ development strategy had evolved and according to documents
issued in the year 2001, it includes over 71% of China’s total area
that make up only 29% of its population. In the document issued in
1999, it is intended to benefit ten provincial-level regions.47

The Great Opening of the West is planned to be implemented

over the course of 50 years in three phases. The initial phase was
scheduled from 2001 to 2010, where the focus was largely on building
infrastructure, health care, schooling system and strengthening the
accessibility of state broadcast in rural areas. 48

The second phase of this campaign, which is scheduled to be

implemented from the year 2010 to 2030. During this second phase,
the focus would be trained on accelerating economic and ‘cultural
development.’ And in the final phase of the campaign, it would be
to lift up the living standards of the population in the west on par
with the rest of China.

The New Socialist Countryside and the Comfortable

Housing Campaign
A new radical approach to renovate and remodel rural Tibetan
housing in the TAR as part of nation-wide initiative to “Build a New
Socialist Countryside” was taking shape in 2005, which according to
an official document says, it is an effort to improve “the production
and living condition of farmers and herdsmen, and increase their
income.”49

The “Comfortable Housing” policy was formally launched in 2006

to carry out renovation or reconstruction of private residences. It

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was made official as this policy appeared in the government’s 11th
Five-Year plan (2006-2010), which aims to ensure that 80% of
Tibetan farmers and herders in the TAR would live in “safe and
suitable” housing within five years. 50

This policy is staggering in terms of number of Tibetans directly

affected since its implementation. According to figures cited in
official media, under this policy, TAR’s government met the target to
move over “2.1 million Tibetans ...to new houses or rebuilt houses
from 2006 to 2012.” This also went with an announcement by the
TAR’s government to rehouse and relocate 185,000 rural households,
which amounts to about 900,000 people within three years.51

The Leapfrog Development Strategy

Top leadership associated with governing Tibet met during the
Fifth National Work Forum on Tibet, convened by the central
government in July 2010. 52 It was supposedly to introspect and
frame policies after mass peaceful Tibetan protests throughout
Tibet in 2008. They maintained that there was no major flaws in
ongoing policies in Tibet and had “been proved entirely correct.”
However, the government felt the need to implement a more vibrant
and ambitious rapid-growth strategy, which was termed “Leapfrog
Development Strategy.”

The then Party Secretary of the TAR, Zhang Qingli, in an interview

outlined this new strategy, which could be pushed through with even
larger investment to spur economic growth and further plans to
reorganize the Tibetan countryside. This strategy aimed at bringing
the per-capita net income of herders and nomads “close to the
national level” by 2020.53

This strategy resonated right to the top Chinese leadership as the

then President of the PRC, Hu Jintao, was quoted in the state
media saying that the “Leapfrog Development Strategy” includes
“combination of economic growth, well-off life, a healthy eco-
environment, and social stability and progress.”54

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One of the key aspects of the “Leapfrog Development Strategy”
is the establishment of “New Socialist Villages,” renovation and
relocation of Tibetan herders and nomads. This strategy seemed to
stem from growing frustration within the authorities in Tibet over
perceived slow progress and in order to accelerate developmental
projects in Tibet.

In addition to China’s plan to relocate 900,000 Tibetans by the end

of 2016, 55in a move to completely rid its region of herders and
nomads, the Qinghai government announced in 2009 to settle all
herders in its province, which is over a half a million Tibetans, by
2014. 56

Challenges faced by Tibetans who are affected by these policies are

documented in two comprehensive reports on the same issue by the
Human Rights Watch. In its report published in 2013, They Say We
Should be Grateful, it documents testimonies drawn from their on-field
interviews in Tibet. Other than inevitable large scale embezzlement
of public funds by the authorities, Tibetans speak of coerced
expulsion from their grassland and homes, inadequate consultation
and compensation and real threat to their culture and way of life. 57

One such expression of grief that resonated with its readers in

Tibet and even the cadres, is an essay that appeared in a popular
website within Tibet, Na Shon Sar Pa (New Tibetan Youth). The author
of the essay who has adopted the pen name Bongtak Rilu, writes
eloquently about the challenges facing Tibetan nomads affected by
nomadic resettlement policies. His essay, written in earthy nomadic
style, outlines Eight Losses Faced by Tibetan Nomads due to China’s
resettlement policy. Although no longer existing in its original
website, a translation is available on the website of the Tibetan
Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, the premier Tibetan
rights group in exile.58 Here we reproduce the english translations of
the five of the Eight Losses Faced by Tibetan Nomads as expressed by
Bongtak Rilu:

Loss of independent livelihood

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Since ancient times, drogpas (nomads) have depended on livestock
for their living.  They have been used to eating dried meat, butter,
cheese, milk, yoghurt and tsampa. These have become their staple
diets. Moreover they survive on animal produces such as sheep wool,
yak skin, cow dung and so on. They make tents, quilts and mattresses
out of yak hide. Milk and yoghurt gave them a robust health. Yak
and sheep dung fuel their hearths. With resettlement in urban areas,
drogpas have been deprived of their traditional sources of living and
staple diets. Now drogpas have to visit Chinese streets (gya sang) to
buy milk, yoghurt, cheese and firewood. The prices of these foods,
which drogpas are used to eating, have skyrocketed. They have to
pay six to eight renminbi for one gyama(Approximately 500 gram)
of milk and thirteen to fifteen renminbi for one gyama of meat.
Drogpas have no choice but to wait – their throats dry and hands
empty – for the compensation money the state provides them. Their
previous independent source of living has now disappeared.

Loss of unity and solidarity

It is generally said that Tibetan people are kind and compassionate.

Tibetan drogpas, in particular, have developed a harmonious
relation with their surrounding environment, including the snow-
mountains. Because of difficult travel and communication systems
and other environmental hazards on the roof of the world, drogpas
have had to settle in particular areas. In some places, only one or
two families can be found. Cities with vast population have never
existed. Drogpas are divided into different villages. When they
migrate to greener pastures, treat animals infected with diseases
and shear them for wool, drogpas seek the help of fellow drogpas
from other villages. As a result, they get plenty of opportunities to
mingle and cooperate with each other. Their experience of helping
each other means drogpas have developed a culture of unity and
solidarity among themselves. With the resettlement in urban areas,
drogpas have been deprived of work requiring collective efforts.
They now abhor helping each other. Because of atomised lives,
drogpa culture of unity and solidarity is disappearing. Without any
cooperative interaction among themselves, drogpas remain isolated
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in their [concrete houses] staring blankly at each other.

Loss of culture of decency and respect

Tibetans are known to be decent people. To elders we accord the

respect generally due to our parents. Those who are younger than
us, we shower them with love and kindness as if they are our real
siblings. More admirable than this is the kind of hospitality given to
guests visiting our homes. Even beggars who possess nothing would
be showered with clothes to wear and food to eat when they arrive
in nomadic areas. When guests leave our homes, we have a beautiful
culture of not walking in front or behind them. With the resettlement
of dropgas in urban areas – in concrete houses – the culture of
decency and respect among drogpas is disappearing. Drogpas
now avoid visiting their neighbours. When they leave their houses,
they put huge locks on their doors. They live their lives suspecting
about anything that they see and touch. Their previous culture of
hospitality, of inviting guests to their homes, has disappeared.

Loss of a unique livelihood

In the course of their long history, nations have developed their own
unique source of livelihood. Tibetans are no exception. Drogpas have
developed their own four-squared black tents to live in, three-headed
hearths to light their homes, ropes to tie animals – thus crafting a
livelihood autonomous and self-sufficient. Because of the creative
genius of our ancestors, we have a unique dwelling called nomadic
tent. These tents are constructed in such a way that they can absorb
fresh air from outside, while getting rid of the damp air inside. The
tents have the ability to keep dwellers warm during winter and cool
during summer. Yak dung can easily catch fire in the three-headed
hearths, causing no serious problems to nomads and their animals.
Moreover, the art of weaving clothes give drogpas a good physical
exercise. Whether milking their animals or churning out butter and
cheese, such activities give them a good source of living and strong
physique. Drogpa livelihood is thus unique and productive. With the
resettlement of drogpas in urban areas, this unique livelihood is now

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disappearing. Unlike their drogpa ancestors, the coming generation
shall be deprived of [the joy] of erecting tents, building hearths,
milking animals and churning out butter and cheese.

Loss of ancestral homelands

Since ancient times, drogpas and their ancestors have been dwelling
on high mountains blessed with pure rivers. Our ancestors have
been performing the ritual of burning incense (sang) on mountains,
throwing blessed mani stones (deu bum) into rivers, putting up
prayer flags on the hills and hanging prayer flags on trees in forests.
All these rituals, conducted for thousands of years, are meant to
protect rivers, forests and mountains from pollution. We believe that
digging out the earth will invite the wrath of nyens (evil spirits),
polluting waters that of lu (nagas) and destroying mountains would
alienate ancestral gods dwelling in them. Such myths and beliefs
have served to protect Tibet’s environment. Resettling the nomads
haphazardly in urban areas by forcing them to sell their animals, all
in the name of grassland protection means they will be displaced
from their ancestral homelands. This will not work. An example
could be given of Australia, a nation that relies heavily on animal
husbandry. Australian government tried to increase the population
of livestock by hunting down foxes. This, however, had a devastating
impact on the population of livestock. In the end, the government
was forced to bring foxes from other countries and released them on
the grasslands. Similarly, there has to be an interdependent existence
between livestock and grasslands of Tibet. Simply dispensing with
the animals cannot save Tibetan grasslands.

