Anna Louise Strong Reference Archive
“My fathers were kings in the Tibet area for three hundred years before the political unification. After it, they were nobles and landowners, always holding high government posts.”
The speaker was Ngapo Ngawang-Jigme, known more simply in Chinese as Apei. He was Secretary-General of Tibet’s new local government as of March 28, 1959. I had picked him out, even before he came to Peking as one of Tibet’s deputies to the National People’s Congress, as the man most worth interviewing in Tibet. For the two Grand Lamas — the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Erdeni — are interesting enough as symbols but without long experience in politics. But Apei, at 49, was seasoned in Tibet’s top politics for years.
I might have said, not “years,” but “centuries.” For when I asked what was this “political unification” and when did it happen, he casually replied: “It was Kublai Khan who took Tibet into China, about 1250 by your calendar. My family’s realm remained for a time separate but was soon absorbed. Before that we were kings: since then we are nobles.”1
Apei thus traces a thousand years in which his fathers ran government in Tibet, three hundred years as kings in one of its petty warring kingdoms, and afterwards as nobles in the outer fringe of the Chinese empire. The Taichao area, some 160 miles to the east of Lhasa, was their domain. Apei still held, in summer of 1959, 4,000 square kilometers of it, “never yet measured off,” he told me, together with 2,500 serfs. These lands and serfs would not be his much longer. “Democratic reform” was on the way, with the abolition of serfdom and the distribution of land to the tiller. Apei not only knew it: he was prepared to engineer it.
“The days of serfdom are over,” he told me in private conversation. “Under it the misery of the people is very great.” He said much stronger things on serfdom in the National People’s Congress, China’s supreme organ of state power, to which he came as a deputy from Tibet. I saw him there, in the great Hall of Benevolence with the scarlet and ivory columns, standing aloft on the rostrum in a long robe of gray wool, made Tibetan style, falling gracefully with the left sleeve chastely embroidered while his right arm rose free and emphatic in a balloon sleeve of heavy white silk.
Thus he accused his fellow serf-owners, the ones who had made the rebellion. “They have sucked the blood of the serfs for a thousand years, and now they rebel against the Central Government because it will no longer permit them to go on sucking the blood of the serfs.”
Apei, it will be seen, is an orator. He is also experienced in politics: his family has been at it a thousand years and he himself has been in it all his life. He knows when the time has come for change. He also knows that under serfdom, the life even of top nobles is neither very good nor secure in terms of the modern world. You can get more comfort and even luxury from one modern power-plant than from a thousand barefoot serfs. Life under serfdom is, moreover, precarious. In his lifetime Apei has seen both the present and the past Dalai Lama more than once in flight from his capital: he has seen the present Dalai Lama’s father poisoned and a regent strangled to death in jail and the richest man in Tibet tossed to his death from the top of Potala Palace together with his son — all over questions of politics. Apei is one of the “progressive serf-owners” who are ready to see serfdom abolished. His own life has made him face the modern world.
Through Apei we can see Tibet not as it looks to the serfs, to Lachi and Gada, but as it looks from the top, from the seats of government down the centuries, by men who know when the time for change has come. We can see through him the march of armies, and the signing of treaties, and the questions of “sovereignty” and “autonomy.” These are the concepts in Apei’s blood, and the problems in which he took part.
He was commander-in-chief of the Dalai Lama’s armies in 1950, and defeated in the battle of Chamdo. He was simultaneously one of the six kaloons, the nobles who formed the kasha, the Cabinet of Ministers, through which the Dalai Lama exercised temporal power. He was plenipotentiary for the Dalai Lama to negotiate the famous “1951 Agreement” with Peking, over which controversy now rages. From that time, in almost every formal arrangement made between Peking and Lhasa, Apei took part. When the Preparatory Committee for the Tibetan Autonomous Region was formed in 1956, he became its Secretary-General. When four of the six kaloons launched rebellion against Peking in March 1959, Apei was one of the two who remained loyal to China. He carried the last exchange of letters between the Dalai Lama and General Tan Kuan-san, which are now of historic note. And when on March 28, 1959, Tibet’s local government of the six kaloons was dissolved by the State Council’s orders from Peking, Apei, as Secretary-General of the Preparatory Committee, became the chief executive officer of the new local government in Tibet.