Just before this report goes to press, UNESCO will hear an application
from the Chinese government to confer UNESCO World Heritage
status for a vast area in Tibet of lakes, wetlands and wildlife from
July 2, 2017.63 Spreading over 60,000 km2 area, known as Achen
Gangyap in Tibetan and Hoh Xil, or Kekexili in Chinese, is in
the middle of three major nature reserves that increasingly exclude
normal Tibetan land use such as nomadic herding, situate the state
as the sole agency of control, and encourage mass domestic tourism.

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This plan, if approved by UNESCO will erode Tibet’s fragile sources
of rivers as it involves the removal and relocation of Tibetan nomads,
who for centuries have managed to protect the environment, the
grassland, its wildlife and the rivers which sustain them all.64

With its huge potential to develop into a profitable site for mass
domestic tourism, this will reinforce China’s plan to meet its official
target to increase the number of annual domestic visits to Tibet to
reach 20 million Chinese tourists by the year 2020 in the hope many
of these tourists will settle in these areas.65 This will lead to dramatic
change in demographic composition of Tibet.

This raises serious concerns about China’s nomination of Achen

Gangyap for World Heritage Site. If UNESCO approves this
nomination, it excludes herders and Tibetan nomads and it
threatens the region’s biodiversity. Such concerns were included
in findings of a scientific evaluation team that travelled to Achen
Gangyap in 2016 to carry out an official mission for UNESCO. 66
The delegation admitted that people had expressed concern to them
about relocations. In a party-state that is found to be one of the
least free countries in the world by Freedom House, their concerns
must be taken into serious consideration as UNESCO sits to decide
the fate of Tibetan nomads and their distinct culture. This must be
seen in the light of other policies implemented in Tibet that further
marginalize Tibetans in their own land.

Population Transfer and Western China ‘Development’

Programme
According to Jung Chang and Jon Halliday in their book, Mao:
the Unknown Story, “From the time he conquered China, Mao was
determined to take Tibet by force. When he saw Stalin on 22 January
1950, he asked if the Soviet air force could transport supplies to
Chinese troops ‘currently preparing for an attack on Tibet.’ Stalin’s
reply was: ‘It’s good that you are preparing to attack. The Tibetans
need to be subdued... ‘Stalin also advised flooding Tibet and other
border regions with Han Chinese: ‘Since ethnic Chinese make up

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no more than 5 per cent of Xinjiang’s population, the percentage
of ethnic Chinese should be brought to 30... In fact, all the border
territories should be populated by Chinese...’ This is exactly what the
Chinese communist regime then proceeded to do.”1

In 1952, three years after founding the People’s Republic of China,

Mao Zedong said, “Tibet covers a large area but is thinly populated.
Its population should be increased from the present two or three
million to five or six million, and then to over ten million.”2 At that
time Tibet had just been occupied by the Chinese communists in
1951 and yet Mao already had fully formed idea to swamp Tibet
with Chinese.

In 1955, Liu Shaoqi, the president of the newly formed republic, told
the late Panchen Lama that Tibet was a vast and thinly populated
country and China had a big population which could be settled
there.3 In August 1957, Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier, gave an
important speech on the incorporation of non-Chinese regions into
the national plan. The premier pointed out the shortage of land and
underground natural resources in the Chinese-inhabited regions and
the importance of developing natural resources in areas populated by
the ‘fraternal minority nationalities’ to support the industrialization.
Zhou said that the natural resources in the minority regions had been
left untapped because of lack of labour power and technological
expertise. The Chinese premier said, “Without mutual assistance,
especially assistance from the Han people, the minority people will
find it difficult to make significant progress on their own.”

With clear guidelines from the highest leaders of the Communist

Party, the xiafang campaign was launched in 1956. Xiafang or the
‘downward transfer to the countryside’ was a campaign to move
millions of people from the urban areas of eastern China to the
remote and sparsely-populated regions in the north and west with
intention to integrate and assimilate the minorities. Over 600,000
people were sent to Amdo, Gansu, Ningxia, East Turkestan and
Inner Mongolia in the first couple years after the campaign was
launched.4 A large number of Chinese also arrived in central Tibet.

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Xiafang campaign was intensified during the Great Leap Forward,
which produced disastrous consequences. The Great Leap Forward,
launched in 1958, was a campaign to mobilize the masses to
intensify China’s economic growth. The result was a famine of such
magnitude, unprecedented in China’s own famine-stricken history.
Scholars say about 20-30 million people died.5 Others put the figure
much higher.

After Deng Xiaoping came to powering 1978, he initiated the ‘four

modernizations’ to revive China’s stagnant economy. As a part
of his ‘four modernizations’ drive Deng said in 1987 in regard
to Tibet, “Tibet is sparsely populated. Two million Tibetans are
not enough to handle the task of developing such a huge region.
There is no harm in sending Han into Tibet to help... and move
ahead in the four modernizations in China.”6 As part of his ‘four
modernizations’ drive, Deng also demolished the commune system
and let peasants have the right to private ownership of wealth. This
led to an increased agricultural output, which in turn produced
huge surplus in rural labour — the floating population. Millions of
peasants, freed from the commune system, and unable to find jobs
on their own in the rural areas because of increased mechanization
of agriculture, drifted to urban China. Seeing such an exodus into
cities as a threat to social stability, the Chinese authorities planned
a step-by-step migration to the border regions of Xinjiang, Gansu
and Tibet, including Tibetan areas in Gansu, Qinghai, Yunnan and
Sichuan. It was estimated that this vast region could absorb more
than 100 million migrant Chinese workers.7 These Chinese workers
did indeed flock to sparsely-populated Tibet, to Tibetan urban areas
like Lhasa, Shigatse, Chamdo and Gormo and urban centres in
eastern and north-eastern Tibet.

According to Tibet Under Communist China: 50 Years, the Chinese

population transfer to the TAR was carried out in earnest in the
1980s when Beijing launched the campaign to ‘Help Tibet Prosper’.
In May 1984 Radio Beijing reported that, “Over 60,000 workers,
representing the vanguard groups to help in the construction
work in the TAR, are arriving in Tibet daily and have started their
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preliminary work. They will be helping in the electricity department,
schools, hotels, cultural institutions and construction of mills and
factories.”8 Another 60,000 Chinese workers – mainly from Sichuan
province – arrived in the TAR in the summer of 1985.9 In the same
year, there were 50,000 to 60,000 Chinese civilian residents in Lhasa
alone, and within three years this figure doubled.10

The influx of Chinese settlers onto the Tibetan plateau accelerated

in the early 1990s due to Deng Xiaoping’s personal encouragement
of the migration of large numbers of Chinese ‘comrades’ into Tibet
to ‘impart scientific and technological know-how and share their
scientific expertise.’11 In January 1991, Beijing Review reported that
about 300,000 workers were prepared to join the new construction
projects in the TAR.12 In Lhoka alone about 28,000 Chinese settlers
arrived between 1987 and 1992. 43,860 arrived in Nagchu between
1986 and 1992.13

Around this time Mao Rubai, vice-chairman of the TAR government

was quoted as saying that apart from the PLA soldiers and other
military personnel stationed in the autonomous region there were
one million new Chinese settlers in the TAR.14

Tibet Under Communist China: 50 Years says it is the fertile Tibetan

areas outside of the TAR’which have the highest concentration of
Chinese migrants. These territories include the whole of Amdo and
a substantial portion of Kham. Official Chinese statistics published
between 1990 and 1995 show the total population of these regions
as 7,742,000. Out of this Tibetans constituted 2,546,500, about
32.89 percent.15

Under various guises such as ‘reducing the gap between the eastern
provinces and western regions’ and maintenance of ‘sustained,
stable and coordinated growth’, population transfer was carried out.
In 1992, Chen Kuiyuan, the party boss of TAR, even advocated
setting up a framework which would allow and encourage extensive
Chinese migration.

Chen said, “We should open Tibet wider to the outside. In other
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words, we should open Tibet to all countries and regions and open
our job market to all fellow countrymen.”16

Around this time, development programmes in Tibet emerged such

as the plan to turn Lhasa-Shigatse-Tsethang triangle into a ‘bread
basket.’ Elsewhere in TAR and other Tibetan areas, mining, logging
of trees and commercial animal husbandry (to raise pigs, ducks and
chickens to meet the demand of Chinese settlers in Tibet) were
intensified. These economic projects and initiatives were further
stepped up after the Third Work Forum on Tibet in 1994, which
ushered in economically liberal but politically hard-line policies
to assimilate Tibet in the Chinese economic, social and culture
mainstream. The major thrust of the strategy was “to open Tibet’s
door wide to inner parts of the country and encourage traders,
investments, economic units and individuals from China to central
Tibet to run different sorts of enterprises.”17

Massive highway constructions in Tibet and other infrastructural

projects like the construction of airports, dams and extensive mining
encouraged unskilled labourers from neighbouring provinces like
Sichuan to flock into Tibet and transforming Tibetan cities and
urban centres into so many Chinatowns.18

This influx of Chinese migrant workers made commodities in short

supply and prices shot up. Pressure on the land and Tibetans became
so apparent that a high-level Tibetan in TAR, remarked in 1992,
“There is a little door and a big door. The little door opens to the
outside world, and the big door opens to China ...The big door will
outweigh the little door, and Tibet is more than ever in danger of
being engulfed.”19

Population transfer and resource extraction was expedited with the

completion of the Lhasa-Gormo railway line in 2006. Tracking the
Still Dragon, a report by the Washington, DC-based International
Campaign for Tibet, says the railway line “has had a dramatic impact
on the lives of Tibetans and on the land itself. As the ‘centrepiece’ and
most visible symbol of Beijing’s plan to develop the western regions

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of the People’s Republic of China, the rail road is accelerating the
influx of Chinese people to the plateau, exacerbating the economic
marginalisation of Tibetans, and threatening Tibet’s fragile high-
altitude environment.”20

During its first year Lhasa-Gormo railroad transported “1.5 million

passengers into Tibet.”21 The director of TAR’s Development and
Reform Committee, Jin Shixun, stated that over 60 percent of the
people coming into Tibet by train were businessmen, students and
transient workers and only 40 percent were tourists.

However, according to Tracking the Still Dragon, “In 2006 a total of

2.51 million tourists visited TAR, almost matching the reported 2.7
million Tibetan residents in the whole of TAR, and this figure is
expected to more than double by 2010.”22

Such mass migration into isolated regions after railroad construction

follows a pattern seen elsewhere in China. For instance, the
Chinese population of Inner Mongolia increased five-fold after the
completion of a railroad from Zhangjiakou in Hebei province to
Hohhot, the capital city of Inner Mongolia from 1912 to 1949. By
1949 Chinese outnumbered the Mongolians 11 to one.

China exporting its excess population to the minority regions in the

west and importing the region’s vast and abundant natural resources
was first formulated in China’s seventh five-year plan (1986-1991).
Angela Knowx in her forward to The Poverty of Plenty, a book
authored by Wang Xiaoqiang and Bai Nanfeng, writes, “Based on a
model of regional comparative advantage, the plan sees the western
regions as the providers of energy and mineral resources, to be used
by the central provinces where much of China’s energy and defence
industry is based, the argument being that the wealth created in this
region can later be shared with the west. The plan also provides
personnel to be transferred from the east to the west in order to raise
the level of technology there...In April 1988 the then party secretary
Zhao Ziyang stated, ‘Our goal is to seek common prosperity for all
nationalities, but this cannot be achieved simultaneously.’ For the

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time being, he said, the west was to supply the raw materials for the
development of the east, and in return provide a ready market for the
goods the east produces. Raising incomes, increasing marketization
and exploiting natural resources in the west are clearly of major
importance for this strategy.”23

In fact, in their book, The Poverty of Plenty, Wang Xiaoqiang and

Bai Nanfeng recommended that the central government create the
infrastructures needed to exploit the natural resources of Tibet, East
Turkestan (Ch. Xinjiang) and Inner Mongolia to feed the industries
of coastal China. They also recommended that in these minority
regions urban centres be established to house the Chinese migrant
workers involved in resource extraction. This they hinted would
serve the double purpose of relieving population pressure in China
proper and establishing a growing Chinese presence in the minority
regions that would serve to stifle separatist trends. This is China’s
master plan for the minorities: use the natural resources of minority
regions to fuel China proper’s economic development while pressing
down the minorities by exporting China’s excess population to these
regions.24

More than a decade later, China came up with an overall solution

to the pressing problems first articulated by Wang and Bai in The
Poverty of Plenty. According to the London-based Tibet Information
Network’s publication, China’s Great Leap West, “President Jiang
Zemin launched the Western China Development Programme in a
speech he gave in Xian on 17 June 1999. The initial emphasis of
the campaign was on the acceleration of development focusing on
the western regions, Tibet, which include Tibetan areas outside the
autonomous region, Xinjiang, Sichuan, Gansu, Yunnan, Shaanxi,
Ningxia, Guizhou and the Chongqing municipality, which altogether
cover 56 per cent of China’s total land mass and 23 percent of its
total population. Party speeches on the subject were little more than
lists of ideals and grand plans, devoid of context on implementation
or priorities.”25

Despite the vagueness of the economic priorities of the Western

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China Development Programme in the initial announcement, its
political compulsions were clearly articulated right from the beginning.
Party leaders have explicitly linked the success of the campaign to
the survival of the party. Jiang Zemin, the then president of China,
has been quoted as saying that the campaign “has major significance
for the future prosperity of the country and the (Party’s) long reign
and perennial stability.”26 On 18 September 2000, Jiang Zemin was
quoted by China Daily, as saying that developing the west “will help
develop China’s economy, stabilise local society and contribute to
China’s unity.”27

But external developments also forced China to speed up the pace of

the implementation of its Western China Development Programme.
NATO military intervention in the war in Kosovo was perceived by
the nervous regime in Beijing as a dangerous precedent set by the
West for interference in a nation’s internal affairs. Hu Angang, an
economist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said, “The worst case
scenario – and what we are trying to avoid – is China fragmenting
like Yugoslavia... Already, regional (economic) disparity is equal to –
or worse than – what we saw in Yugoslavia before it split.”28

A Chinese economist living in the West, quoted in China’s Great

Leap West, explained it all when he said, “First of all the Chinese
authorities are looking at the economic aspect, the western areas
are very poor, and the standard of living needs to be increased. But
Beijing is also concerned about the potential for social unrest, due to
poverty and nationalistic feelings in areas such as Tibet and Xinjiang.
Their real fear is that the west could become another Chechnya.
That is the origin of the campaign to develop the west.”29

So the solution China came up to solve its pressing political and

economic problems in Tibet and elsewhere in the western region
was the Western China Development Programme. Hidden behind
this facade are the colonial power’s greed for native resources and its
need to control and extinguish native restlessness so as to facilitate
Beijing’s continued exploitation of native resources. Much of the
“development” in the Western China Development Programme

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consists of construction of infrastructure: building of roads, laying
of railway lines, airports and communication facilities, all geared
towards facilitating the exploitation of the region’s abundant natural
resources and transporting these to China’s resource-hungry coastal
seaboard.

It is this aspect of the Western China Development Programme

that is worrying Tibetans on the plateau. A Tibetan living in Lhasa
summed up some of the deeper fears of the development of the
west when he told Tibet Information Network, “The western
development project aims to transfer large numbers of Chinese for
permanent settlement into areas inhabited by minority nationalities,
exploit mineral resources, and above all to bear down heavily on
people for perceived political intransigence. Contrary to the claims
of ‘rare opportunity’ for the minority nationalities, this campaign
represents a period of emergency and darkness.”

Thus contrary to the officially-expressed benign intentions of the

Western China Development Programme, the real reasons and
compulsions that are forcing the Chinese authorities to develop
this vast, troublesome region is to ensure that the forces of market
economy will succeed in fully integrating its ‘Wild West’ into China
proper.

As a part of its Western China Development Programme, China

came up with a number of projects to help migration of the poor
or displaced Chinese population to Tibet. One of them was the
Western Poverty Reduction Project. A component of this project
is to develop agriculture in the Dulan area of Amdo and to relocate
58,000 Chinese settlers there. In 2000 the World Bank withdrew
its US$40 million loan to this project in the face of protests from
Tibetans and their international supporters. China said it would go
ahead with the resettlement project using its own finance.30

In his book Written in Blood, the Tibetan author Tashi Rabten or

Theurang writes that “each year the number of tourists [from China]
increases ... and there are clear signs that a huge number of them are

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preparing themselves to settle in Tibet.”31

The impact of this extraordinarily large influx of Chinese migrant

workers into Tibet is multiple. The development in infrastructure to
facilitate the extraction and transportation of Tibet’s abundant and
till now largely untapped natural resources is attracting increasing
number of jobless Chinese workers to the TAR and other Tibetan
areas. These Chinese workers benefit from government subsidies
and an administration that favours them at the expense of Tibetans
in terms of employment. Obtaining jobs often entails guanxi, “the
backdoor” or connections with officials and a proficiency in Chinese
language, which very few Tibetans have.32 As a result, Gongmeng Report
mentions that there is “a relentless trend of growing disparities”
between Tibetan areas and Han areas and between urban and rural
areas amid the process of rapid modernization and marketization.33

In order to accommodate this influx of Chinese settlers in Tibet,

Beijing has initiated “massive construction schemes and rows upon
rows of Chinese barrack-style housing”34 which the authorities
term as “a new highland city with national characteristics”.35 These
uniform structures have appeared in most Tibetan towns and cities
and are predominantly populated by fresh Chinese migrant workers
and settlers.

In his essay Tibet Through Chinese Eyes, Peter Hessler, who travelled
to Tibet, writes, “In Tibet Sichuanese have helped themselves to a
large chunk of the economy. This was clear from the moment I
arrived at the Lhasa airport, where thirteen of the sixteen restaurants
bordering the entrance advertised Sichuan food. One was Tibetan.
Virtually all small business in Lhasa follows this pattern; everywhere
I saw Sichuan restaurants and shops. Locals told that 80 percent of
Lhasa’s Han were Sichuanese ... In front of the Jokhang, the holiest
temple in Tibet, rows of stalls sell khataks, the ceremonial scarves
that pilgrims use as offerings. It’s a job one would expect to see filled
by Tibetans [but] all the stalls were run by Sichuanese... There were
more than 200 of them — relatives, friends of relatives, relatives of
friends — and they had completely filled that niche.”36

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The influx of huge number of Chinese migrants, all with the same
aim of making quick money, is eroding Tibetan cultural values and
Tibet’s environment. Perhaps, the worst impact is the everyday
interactions that Tibetans have with this huge mass of migrant
Chinese workers. Everyday, Tibetan values, traditional way of life
and outlook to the world are gradually changing for the worse.
The impact of this cultural invasion is reflected in changing habits,
the decreasing use of Tibetan language and the new and much
transformed urban landscape. These changes force Tibetans to
adjust to the cultural influence of this “new majority” at the cost of
Tibetan identity and culture.37

China’s Urbancide in Tibet

The State Council of China unveiled the National New Type
Urbanization Plan (NUP) in 2014 to increase the percentage of
urban residents in the total population of China from 52.6
percent in 2012 to 60 percent by 2020. The ratio of citizens
with urban hukou (resident permit) will increase 35.3 percent to
approximately 45 percent. After many decades of deliberations
and halt in reforms to the strict urban hukou system, the Chinese
government has finally loosened procedures for rural migrants to
transfer their household registrations to urban areas.