What may have been his last service to his former chief, the Dalai Lama, was made in late April in Peking, when the National People’s Congress prepared to elect its officers before adjourning. Debate went on in the caucuses of deputies as to whether the Dalai Lama, already in India, should again be elected as one of the vice-chairmen of the Standing Committee, which is China’s chief organ of state between congresses. A statement in the name of the Dalai Lama had been issued from Tezpur, India, on April 18, denouncing China in such terms that some deputies said it was not seemly to re-elect its author.
That was when Apei made his main speech, in which he passionately denounced the Tezpur statement as a forgery. For eight years, he said, he had “served the Dalai Lama as his shadow,” and never in public or private had he heard sentiments like those of the Tezpur statement expressed. The statement, he claimed, was not even Tibetan style, but borne signs of having been written in English. It was given to the press, not by the Dalai Lama nor even by his retainers, but by an Indian civil servant. Whatever the Dalai Lama might be reported as saying, in a foreign land among rebels who threatened his life, Apei assured the deputies that the Dalai had been basically loyal to China for these eight years.
It was a strong speech: for a time it helped the Dalai Lama’s reputation in China and made it easier for the deputies to re-elect him. It was not, however, borne out by events that followed. Apei’s picture of a Dalai Lama loyal to China — in which Apei seemed really to believe — wore thin after June 20 when the Dalai began to give statements to the world press attacking China more strongly than even the Tezpur statement did, and demanding independence for Tibet, and a “Greater Tibet” at that. But Apei had done more than most to preserve for a full two months, the open door of return for the Dalai Lama.
It was shortly after this speech at the congress that Apei gave me the interview I asked. I drove to the large walled compound in which a stately villa served as his Peking residence. The formal exchange of long ceremonial scarves known as hata, the Tibetan mode of greeting which I later used when I met the Panchen Erdeni, was not enforced by Apei. In dealing with modern people, he chose to be modern too. He sat at ease in a western-style suit of soft brown, a lean, lithe man with features gauntly chiselled of cast and color not unlike those of the American Indian. He offered tea and the best chocolates I had had in China. He answered questions fully but tersely, being, like most Tibetans, more reserved than the Hans. The talk had its discouraging quality: it had to come through two interpreters, from Tibetan to Mandarin to English. To lessen this difficulty, my questions had been written in advance and translated: they lay before him in Tibetan.
I had first asked for his biography. He had begun with his ancestors from the days of Kublai Khan. His personal career he sketched more briefly. “To the age of twenty-three I studied, then went into the army and then took government post.” I asked what and where he studied. He replied that, there being no universities in Tibet, he had tutors, first in art, then in history, then in Buddhism. Where he picked up the arts of war and politics he didn’t say. Nobles in Tibet seemed to be born knowing them.
In 1950 he was made a kaloon, one of six ministers who made the kasha, the governing body of Tibet. In the same year he was sent to Chamdo as governor and as commander-in-chief of the Dalai Lama’s armies. The situation was tense, uncertain. In China, Chiang Kai-shek had fallen: the Chinese People’s Republic had been set up in Peking. Its armies were moving on to take the far ends of the country. They might soon be expected in Tibet. Lowell Thomas had gone to Lhasa in 1949, and done world-wide promotion on radio and television for “Tibet’s independence.” According to his published book he had discussed with the top nobles in Lhasa the question of American help with money and arms, but “could give no guarantee.”