This policy has a unique impact on Tibet, where urbanization has

become a major burden. Ethnically Chinese migrants coming from
China’s densely populated coastal provinces have started moving
to Tibet and the reformed hukou system has made it easier to
transfer their household registration in Tibet.

“Urbancide,” refer to the extinguishing of Tibetan culture and

identity through an influx of millions of Chinese migrants in Tibet.
At the same time, Tibetans in rural regions are made landless through
expropriation of their land. As suggested by Emily T. Yeh in her
book, Taming Tibet, this is part of China’s state territorialization of
Tibet.38

According to James Leibold, senior lecturer in Chinese Politics and

108
Asian Studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne argues that the
Chinese state, as part of its arsenal of responses, has intensified
urbanization, hoping that economic development and cultural
contact will lead to assimilation and stability. 39

The policy is already taking effect, as seen in the growth of Tibetan

cities. As of 2016, Lhasa, Shigatse, Lhoka, Nyingtri, Tsoshar, Siling,
and Chamdo were recognized as prefecture-level cities in Tibet.
According to recent reports from China, two more will soon join
that list: Nagchu and Ngari are to be upgraded from county-level
cities to prefecture-level cities.

The late Bawa Phuntsok Wangyal, a high-ranking communist cadre

in Tibet, pointed out in his book that cities should be centres of
China’s regional autonomous areas. Cities and towns of regional
and national autonomous areas should have cultural, economic and
political characteristics of people living in these areas. As a result
of reforms and changes in these areas, in reality gradually these
characteristics have disappeared and national and regional autonomy
remains in name only. Majority of people living in these cities and
town in Tibetan areas are Chinese migrants. This issue needs to be
thought carefully and rectified.40

Hukou Reform: An Influx of Chinese Migrants in Tibet

Apart from government officials and military personnel who are
transferred to Tibet, there has been a huge influx of ethnically
Chinese migrants due to highly subsidized aid and investment in
infrastructural development in Tibet. Chinese migrants, many of
whom are facing a lack of employment opportunities in their home
regions, are attracted to jobs and opportunities to start a business
in Tibet. The population transfer from China to Tibet is following
the same policy implemented in China-occupied Mongolia (today’s
Inner Mongolia) during the Qing Dynasty, where Mongolians were
already a minority in the end of the 19th century. The agrarian
focus of such policies meant that Chinese migrants settled in the
countryside and they became dominant in rural as well as urban

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populations. The policy has continued through modern times: the
number of cities in Inner Mongolia has increased from 193 in 1979
to 668 in 1997.41

The Western Region Development (WRD) Office of the State

Council has suggested that no government authorities should
collect urban population surcharge fees or similar fees from people
moving their hukous to the Western Region. 42 This suggestion has
further incentivized Chinese migrants to settle in Tibetan cities. In
the coming decades, Tibet could witness a population growth of
millions of Chinese migrants in various cities.

Rural Tibetans (Forced) Migration to Cities and Towns

Urbanization in Tibet has also encouraged many Tibetans living in
rural areas to take up non-agricultural professions in Tibetan cities.
Their ancestral lands are sold to land developers to build industries
to attract migrants entering Tibet. As Straits Times reported recently,
“Out of China’s 31 provinces, regions, and municipalities, only
the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) still maintains a distinction
between rural and urban residents.” 43 Because of the rural/urban
classification scheme, Chinese migrants coming from outside Tibet
are particularly encouraged to resettle in Tibetan cities, where they
will have access to social welfare schemes.

In addition to natural migration patterns, a greater number of

Tibetans from rural areas are being moved to towns through the
government’s forced resettlement policy. Pastoral Tibetans who
live scattered with their herds in mountains and valleys are moved
into compact and fenced residences. This allows the government
to control the movement of these rural residents in the name of
social stability. As Sophie Richardson, China director at the Human
Rights Watch, pointed out, “Tibetans have no say in the design of
[relocation] policies that are radically altering their way of life, and –
in an already highly repressive context – no ways to challenge them.”
Rights violations during this process range from lack of consultation
to failure to provide adequate compensation, both of which are

110
required under international law for evictions to be legitimate. After
the move, the sudden shift from nomadic life to cities has increased
unemployment in Tibet.

A field study conducted by Tibetan researcher Gongbo Tashi (Alias

Gonpo Tashi) and Marc Foggin in 2009 shows the empirical impact
of ecological resettlement in Lhoka prefecture. The researchers
interviewed more than 300 individuals in this survey. They found
that forced resettlement deprived the residents of Dekyi village of
their livestock, which was the main source of their livelihood. The
new town where the villagers were resettled provided insufficient
space to rear livestock. New farm training is supposed to be given
to the resettled Tibetans to help them begin their new lives but most
of the families complain about not receiving any of the training
promised by the government before resettlement. As a result, the size
of their livestock decreased dramatically, thereby making previously
self-sufficient rural Tibetans heavily dependent on government
subsidies. The table below indicates the shrinking size of livestock
populations in Dekyi village after the resettlement 44
Table No.1 Average livestock number, pre-resettlement in
Dekyi village, Tsona county, Lhoka prefecture

Original Yak and Cattle SHeep and Donkey and Horses

County Goats
Before After Before After Before After
Darnang 1,320 255 876 107 267 0
county
Tsona 2,457 126 1,260 32 253 0
county
n=42 households (over 300 individuals)
Source: Gonpo Tashi, 2009 survey

Another  experience of residents in two resettlements

in Qinghai province from 2005-2009 could be taken as a case
study. Residents were interviewed by a Chinese researcher, Xu Jun,
with a group of other researchers. The group spent one month in
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each year in Yushul and Gormo prefecture in Amdo. In his study
of  these prefectures, where resettlement took place, Xu concluded
that resettled nomads faced an intense sense of displacement: “We
saw first-hand their struggle to make a new life as they resettle in a
new place, puzzling over their future. Some are disappointed. Some
are shameful, as they talked about their lives and having to rely on
their relatives who remained in grassland. Some have to return to
grassland to do some odd job to earn a living for their children.”
This five-year investigation showed that most of those resettled in
or near cities during the period of the San Jiang Yun( Three parallel
rivers project) protection and rebuilding program have not been
able to make a living without access to grassland resources. On the
other hand, no clear data exists to prove that such immigration had
been helpful to the grassland ecosystem, which is the stated motive
behind the relocations.45

Urbanization and Social Stability 

In cities, unlike in remote areas of Tibet, people’s movements and
contacts can be monitored through a grid system. China carried out
its first urban grid management experiment in Dongcheng district in
Beijing in October 2004. 46 Down the road, if China remains devoid
of real democratic checks and balances, there is little doubt that the
continued development of grid management will only lead to a model
for a modern police state in Tibet. This in part lends confidence to
President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang’s urbanization plan.

Human Rights Watch released a comprehensive report in 2013

47
on how the urban grid management system in Lhasa, the capital
of Tibet, has proven to be efficient in monitoring the movement of
residents. In this new grassroots-level of urban administration, each
“neighborhood” or “community” in towns will be divided into three
or more grid units. At least eight pilot units were set up in Lhasa in
April 2012, and in September they were declared to have “achieved
notable results.” In October of the same year, the regional party
secretary stated that because “the Lhasa practice has fully proved
the effectiveness of implementing grid management to strengthen

112
and innovate social management [i.e., controlling mass protests],”
the system should be made universal in “the towns, rural areas, and
temples” of the TAR.

Land Expropriation
Nearby towns and remote villages in Tibet are now connected to
extended cities. Land originally used for cultivation is increasingly
seeing construction of vast infrastructure projects as well as
residential and commercial buildings. According to the World Bank,
rural land requisition and conversion for industrial use in China has
been particularly inefficient because the decisions have been
largely driven by administrative decisions rather than market demand
48

China’s urbanization has consumed significant land resources as

urban boundaries are continuously expanding outward and the
territorial jurisdictions of cities are increasing, primarily through

113
the expropriation of surrounding rural land and its integration into
urban areas. As indicated in the graph below, the demand for urban
requisition of land has soared over the past few years in China due
to the urbanization project.

Between 2001 and 2011, the amount of land in China classified as

urban construction land had increased by 17,600 square kilometers
(sq km), reaching a total area of 41,805 sq km in 2011, an increase
of 58 percent over a decade. About 90 percent of demand for urban
land was met through the expropriation of rural land, while only 10
percent was supplied from the existing stock of undeveloped urban
construction land. Following this trend, as Tibetan cities grow, a
sizable amount of  rural land in Tibet will be expropriated by the
Chinese government.

The government and, to an extent, the academic community in

China, have largely overlooked the implication of rapid urbanization
for millions of farmers or villagers who have been made landless
(legally or illegally) over the years. According to an official statistic,
three million people become landless farmers every year in China.
The total number is expected to double in 2020 because of the
current pace of urbanization.49

The growth of cities has another consequence. In her book Taming

Tibet, Emily T. Yeh stated that according to China’s Law of Regional
National Autonomy (LRNA), when regions, prefectures, and
counties are upgraded to cities, the autonomous status of these
areas will be lost. Uradyn Bulag, an anthropologist who researches
Inner Mongolia, advanced the argument that the benefits of an
administrative promotion from county to city, particularly for local
leaders, “checkmates ethnic sensitivity” about the loss of ethnic
autonomous status.

China’s urbanization in Tibet (and across the country) is aimed as

a solution to China’s slowing economy. The policy is intended to
bring millions of Chinese migrant workers to settle and do business
in Tibet. As part of this process, Tibet’s cities have gone through

114
demographic shifts, resulting in the  strong influence of Chinese
culture.

The projected rate of 30 percent urbanization in Tibet in the coming

few decades would mean that all cities in Tibet will be dominated
by ethnic Chinese. As a result, Tibetans lose the language rights
associated with autonomous status. Meanwhile, mobility and
communication for urban residents is monitored strictly whenever
the government deems it necessary.

To feed the growth of cities, land, which is the only asset that many
rural Tibetans inherit from their ancestors, is bought by state-owned
enterprises (SOEs) and foreign companies. Tibetans from rural
areas who lose their land must look for unskilled, usually temporary
work. If the current rate of urban land requisition by the Chinese
government continues, the ownership of land in many areas in Tibet
will be transferred to Chinese migrants, businesses, and the state.

In response to these changes, Tibetan resistance will grow stronger.

Urbanization in Tibet, with the resulting damage to traditional ways
of life, cannot win the hearts of Tibetans as explicitly called for by
Xi Jinping at the last Work Forum50 held in Tibet. It has only created
more resentment among Tibetans.

Tibet Under Communist China: 50 Years sums up China’s rule in Tibet

in the following words, “Earlier communist China looked at
Tibet more from a geopolitical and security perspective. Now
coupled with this enduring imperial reason for staying put in
Tibet, an economically vibrant China looks to Tibet as the best
source for coastal China’s galloping demand for energy, fuel
and water. The devastating impact of this change in attitude
toward Tibet is already felt in Tibet as Tibetans, unable to
compete with more skilled Chinese settlers, are increasingly
marginalised by the forces of globalisation unleashed on the
roof of the world. Having lost their country, Tibetans in
increasing number are losing their jobs and their future to the
Chinese settlers streaming to Tibet to take advantage of the

115
economic boom.”51
Mining Tibet - Mineral Exploitation in Tibetan Areas of the PRC, a report
by the London-based Tibet Information Network, published
in 2002, says, “Many Tibetans see the immigration of large
numbers of Chinese into Tibetan areas as the most serious
threat to their land and resources and to traditional Tibetan
livelihoods and culture.”52
“I do not see we have that long before we reach the point of
no return. I am not saying all Tibetans are going to disappear
but by then there will be so many Chinese in Tibet, it will be
no longer realistic for the Tibetan people to regain a Tibet for
Tibetans. What has happened to the native Americans, to the
native Australians, is happening in Tibet,”53 Lhasang Tsering,
a Tibetan writer and activist, says in The Sun Behind the Cloud,
a documentary on the Tibetan struggle for freedom by Ritu
Sarin and Tenzing Sonam, two veteran filmmakers.
Given these fears, it is only natural for Tibetans to suspect, as
many do in Tibet, that China wants Tibet and not the Tibetans.
Conclusion
An estimated 2.25 million nomads live on the Tibetan Plateau.
For ages the Tibetan nomads skilfully managed their livestock
and sustained the land while adapting to the realities of Tibet’s
fragile ecological system. Since 2002, the Chinese government
has been implementing forced resettlement, land confiscation,
and fencing policies in pastoral areas inhabited primarily by
Tibetans, drastically curtailing their livelihood. Herders have
been required to slaughter or sell off their livestock and move
into newly-built housing colonies, abandoning their traditional
way of life.
Over 700,000 nomads have been settled since 2000 and
the official Chinese media state that 1.32 million Tibetan
nomads will have settled within a few years. The relocation in

116
permanent settlements has severed their intimate connection
with their animals, and rendered their knowledge of animal
and grassland management, inherited from one generation to
another, useless.
In December 2010 the UN Special Rapporteur on the right
to food, Olivier De Schutter, has encouraged the Chinese
authorities to reassess its nomad removal policies stating that
it “leaves the nomads with no other options than to sell their
herd and resettle.” However, Beijing’s forceful removal of
Tibetan nomads from traditional pastoral lives goes on, thus
destroying over 9000 years of Tibet’s mobile civilization.
China’s final solution to Tibetan culture and way of life is its
policy of population transfer into Tibet. This began with xiafang
or the ‘downward transfer to the countryside’ launched in
1956. This was a campaign to move millions of Chinese from
the urban areas of eastern China to the remote and sparsely-
populated regions such as Tibet with intention to integrate and
assimilate the minorities. Over 600,000 people were sent to
Amdo, East Turkestan and Inner Mongolia in the first couple
years after the campaign was launched.
The campaign was intensified during the Great Leap Forward,
which resulted in a famine of such magnitude, unprecedented
in China’s own famine-stricken history. Scholars say over 30
million people died.
During Deng’s ‘four modernizations’ campaign, more Chinese
were encouraged to go to sparsely populated Tibet. Millions
of peasants, freed from the commune system, and unable to
find jobs on their own in the rural areas because of increased
mechanization of agriculture, drifted to urban China. Seeing
such an exodus into cities as a threat to social stability, the
Chinese authorities planned a step-by-step migration to the
border regions like Tibet and East Turkestan. It was estimated
that this vast region could absorb more than 100 million

117
migrant Chinese workers. In 1984, there were 50,000 to 60,000
Chinese civilian residents in Lhasa alone, and within three
years this figure doubled.
Population transfer and resource extraction was expedited
with the completion of the Lhasa-Gormo railway line in 2006,
which transported 1.5 million passengers into Tibet in that
year alone. Over 60 percent of the people coming into Tibet
by train were businessmen, students and transient workers
and only 40 percent were tourists. Such mass migration into
isolated regions after railroad construction follows a pattern
seen in Inner Mongolia after the completion of a railroad to
Hohhot, the capital city of Inner Mongolia in 1911. By 1949
Chinese outnumbered the Mongolians 11 to one.
The impact of the population transfer through the xiafang
campaign, the railroad and the Western Development Program
represents a period of emergency for the Tibetans. This
extraordinarily large influx of Chinese settlers in Tibet has
multiple effects. The extraction and transportation of Tibet’s
abundant and till now untapped natural resources benefits the
Chinese at the expense of Tibetans. The Chinese have also
helped themselves to a large chunk of the economy such as
restaurants, small businesses and government jobs.
However, the biggest blow is the erosion of Tibetan cultural
values and Tibet’s environment. The everyday interactions that
Tibetans have with this huge mass of migrant Chinese workers
change Tibetan values, traditional way of life and outlook to
the world for the worse. This cultural invasion is reflected
in changing habits, the decreasing use of Tibetan language
and the new and much transformed urban landscape. These
changes force Tibetans to adjust to the cultural influence of
this “new majority” at the cost of Tibetan identity and culture.
Thus the combined impact of China’s systematic destruction
of Tibetan religion, distortion and damage on Tibetan

118
education and language, forceful removal of nomads, and the
population transfer policy is the complete annihilation of the
Tibetan culture and way of life. These may keep the Tibetans
physically intact, but the collective Tibetan identity suffers
in a fundamental and irremediable manner. This is cultural
genocide in intent and in deed.
Recommendations
- That Tibet under China is a stark reminder to the rest of the world
that there is an urgent need to further develop Raphael Lemkin’s
concept of cultural genocide and to include this in international law

- That this report should serve as a basis for scholars, researchers

and concerned institutions to conduct further systematic academic
study and research on Tibet and other similar cases around the world
by holding frequent seminars and conferences on the subject of
cultural genocide and to be allowed to do field research

- That the world leaders and the international community must and
should take proactive stand regarding the cultural genocide that is
taking place in Tibet

- That the Chinese government should cease all policies leading to

systematic destruction of Tibetan and stop the party’s daily dictates
on ‘correct’ thinking

- That the Tibetans should have full freedom to inherit and creatively
develop their traditional culture and religion

- That the media, scholars, environmentalists and researchers

should actively seek access to Tibet and the Tibetans to report
about the ongoing cultural genocide in Tibet which could make
valuable contribution to overall debates and discussions on “cultural
genocide” as Lemkin defined and as was included in the draft 1947
UN Genocide Convention

** end ***

119
 NOTES

Destruction Documented by Scholars, Jurists and the UN

1 So Close to Heaven – The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas
by Barbara Crossette. p. xii
2 see A Cultural History of Tibet by David Snellgrove and Hugh Rich-
ardson
3 ibid
4 see The Question of Tibet and the Rule of Law by International Com-
mission of Jurists. 1959.
5 see Tibet and the Chinese People’s Republic: a report to the International
Commission of Jurists by its Legal Inquiry Committee on Tibet. 1960.
6 see Tibet: Human Rights and the Rule of Law. 1997
7 UN resolution no.1353 (ivx). 1959
8 UN resolution no.1723 (xvi). 1961
9 UN resolution no.2070 (xx). 1965
10 see Situation in Tibet. No. E/N.4/sub.2/91, 43 Session
11 see Tibet: Human Rights and the Rule of Law. 1997
12 ibid
13 ibid

Tibetan View on the Destruction: the 10th Panchen Lama and

His Petition
1 Namsa Gojey by Shogdung (The Line Between Sky and Earth). pp.72-74
2 Tsenpoi Nyingtop (The Fierce Courage) by Gartse Jigme. pp.44-45
3 ibid
4 Surviving the Dragon by Arjia Rinpoche. p.vii
5 Joint Statement of Lama Karma Tenzin in Tibet Under Chinese Com-
munist Rule: a compilation of refugee statements 1958-75. p.116
6 ibid p.119
7 Statement of Yeshi Chophel in Tibet Under Chinese Communist Rule:
a compilation of refugee statements 1958-75. p.122
8 Imprisonment. My Life My Culture by Dr Lobsang Wangyal. p.32
9 Chapter 2 of Xi Zang Xing Shi He ren Wu Jiao Yu De Ji Ben Jiao Cai.