The Dalai Lama himself was only sixteen. His regent was pro-British. His ministers argued the situation and split. Finally in February 1950, they sent a mission to Peking to negotiate, but the mission stopped in New Delhi for nearly a year, for reasons too complex to discuss here. Meantime Apei, with the army, was sent in the other direction, towards Szechwan, to meet by force of arms Peking’s advance. The Dalai Lama was taken by his regent to Yatung, a city near the Indian border, where he could await events and slip quickly into India in case of need. Both Dalai Lamas and Panchen Lamas have been used to this practice: they have thus fled from Lhasa or Shigatse several times in this century as well as in centuries gone.
Chamdo, to which Apei went to oppose the People’s Liberation Army, is a place to remember. It was to become a turning-point in Tibet’s modern history and in Apei’s personal life and career. It was not at the time in Tibet, according to most maps of the present century. It is eastward from Lhasa towards Szechwan about a month’s journey by horse in a province you will find marked Sikang. The Tibetans, however, claimed this area, for the population was largely Tibetan and it had been made into Sikang Province at the very end of the Ching Dynasty. Since the fall of the empire, Tibetan and Szechwan warlords had fought over it in bloody inconclusive combat. Chiang Kai-shek had not been able to pacify it: he had controlled none of China’s outlying areas, neither Manchuria, Sinkiang, nor Tibet.
So when Chiang collapsed, the Dalai’s armies were sent to hold Chamdo against the expected advance of the People’s Liberation Army, known for short as the PLA. In Chamdo in October 1950, Apei, with the Dalai Lama’s army, met the PLA and was roundly defeated, part of Apei’s forces going over to the side of the PLA. Apei himself expected death as the normal outcome of such a defeat. The PLA surprised him by treating him well and giving him long lectures on the New China’s policies towards minor nationalities, such as Tibetans. Apei liked what he heard. He thought it worth reporting to the Dalai Lama. Within a year Apei himself had become Deputy Commander-in-Chief for the PLA’s forces in Tibet. If to westerners this seems a sudden turn-about, we note that in China’s history defeated generals often joined the victors. Apei had reason to.
It was done in proper order. One should not assume that Apei all at once became a Communist. Not while he still had serfs. From what he told me and from what he says in public, he became convinced of two things. First, that Peking had a strong government and army which had beaten him. Next, that Peking announced policies under which Tibet might develop in reasonable freedom, peace and security, better than in the past. Apei, as practical politician, decided that Tibetans had a better chance with this new Peking than with an American- or British-financed “independence,” bringing the wars of the West to the roof of the world.
Apei’s exact words to me were: “The Ching Dynasty left with us a bad impression. The Kuomintang was worse. At first we were very suspicious of this new government in Peking, because of rumors spread by foreigners and by the Kuomintang. There were many agents of the Kuomintang and the imperialists in Tibet in 1950 and we did not know the facts about the policies of the Communists. So I led the resistance to the People’s Liberation Army. It was a short fight. I could not resist them. They took Chamdo. By the end of 1950 I began to learn their policies, that they stand for equality and unity of all the nationalities in the motherland. From then on, my suspicions began to disappear.
“In Chamdo the people had suffered long centuries of feudal exploitation and many recent wars. After the victory of the PLA the people’s burden lessened. They set up a committee representing all the local people, the nobles and the commoners, the clerical and the lay. They began to mediate the local tribal wars and feuds. They set up a hospital and a school. I began to see that this backward state would change. I ceased to fear the new government in Peking.”
When Apei reported these facts to the Dalai Lama, who was in Yatung at the other end of Tibet, the Dalai Lama ordered Apei to proceed from Chamdo directly to Peking as the plenipotentiary for Tibet to negotiate an Agreement. Two other men from Chamdo were appointed to go with him, two others were to join him from the first mission so long stalled in India. Apei was chief of the joint mission.
“I reached Peking in April 1951,” Apei told me. “It was my first trip to Peking. I already knew something of Peking’s policies and the trip confirmed what I knew. The other four members of the mission knew less than I did and were more surprised than I by the friendly, equal treatment they gave us in Peking. Negotiations went fast in a friendly atmosphere. We signed the Agreement of Seventeen Articles on May 23. Early in June I started back to Lhasa. Since I went overland, and most of the way by horse, I did not reach Lhasa till the end of August.”