120
Zhong guo ren min jei fang jun. xi zang jun qu zheng zhi bu bian yin. 1960
nian 10 yue 1 ri. p.6
10 see Ping Xi Xizang Pan Luan. Xi zang ren min chu ban she. Xizang
zizhi qu duang shi zi liao zhen ji wei yuan hui. Xizang jun qu dang shi zi liao
zhengji lingdao xiao zhu. p.34
11 Ngamda near Rivoche, Shopamdo near Lhorong, Tengchen and
Lhari Dzong are currently in the ‘TAR’. These are some of the im-
portant and strategically located towns along the route that the PLA
troops took (in 1959-60) to reach Lhasa, Tibet’s capital city.
12 see The Panchen Lama’s Letter in Hungry Ghosts: China’s Secret
Famine. p.171
13 see Tibet Enslaved in In Exile from the Land of Snow. p.263
14 Chapter 9. The Sacred Tree and Time Machine in Surviving the
Dragon. pp.137-38
15 as quoted in Hu Yaobang’s Visit to Tibet, May 22-31, 1980 by Wang
Yao, in Resistance and Reform in Tibet. pp.287-88
16 for more on the protests see Circle of Protest: Political Ritual in the
Tibetan Uprising
17 for more on the Third Work Forum on Tibet (1994) and its im-
pact see Cutting Off the Serpent’s Head: Tightening Control in Tibet, 1994-
1995; and Golden Bridge Leading to a New Era

Why the Destruction?

1 for example Wang Yangming, during the Ming Dynasty (1386-
1644), wrote: “barbarians were like animals. For Han officials to try
to govern them through civil administration would be like a man
trying to tame a pack of deer in his own living room,” and that the
only way to discipline them is “to split up the domains of the various
chiefs means to establish zones of restriction and fits into the policy
of circumcising stallions and castrating boars.” For more see Old
Tibet a Hell on Earth? The Myth of Tibet and Tibetans in Chinese Art and
Propaganda by Thomas Heberer in Imagining Tibet: perceptions, projections
and fantasies.
2 The Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen. p.174

Chinese Communist Leaders’ view on Tibetan Culture

121
1 My Land and My People. p.118
2 as quoted The Struggle for Tibet. p.166
3 Dus Rabs Gsar par Skyod Pa’i Gser Zam (A Golden Bridge Leading to a
New Era) p.74
4 ibid p.66
5 as quoted in Tibet – Human Rights and Rule of Law. International
Commission of Jurists. p. 109.
6 as quoted in TIN NEWS, Review No. 25 Reports from Tibet 1996
7 ibid
8 speech made at the 6th TAR Political Consultative Conference. 14
May 1996
9 speech made at the TAR Party Committee. 8 November 1997
10 as quoted in The Struggle for Tibet. p.175
11 Jiang’s speech at the National Committee of the Chinese People’s
Political Consultative Conference Working Meeting on religious Af-
fairs. 12 December 2001.
12 Speech by the then Vice-president Hu Jintao at the 50th anniver-
sary of Tibet’s ‘liberation.’ 19 July 2001. Available at: http://news.
xinhuanet.com/english/20010719/431559.htm
13 ibid
14 see Kashag’s (Cabinet of the Tibetan Government in Exile)
speech on Tibetan Democracy Day. 2 September 2000.
15 Interview with Tibet’s Communist Party Chief. Der Spiegel. 16 August
2006.
16 as quoted in Al Jazeera. Available at: http://english.aljazeera.net/
news/asia-pacific/2010/03/201031085048872552.html
17 see Facts About the 17-point “Agreement” Between Tibet and China.
DIIR. Dharamsala. 22 May 2001.
18 Constitution of the People’s Republic of China
19 for more see Religion in China Today (edited by Donald MacInnis)
in which the full document is reprinted. pp.8-26
20 Circle of Protest – political ritual in the Tibetan uprising by Ronald D.
Schwartz in which the full document is reprinted. pp.235-43
21 dus rabs gsar par skyod pa’i gser zam (A Golden Bridge Leading to a New
Era). A document issued after the Third Work Forum on Tibet was
held from 20-23 July 1994, which marked a clear move towards a

122
hardline policy regarding Tibetan religion, culture and intellectual
freedom. The First Work Forum was held in 1980, and the Second
in 1984.
22 Cutting Off the Serpent’s Head, in which the full document is print-
ed, including those passages that were omitted from the public ver-
sion. pp.150-68
23 the full document in Chinese is available at: www.sohu.
com/20070802/n251386214.shtml
Although the document does not mentions Dalai Lama by name, it
can be clearly inferred from “those [reincarnations] with a particu-
larly great impact shall be reported to the State Council for approv-
al” meaning that the highest authority in the PRC will interfere in the
selection of the future Dalai Lama
24 full text of the Order No. 2 or “Measures for dealing strictly with
rebellious monasteries and individual monks and nuns” is available
in Tibet at a Turning Point: The Spring Uprising and China’s New Crack-
down. pp.137-139

Eradication of Tibetan Buddhism

1 see Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right by Karl Marx
2 Lenin Collected Works. Progress Publishers. 1965. Moscow. Volume
10. p.83
3 see My Land My People. p.118
4 as quoted in The Nationalities Policy of the CCP by W. Smith in Resis-
tance and Reform in Tibet. p.61
5 see The Question of Tibet and the Rule of Law by International Com-
mission of Jurists. 1959.
6 How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in
America. p.276
7 Mao: The Unknown Story. p.556
8 personal correspondences with Arjia Rinpoche
9 A Poisoned Arrow: The Secret Report of the 10th Panchen Lama. p.9
10 ibid p.26
11 ibid p.55
12 ibid p.52

123
13 see Buddha’s Warrior. p.165
14 ibid
15 The end of Tibetan Buddhism by Wang Lixiong in The Struggle for
Tibet. pp.147-189
16 ibid
17 Dragon In the Land of Snow. pp.320-21
18 Ribhur Tulku as quoted in CHINA’s Tibet? Autonomy or Assimila-
tion. pp.127-130
19 My Life My Culture. p.45
20 Dragon In the Land of Snow. p.316
21 see Tibet Under Communist China: 50 Years; also see Authenticating
Tibet
22 Search for Jowo Mikyo Dorjee. p.6
23 for more see Memoirs of Keutsang Tulku.
24 Fire Under Snow: True Story of a Tibetan Monk. pp.66-67
25 for more on DMC see A Poison Arrow. p.52; Forbidden Freedom:
Beijing’s Control of religion in Tibet. pp.24-30; and Golden Bridge Leading
to a New Era. p.80
26 Forbidden Freedom: Beijing’s Control of Religion in Tibet. p.26
27 Golden Bridge Leading to New Era. p.74
28 ibid p.80
29 ibid. pp65-67
30 Xinhua News. 30 June 2000
31 Strike Hard” Campaign: China’s Crackdown on Political Dissidence. p.27.
For more see The Communist Party as Living Buddha: The Crisis Facing
Tibetan Religion Under Chinese Control. p.108
32 Golden Bridge… p.77
33 for more see Tibet At a Turnign Point. p.75
34 Tibet Daily. 18 April 2001.
35 for more on Larung Gar destruction and Khenpo Jigme Phunt-
sok see Destruction of Serthar Institute : A special report. TCHRD. Avail-
able at:
http://www.tchrd.org/publications/topical_reports/destruction_of_ser-
thar-2002/ and Jigme Phuntsok: Buddhist monk whose settlement at Larung
Gar in Tibet attracted thousands until it was brutally destroyed by the Chinese.
12 January 2004. Available at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/com-

124
ment/obituaries/article992925.ece
36 for more on Tulku Tenzin Delek see Trials of a Tibetan Monk:
The Case of Tenzin Delek, vol.16, no.1, February 2004. www.hrw.org/
reports/2004/china204/index.htm. and Unjust Sentence. TCHRD
available at
www.tchrd.org/publications/topical_reports/unjust_sen-
tence-trulku_tenzin_delek-2004/trulku.pdf
37 Annual Report 2009 by United States Commission on Internation-
al Religious Freedom. p.75
38 see Congressional-Executive Commission on China. 2007 Annual
Report;
39 crackdown by the Chinese authorities has increased since 2008
not only on religious leaders but also on public intellectuals such as
writers, singers and others who are involved in social services such
as starting an orphanages etc. see A Raging Storm: The Crackdown on
Tibetan Writers and Artistes after Tibet’s Spring 2008 Protests
40 for more see Colossal Guru Rinpoche’s statue demolished in Tbet: Chi-
na’s new religious affairs regulations for ’ TAR’ entered into force. TCHRD.
June 2007. Available at: http://www.tchrd.org/publications/hr_up-
dates/2007/hr200706.pdf and Demolition giant Buddha statue at Tibet-
an monastery confirmed by China. ITC. Available at:
http://www.savetibet.org/media-center/ict-news-reports/demoli-
tion-giant-buddha-statue-tibetan-monastery-confirmed-china
41 Order No. Five issued by the State Religious Affairs Bureau of
PRC. 18 July 2007.
42 personal correspondences with Arjia Rinpoche
43 see The End of Tibetan Buddhism by Wang Lixiong in The Struggle
for Tibet.
44 An Investigative Report Into the Social and Economic Causes of the 3.14
Incident in Tibetan Areas. Gongmeng Law Research Center.
45 ibid
46 Golden Bridge… p.75
47 Questions of the first term examination for the nuns of Tsam-
khung Nunnery “in order to deepen the Patriotic Education.” The
test paper (2006) contains 30 questions on various issues such as
religion, politics and how to ‘oppose the Dalai clique’ etc.

125
48 The “Strike Hard” Campaign: China’s crackdown on political dissidence.
p.22
49 Communist Party as Living Buddha. p.107
50 Tibet at a Turning Point: The Spring Uprising and China’s New Crack-
down. p.75
51 ibid p.137
52 ibid p.88
53 ibid pp.137-38
54 ibid p.139
55 VOT radio broadcast. 23 July 2010. www.vot.org
56 The Struggle for Tibet pp.147-189
57 Stick Out Your Tongue. p.84
58 A Poisoned Arrow. p.105
59 see Social Evils: Prostitution and Pornography in Tibet. TIN. Also see
Days of Debauchery in Tibetan Bulletin. January-April 2000.

Damage and Distortion in Education and Tibetan Language

1 Politicisation and the Tibetan Language by Tsering Shakya in Resistance
and Reform. p.159
2 Education in Tibet: policy and practice since 1950. p.20
3 sum rtags mtha’ dpyad las bod kyi spyi skad skor. pp 17-34
4 Life In the Red Flag People’s Commune. p.23
5 as quoted in Education in Tibet. p.38
6 ibid
7 ibid p.21
8 for more see The Chinese Frontiersman and the Winter Worms – Chen
Kuiyuan In the TAR, 1992-2000
9 full text of the speech is available in Education in Tibet. pp.272-279
10 ibid
11 ibid
12 ibid
13
14 Golden Bridge Leading to a New Era. p.40
15 for more on this see Education in Tibet. pp 53-54; also see China:
Minority Exclusion, Marginalization and Rising Tension by Human Rights
in China. p.29

126
16 a moderate estimate number of Tibetans who have escaped into
exile is over 80,000 since the 1980s. About two to three thousand
refugees come from Tibet each year. However, the number has dra-
matically reduced since 2008 due to strict border patrolling by the
Chinese authorities.
17 see Gongmeng Report or An Investigative Report into the Social and Eco-
nomic Causes of the 3.14 Incident in Tibetan Areas.
18 ibid
19 ibid
20 ibid
21 read We Have Our Own Religious Symbols, Our Own Culture and Histo-
ry by Woeser. Available at: www.highpeakspureearth.com/2010/02/
we-have-our-own-religious-totems-our.html
22 ibid
23 Tibet Through Chinese Eyes (part 1, 2 & 3) by Peter Hessler pub-
lished and available on The Atlantic Online www.theatlantic.com
24 see Gongmeng Report
25 ibid
26 Trag-Yig or Written in Blood. p.110
27 as quoted in Tibet Under Communist China: 50 Years. p.40
28 ibid p.41
29 ibid
30 China: Minority Exclusion, Marginalization and Rising Tension by Hu-
man Rights in China. pp.18-19
31 ibid pp.26-31
32 for more see The Chinese Frontiersman and Winter Worm
33 ibid
34 for more on Woeser see www.nytimes.com/2009/04/25/world/
asia/25woeser.html
35 see http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/1919/pr-
mID/172
36 A ‘Raging Storm’: The Crackdown on Tibetan and Artists After Tibet’s
Spring 2008 Protests
37 ibid
38 ibid

127
39 ibid
40 see Race Against Time to Save Manchu Language. Available at: www.
china.org.cn/english/culture/167537.htm Also see Mustering the
Strength to Save Manchu. Available at: http://tyglobalist.org/index.
php/20090105171/focus/Mustering-the-Strength-to-Save-Manchu.
html
41 ibid
42 ibid
43 ibid
44 Tournadre. N. (2003). Roundtable before the Congressional ex-
ecutive commission on China on teaching and learning Tibetan: The
role of Tibetan language in Tibet’s future 7 April, 2003. Retrieved
23 June, 2017. http://www.cecc.gov/sites/chinacommission.house.
gov/files/documents/roundtables/2003/CECC%20Roundta-
ble%20Testimony%20-%20Nicolas%20Tournadre%20-%204.7.03.
pdf
45 A few proposed suggestion by Jigme Gyaltsen, High Peak Pure
Earth, 21 Febuary, 2010, http://highpeakspureearth.com/2014/a-
few-proposed-suggestions-on-education-by-jigme-gyaltsen/( Ac-
cessed17, June 2017)
46 Report prepared by CTA (1995). The World-Wide Web Virtual
Library. Retrieved June 2, 2017, from http://www.ciolek.com/WW-
WVLPages/TibPages/TibetWomen-Exile.html
47 ‘འགར་རྩེ་འཇིགས་མེད། (༢༠༡༣) བཙན་པོའི་སྙིང་སྟོབས། ས་རཱ་བོད་ཀྱི་དཔེ་སྐྲུན་ཁང་། ཤོག་གྲངས། ༩༧།
48 Bass.C. (1998) Education in Tibet Policy and Practie since 1950.
(TIN) London and New York. Zed Books p.237. 240
49 “Students Protest Language Change,” Radio Free Asia, 19
October, 2010, http://www.rfa.org/english/news/tibet/lan-
guage-10192010170120.html (Accessed 20 June, 2017)
50 Protests by students against downgrading of Tibetan language
spread to Beijing, ICT, 22 October 2010, https://www.savetibet.
org/protests-by-students-against-downgrading-of-tibetan-language-
spread-to-beijing/ Accessed 15 June, 2017)
51 Tibetans protest against language curbs in Chinese schools,
The Guardian, 20 October,2010, https://www.theguardian.com/
world/2010/oct/20/tibetans-protest-language-chinese-schools

128
(Accessed 21 June, 2017)
52 China: Drop Charges Against Tibetan Education Activist,
Human Rights Watch, 15 January, 2017 https://www.hrw.org/
news/2017/01/15/china-drop-charges-against-tibetan-educa-
tion-activist (Accessed 28 June, 2017)
53 A Tibetan Journey for Justice, New York Times https://www.
nytimes.com/video/world/asia/100000004031427/a-tibetans-jour-
ney-for-justice.html (Accessed 28 June, 2017)

The Destruction of the Nomadic Way of Life

1 as quoted in The Nationalities Policy of the CCP by Warren Smith in
Resistance and Reform. p.65
2 ibid p.66
3 full text of Communalization in a Single Stride is available in A Poisoned
Arrow. pp.161-163
4 ibid
5 ibid
6 A Poisoned Arrow. p.10
7 ibid p.110
8 for more see Tibet Under Chinese Communist Rule: A Compilation of
Refugee Statements 1958-1975. p.119 and p.122
9 A Poisoned Arrow. p.30
10 No One has the Liberty to Refuse. p.17
11 ibid
12 Northern Tibet Grassland Takes on a New Look. 19 May 2009. Available
at www.eng.tibet.cn/news/today/200905/t20090519_477226_1.
htm.
13 for a detailed report on the traditional Tibetan environmental
protection see High Sanctuary, wildlife and nature conservatory in Old Tibet
by Norbu, Jamyang. 6 December 2009. Available at www.shadowti-
bet.com. Also see Ecological Responsibility: a dialogue with Buddhism ed-
ited by Julia Martin
14 No One has the Liberty to Refuse. p.3
15 ibid pp.3-4
16 ibid p.3
17 ibid p.27

129
18 as quoted in No One has the Liberty to Refuse. p.35
19 Constructing a green railway on the Tibet Plateau: Evaluating the effec-
tiveness of mitigation measure. Available at www.elsevier.com/locate/trd
20 ibid
21 ibid
22 for more on this see Mining in Tibet. pp.77-114; Tracking the Steel
Dragon. pp.61-72; The Political Economy of Boomerang Aid in China’s Ti-
bet by Andrew Fischer in CHINA Perspective. No. 2009/3
23 see Perversities of Extreme Depdendence and Unequal Growth in TAR.
Tibet Watch Special Report August 2007.
24 No One has the Liberty to Refuse. pp.39-44
25 as quoted in Politicisation and the Tibetan Language by Warren Smith
in Resistance and Reform. p.159
26 for a detailed report on the traditional Tibetan environmental
protection see High Sanctuary, wildlife and nature conservatory in Old Tibet
by Jamyang Norbu. 6 December 2009. Available at: www.shadow-
tibet.com; Also see Ecological Responsibility: A Dialogue with Buddhism
edited by Julia Martin
27 Morton, Katherine. Climate Change on the Tibetan Plateau:
A New Security Challenge. Woodrow Wilson Center. Washing-
ton DC. 12 February, 2009 available at: http://www.wilsoncen-
ter.org/ondemand/index.cfm?fuseaction=Media.play&medi-
aid=A98B9EA0-B257-1FBB-7079F3FB8A24667F
28 see at http://chinatibet.people.com.cn/6829088.html
29 Tibet to Bolster Agricultural, Animal Husbandry in 2009. 11 Febru-
ary 2009. Available at: http://eng.tibet.cn/news/today/200902/
t20090211_451880.htm.
30 No One has the Liberty to Refuse. pp.57-64
31 ibid p. 49; also see The Struggle for Tibet. pp.160-168; Fungus gold rush
in Tibetan plateau rebuilding lives after earthquake by Jonathan Watts. 17
June 2010. The Guardian. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/
environment/2010/jun/17/fungus-tibetan-plateau
32 Fungus gold rush in Tibetan plateau rebuilding lives after earthquake. The
Guardian. 17 June 2010.
33 No One has the Liberty to Refuse. pp.64-71
34 ibid p.69