We shift now to what went on around the Dalai Lama in Yatung in the two months while Apei journeyed back to Tibet by horse. The Dalai Lama himself told people in Peking later that both British and American agents were in Yatung, discussing with the Dalai Lama’s ministers what His Holiness should do. Should he flee into India or return to Lhasa? Should he make war against Peking or negotiate peace? The Dalai Lama told people in Peking that the Americans had offered him arms and money if he would fight the Communists. I do not guarantee this for I have it at second hand, but since Washington has given arms and money to every regime on the edges of China which is willing to fight the Communists, one is not surprised to be told that they offered it in Yatung.
Then the wire came from Apei that Agreement was reached with Peking whereby Tibet acknowledged its long existence “within the boundaries of China” and agreed to “return to the motherland,” while its local government and the powers of the Dalai Lama and income of the monasteries remained unchanged. A representative of the Central Government, Chang Ching-wu, had set out from Peking to report to the Dalai Lama about the Agreement. He would reach the Dalai Lama before Apei arrived, for he would go by plane to India and thence by trail to Yatung.
Chang Ching-wu, whom also I interviewed in Peking, told me that he reached Yatung on July 14, 1951, having been met at the border by two officials and fifteen bodyguards, sent by the Dalai Lama to escort him to Yatung. In Yatung Chang Ching-wu conferred with the Dalai Lama and his ministers and then went on to Lhasa, reaching it on August 8. The Dalai Lama followed him to Lhasa on August 17. Being now seventeen, though not yet of age, he had dismissed in Yatung his pro-British regent and himself taken power and decided not to go to India but to return to Lhasa to hear Apei’s full report.
We return to Apei as he reaches Lhasa in late August, after two months’ journey by horse. “In Lhasa I reported at once to the Dalai Lama, who had returned from Yatung. He endorsed the Agreement. I also reported to all the officials of the local government, both clerical and lay. They all discussed the Agreement at length and in detail and agreed to it unanimously. The Dalai Lama then sent a wire to Mao Tse-tung personally confirming the Agreement.”
The Dalai Lama’s wire to Mao Tse-tung is a matter of record. It was sent on October 21, and it read, in part:
The delegates of both parties, on a friendly basis, signed an Agreement on the measures for the peaceful liberation of Tibet. The Tibetan local government and the monks and people of Tibetan nationality are giving the Agreement unanimous support. Under the leadership of Chairman Mao Tse-tung and the Central People’s Government, they are actively helping the People’s Liberation Army units marching into Tibet to strengthen national defense, drive imperialist forces from Tibet and safeguard the unification of the territorial sovereignty of the motherland.
Apei continues his story. “After this the Dalai Lama and the local government of Tibet gave me the task of meeting the People’s Liberation Army and installing its units in posts on the national frontier as the Agreement provided. I helped the PLA take posts on the border towards India and Nepal. At the end of 1951 the Tibetan Military Area of the PLA was formed and I became its Deputy Commander-in-Chief, still remaining one of the six kaloons of the local government of Tibet.
“In both these posts I continued until last March when the local government of Tibet was dissolved by order of the State Council because of the rebellion. You will find my work in my report to the congress.”
Since Apei’s report to the National People’s Congress covers eleven typed pages, I shall not burden my readers with its details. I note, however, that the details of the Chamdo battle, and of the Agreement signed in Peking, would seem to settle some of the questions in the discussion about Tibet that continues abroad.