130
35 see Tibetan Nomads in a Fix? By Anthony Kuhn. Tibetan Bulletin.
July-September 2002.
36 No One has the Liberty to Refuse. pp.31-59
37 12 Northern Tibet Grassland Takes on a New Look. 19 May
2009. Available at: www.eng.tibet.cn/news/today/200905/
t20090519_477226_1.htm.
38 for more see Drokpa in Peril; and Pastoral-Nomadism of Ti-
bet: between Tradition and Modernization. Tibetan Bulletin. Septem-
ber-December. 2000
39 Census Office of the TAR, 2002, The 2000 Census Data of the
TAR (Vol. 1), Beijing: Statistical Press of China. In Chinese; HRW
2013: 34
40 HRW 2013: 4
41 ibid
42. “Massive nomad settlement to protect ‘mother river,’” The
Global Times, 30 November 2012, http://www.globaltimes.cn/con-
tent/747536.shtml (Accessed 29 November, 2017)
43 “Tibet to invest 400 million yuan in nomad’s settlement,”13 Sep-
tember, 2012, cctv.cn, http://english.cntv.cn/20120913/103363.
shtml (Accessed 29 June, 2016)
44 Schutter , Olivier. Report of the Special Rapporteur on the right
to food, Olivier
De Schutter- Mission to China. UN Human Rights Council, 2012
45 HRW 2013:4
46 Lai, Hongyi Harry (October 2002). “China’s Western Develop-
ment Program: Its Rationale, Implementation, and Prospects”Mod-
ern China. Sage Publications
47 ibid
48 Paul, Cheng 2011: 170-171
49 Information Office of the State Council of the People’s Republic
of China, “Fifty Year of Democratic Reform in China,” unpublished
document, March 2, 2009. http://www.china.org.cn/government/
whitepaper/node_7062754.htm (Accessed 29 June, 2017)
50 HRW 2013: 40
51 ibid 41
52 “Tibet to achieve leapfrog development, lasting stability China

131
Daily, “January 23, 2010, (accessed June 29, 2017), http://www.
globaltimes.cn/content/500489.shtml
53 HRW 2013: 42
54 “Tibet to achieve leapfrog development, lasting stability China
Daily, “January 23, 2010, (accessed June 29, 2017), http://www.
globaltimes.cn/content/500489.shtml
55 “Nomadic people in Qinghai to settle within five years,” Peo-
ple’s Daily Online, March 11, 2009, (accessed June 29, 2017), http://
en.people.cn/90001/90776/90882/6611715.html
56 HRW 2013:43
57 HRW 2013: 62-108
58 “Eight losses faced by Tibetan drogpas due to China’s resettle-
ment policy,” TCHRD, (accessed June 26, 2017)
59 Andrew Fischer, State Growth and Social Exclusion in Tibet:
Challenges of Recent Economic Growth, (Copenhagen: Nordic In-
stitute of Asian Studies Press, 2005)
60 HRW 2013: 45
61Andrew M. Fisher, “The Great Transformation of Tibet? Rapid
Labor Transitions in Times of Rapid Growth in the Tibet Autono-
mous Region,” Himalaya, vol. 30, issue 1-2 (2010), pp. 63-79.
62“Dilemma of Development: Tibet’s Development Project and
Reductionist Reading,”tibetpolicy.net , (accessed June 29, 2017),
http://tibetpolicy.net/comments-briefs/dilemma-of-develop-
ment-tibets-development-project-and-reductionist-reading/
63 China’s official nomination to UNESCO, p 137 of hard copy
document seen by Gabriel Lafitte, and cited in his blog posted on
October 18, 2016, http://rukor.org/in-the-no-mans-land-of-tibet
64 Nomads in ‘no man’s land’: China’s nomination for UNESCO
World heritage risks imperilling Tibetans and wildlife, International
Campaign for Tibet, June 30,2017, https://www.savetibet.org/no-
mads-in-no-mans-land-chinas-nomination-for-unesco-world-her-
itage-risks-imperilling-tibetans-and-wildlife-2/ (accessed June 30,
2017)
65 Blog by Gabriel Lafitte, http://rukor.org/in-the-no-mans-land-
of-tibet/, posted on October 18, 2016
66 The ‘Ten-Year Master Plan’ for the future of tourism in the Ti-

132
bet Autonomous Region (2010-2020) defines the new ‘zones’, with
Lhasa as the hub, as follows: “Tibet’s tourism layout will include:
the human culture tourism centre Lhasa and the ecotourism centre
Nyingchi (Kongpo, Chinese: Linzhi, Tibet Autonomous Region);
east-west tourism development axis and south-north tourism devel-
opment axis that can connect Tibet with the outside; four boutique
tourist routes in east, west, south, and north; seven scenic areas.”
The report also states that “tourist development axes will spread
north, south, east and west from Lhasa” enabling fulfilment of the
targets
Population Transfer and Western China ‘Development’ Pro-
gram
1 Mao: The Unknown Story. p.552
2 as quoted in Tibet Under Communist China: 50 Years. p.45
3 Tibet and the People’s Republic: a report to the International Commission of
Jurists. p.289
4 New Majority: Chinese Population Transfer Into Tibet. p.38
5 for more see Hungry Ghosts: China’s Secret Famine
6 as quoted in Peter Hessler’s Tibet Through Chinese Eyes published
in The Atlantic Online. February 1999. Available at: www.atlantic.com
7 New Majority: Chinese Population Transfer into Tibet. p.47
8 as quoted in Tibet Under Communist China: 50 Years. p.47
9 Tibet Under Communist China: 50 Years. p.47
10 ibid
11 as quoted in Tibet Under Communist China: 50 Years. p.47
12 Beijing Review. January 21-27 1991.
13 Tibet Under Communist China: 50 Years. p.48
14 as quoted in Response to Beijing’s Comments on De-militarization and
‘Ethnic Cleansing’. 5 September 2009. Available at: www.tibet.net
15 Tibet Under Communist China: 50 Years. p.47
16 as quoted in New Majority: Chinese Population Transfer into Tibet. p.54
17 for more see Cutting Off Serpent’s Head. TIN/HRW. 1996; and
Tibet: Human Rights and Rule of Law. ICJ. 1997.
18 for more see Destruction by Design: Housing Rights Violations in Tibet
by Scott Leckie
19 as quoted in New Majority. p.55

133
20 Tracking the Steel Dragon. p.9
21 ibid p.37
22 see ‘The Second Invasion’ in Tracking the Steel Dragon. pp.37-60
23 The Poverty of Plenty. p.vx
24 ibid xiii
25 China’s Great Leap Westward. p.5
27 ibid p.6
27 ibid; also see China Daily. 18 September 2000
28 Newsweek International. 2 July 2000.
29 as quoted in Height of Darkness: Chinese Colonialism on the World’s
Roof. 10 December 2001.
30 see Tibetan Bulletin. July-August 2000.
31 Written in Blood. pp.105-108
32 for more see New Majority
33 see An Investigative Report Into the Social and Economic Causes of the
3.14 Incident in Tibetan Areas. Gongmeng Law Research Center.
34 Tibet Daily. 27 February 1991.
35 see Destruction by Design: Housing Rights Violations in Tibet. pp.85-
113
36 Tibet Through Chinese Eyes (part 1, 2 & 3) by Peter Hessler. Avail-
able at: The Atlantic Online www.theatlantic.com
37 see New Majority: Chinese Population Transfer into Tibet. pp.101-145
38 Yeh Emily T. Tamming Tibet. Cornell University Press. Ithaca &
London. 2013
39 http://www.chinafile.com/contributors/james-leibold
40 འབའ་པ་ཕུན་ཚོགས་དབང་རྒྱལ་གྱིས། རང་རྒྱལ་གྱི་མི་རིགས་གནད་དོན་དང་མི་རིགས་ལས་
དོན་སྐོར་གྱི་ཕྱིར་རྟོག།ཁ་བ་དཀར་པོ་བོད་ཀྱི་རིག་གཞུང་སྲི་ཞུ་ཁང་གིས་ཕྱི་ལོ་ ༢༠༡༣ ལོར་པར་དུ་
བསྐྲུན།
41 Bulag Uradyn E. Municipalization and Ethnopolitics in Inner Mongolia.
Mongols From Country to City. in Ole Bruun and Li Narangoa (eds.)
APD Singapore Pte Ltd. 2011
42 Circular of the State Council’s General Office on the Distribution
of Suggestions on the Implementation of Policies and Measures Pertaining to the
Development of the Western Region. Submitted by the Western Region
Development Office of the State Council, September 29, 2001
43 http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/beijing-final-

134
ly-adopts-hukou-reforms
44 Nyima Tashi. Development Discourses on the Tibetan Plateau: Urbanisa-
tion and Expropriation of Farmland in Dartsedo. Himalaya. The Journal
of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies: Vol. 30: No.
1, Article 16
45 Jun Xu. Challenges: Resettlement of Nomads in Qinghai Province. Pre-
sented detailed paper at SLTP Conference, Leipzig, Dec. 2-3, 2009
46 https:// chinachange.org/2013/08/08/the-urban-grid-manage-
ment-and-police-state-in-china-a-brief-overview/
47 https://www.hrw.org/news/2013/03/20/china-alarm-
ing-new-surveillance-security-tibet
48 The World Bank & Development Research Center of the State
Council, the People’s Republic of China. Urban China toward Efficient,
Inclusive, and Sustainable Urbanisation. Washington DC, 2014
49 Zhao, B. 2005. How to address the problem of land-lost farmers? Ren-
minwang, December, 9, 2005 <http://theory.people.com.cn/
GB/40553/3929253.html
50 http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2015-08/26/c_134557687.
htm
51 Tibet Under Communist China: 50 Years. p.i
52 Mining in Tibet – mineral exploitation in Tibetan areas of the PRC. p.84
53 Lhasang Tsering in Sun Behind the Cloud, a documentary on Tibet-
an struggle for freedom by Tenzing Sonam and Ritu Sarin

135
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