Peking never “invaded Tibet in 1950” as commonly considered abroad. The PLA entered Chamdo in 1950, then part of Sikang Province, defeated the Tibetan army there and halted eight months until the 1951 Agreement was signed with the Dalai Lama, after which the PLA proceeded to Lhasa by the terms of the Agreement as the “national army of defense.” Chinese, of course, consider that Tibet has been for seven hundred years a part of China and that to enter Tibet itself would not have been “invasion,” but in view of conflicts, claims and counter-claims of the recent years they punctiliously waited in Chamdo, until the Agreement for “peaceful liberation” was signed. Only on the double assumption that Tibet was an independent nation and that Chamdo was part of Tibet could Peking’s action in 1950 be called an “invasion.” Both assumptions are made by supporters of the Dalai Lama in India, but neither assumption has been supported by any recognition by major powers or by maps of the past half century.
Chamdo, however, which the Ching emperors cut from Tibet and which Apei again lost to the PLA, was returned to Tibet in 1955 by the National People’s Congress of China. Sikang Province, a late creation of the Ching emperors, was abolished, its eastern part going to Szechwan and its western part to Tibet, with boundary at the Kinsha River, the upper Yangtze. What Tibet twice lost in war, it gained in peace, through the Chinese sense of justice to minor nationalities. Chamdo’s actual incorporation into Tibet has been delayed because the formation of the Tibetan Autonomous Region was itself delayed by the kasha’s opposition. Chamdo, however, is on the committee to form the new Tibet, making speeches and voting with all the others, and its future status in Tibet is already recognized in statistical tables. This little detail shows how difficult are generalizations about Tibet where boundaries have changed often.
A reading of the 1951 Agreement should settle some questions of “sovereignty” and “autonomy.” Whatever the past claims, the Tibetans now agreed that they had “a long history within the boundaries of China,” and that they would “return to the motherland,” recognizing Peking as the Central Government, while Peking recognized that Tibet had “autonomy.” The nature of that autonomy is defined in the Agreement itself. It is “national regional autonomy under the leadership of the Central Government ... and in accordance with the policy laid down in the Common Program.”2
Such “autonomy” is not “independence” nor a “buffer state.” As already achieved in Inner Mongolia, Sinkiang and Kwangsi, “regional autonomy” includes respect for a region’s language, customs and religion. Local people handle local affairs and elect their deputies to the National People’s Congress of China. This “autonomy” does not give the right to secession, nor the right to maintain indefinitely a social or economic system that violates the Common Program. This “Common Program” is socialism. Tibet in 1951 agreed to move towards socialism, in its own way and at its own speed but “under the Central Government’s leadership.”
Specific pledges further defined the “autonomy.” Peking agreed “not to abolish the existing political structure,” nor the “powers of the Dalai Lama,” nor “the income of the monasteries” and not to “use compulsion for reform.” The local government agreed to effect reform in its own way, to install the People’s Liberation Army as the national army and to incorporate the Tibetan army into it.
Did Peking keep its promises? Did the kasha, Tibet’s local government, keep theirs?
Apei told me that the Central Government did its part but the local kasha did not. The Central Government built three great highways, to connect Tibet with the rest of China. This advantaged all Tibetans, for the easier transport greatly lessened the cost of all consumer goods. “The Central Government,” said Apei, “paid high prices to private owners for the land to build these roads, which was never done in Tibet before. The power of the local officials remained as before: officials at all levels kept their posts. No damage was done to any monastery in the Tibet region." (To my further question Apei explained that he referred to the period prior to the March rebellion and did not include the time of fighting in Lhasa which will be elsewhere described.)
To implement Tibet’s autonomy and unity, said Apei, the Central Government gave Chamdo to Tibet in 1955 and created in 1956 the Preparatory Committee for the Tibetan Autonomous Region, with fifty-five members of whom fifty were Tibetans, representing the different areas in Tibet. The Dalai Lama was chairman, the Panchen Erdeni was first vice-chairman, a Living Buddha from Chamdo was also a vice-chairman, and Apei himself was Secretary-General. Such a committee should be able not only to draw a constitution for an “Autonomous Region,” but to bring unity of four Tibetan areas between which conflict had existed. These were the area of “U,” of which the Dalai Lama was direct ruler, with the kasha as cabinet and some 600,000 population; the area of Houtsang, ruled by the Panchen Erdeni and with 150,000 people; and the newly added Chamdo Area, with 260,000 people, ruled by local lords, but in which had been continuous strife. The Preparatory Committee, with representatives from all these regions, was expected to unify them and mediate strife.3
“The PLA behaved like the people’s own sons,” said Apei. “They molested nobody and paid for everything they took. The people of Tibet and some strata of the upper and middle classes, were won by Peking’s policy to love Peking and the PLA. But there was a reactionary section of the serf-owners who intended to keep serfdom without change. They delayed reform and hindered even the building of schools and hospitals and roads. They never incorporated the Tibetan army into the PLA but kept it a serf army with nobles as top officers, a heavy burden on the people who had to make the uniforms and boots without pay.”
“Most people,” said Apei, “know that the time has come to end serfdom. The demand is urgent for reform. This reform will affect the income of the upper class and of the monasteries. Peking had agreed to provide compensation for former owners. The Central Government was patient: when no reform was begun by 1956, they agreed to wait another six years. This did not satisfy the reactionaries: they wanted serfdom forever. Our serfdom is a very dark system.”
How dark that serfdom was, with its floggings and maimings and arbitrary killing of serfs will be left till a later chapter, as will also the account of Apei’s part in the Lhasa rebellion, where he carried the Dalai Lama’s last exchange of letters with General Tan. I shall close this with the last question I put to Apei. “Now that the rebellion is crushed, with the top rebels fled to India and others captured, how fast will the reform of serfdom proceed?”
Apei smiled. “Tibet will change very fast now. Even in the upper class there are some people in deep sympathy with the reform. Most of the chiefs of the opposition fled or were captured, and a few are hiding out in the hills. The rebellion and its quelling have opened the way.
“I cannot tell you how fast it will go, for we had little time in Lhasa to discuss it. The Preparatory Committee was given power as local government only on March 28 and we left for Peking on April 8. In those ten days we were all too busy putting down rebels and forming new county governments to plan the reform.
“So what I can say is only my own opinion. The lands of the rebels will be confiscated and their serfs freed; this will take care of part of the problem. Nobles who did not rebel will be compensated; the Central Government has promised this. It will not be too costly for Peking to support Tibet’s nobles on their present living standard. Tibet itself will become prosperous when serfdom goes. I think the arrangements with each will differ and will be determined by consultation.
“My personal view is that the arrangements will be completed and serfdom ended by some time before the end of 1960. We say ‘step by step’ but already the first steps are taken. On the lands of the rebels, the serfs have been told that the harvest they sow this year is their own. This is only an emergency measure to promote the sowing, but it is the kind of measure from which one does not retreat. Already the PLA troops help in the sowing. The great whips of the serf-owners are already confiscated and flogging forbidden, when the PLA men, putting down rebellion, swept through the land. The process for ending serfdom has already begun.”
I mentioned to Peking friends Apei’s prediction that 1960 would see the end of serfdom in Tibet. They smiled: “If Apei says it, you can quote it. He is the man who has the job to do.”
Behind their smile there was a touch of reticence that I thought I understood. Apei and the Panchen Erdeni had the job of abolishing serfdom from the top, through channels of government and law and compensation. Some fifteen hundred runaway serfs like Lachi and Gada had the job of abolishing it from the bottom, by organizing the serfs.
For a thousand years no serf dared sit down in the room with a noble or face him directly on the road. How would the two jobs mix? Even in the National Minorities Institute it took time and discussion before students from the two sharply divided classes could work at ease together.
That would be Apei’s problem and Tibet’s and China’s. For all of them the quelling of the rebellion had opened the way.
1.“Kublai Khan” would be called over-simplification by a meticulous historian, for the absorption was spread over decades, both before and after Kublai. He was the main figure and may stand for his dynasty.
2. See Appendix for full text.
3. There was strife between the nobles of the Dalai Lama and the Panchen, and between Chamdo nobles and the kasha.