[Ms. Woeser was born in Lhasa in 1966 to a
Tibetan mother and her father, Tsering Dorje, who was half Tibetan and half
Han, the dominant ethnicity in China. But in 1970, her father, who had served
as deputy commander of the Lhasa military district, was transferred to Sichuan
Province. It wasn’t until 1990 that Ms. Woeser returned to Lhasa, where she
became editor of the journal “Tibetan Literature.” In 2003, she published
“Notes on Tibet,” a collection of essays and short stories that was soon banned
by the Chinese government. She is now a freelance writer and poet based in
Beijing with Mr. Wang, whom she married in 2004. In an interview, she discussed
what she learned from her father’s photographs of Tibet’s experience of the
Cultural Revolution.]
By Luo Siling
 |
|
Tsering
Woeser’s father, an officer in the People’s Liberation Army in Lhasa
when
the Cultural Revolution broke out in 1966, photographed many public
attacks
on Tibet’s old ruling class and religious leaders. Here, a Buddhist
nun
wears a sign labeling her as a counterrevolutionary.
Credit
Tsering Dorje
|
In 1999, the Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser
came across Wang Lixiong’s book “Sky Burial: The Fate of Tibet.” On finishing
it, she sent Mr. Wang photographs taken by her father, who was with the
People’s Liberation Army when it entered Tibet in the 1950s and documented the
early years of the Cultural Revolution in Lhasa in the 1960s. Mr. Wang wrote
back, saying, “It’s not for me, as a non-Tibetan, to use these photos to reveal
history. That task can only be yours.”
Ms. Woeser began tracking down and
interviewing people who appeared in the photos. This resulted in two books
published by Locus in Taiwan in 2006: “Forbidden Memory: Tibet During the
Cultural Revolution,” based on her father’s photographs, and “Tibet
Remembered,” an oral history narrated by 23 people who appear in them.
Meanwhile, Ms. Woeser had begun taking her own photos, using her father’s
camera, of the places he photographed. Many were included in a new edition of
“Forbidden Memory,” published this year on the 50th anniversary of the start
the Cultural Revolution.
Ms. Woeser was born in Lhasa in 1966 to a
Tibetan mother and her father, Tsering Dorje, who was half Tibetan and half
Han, the dominant ethnicity in China. But in 1970, her father, who had served
as deputy commander of the Lhasa military district, was transferred to Sichuan
Province. It wasn’t until 1990 that Ms. Woeser returned to Lhasa, where she
became editor of the journal “Tibetan Literature.” In 2003, she published
“Notes on Tibet,” a collection of essays and short stories that was soon banned
by the Chinese government. She is now a freelance writer and poet based in
Beijing with Mr. Wang, whom she married in 2004. In an interview, she discussed
what she learned from her father’s photographs of Tibet’s experience of the
Cultural Revolution.
How
did your father manage to take these photos?
In 1950, Mao Zedong ordered the People’s
Liberation Army into Tibet, and on the way it passed through my father’s
hometown, Derge, which is in the present-day Garze Tibetan Autonomous
Prefecture in Sichuan. At the time my father, who was only 13, was sent away by
his Han father to enlist in the P.L.A. His mother was a local Tibetan. During the
Cultural Revolution, my father served as an officer in the political department
of the Tibet Military District. I suppose he was able to take photos because of
his privileges as a P.L.A. officer.
It’s curious, however, that for all the
photos that my father took, he was able to keep the photos and negatives. This
certainly could not have happened if the army had assigned him to take the
photos. This indicates that my father’s activity was not commissioned by the
military.
Very few people had cameras then, and even
fewer had the chance to take photos of public events. There were several media
agencies active in Tibet then. They produced lots of documentaries, photos and
reports. And yet in the newspapers and posters from then you can’t find any
photos of ruined temples or “struggle sessions” against “counterrevolutionary
monsters and demons.” I’ve looked at all the issues of Tibet Daily from 1966 to
1970 but can find no such photos.
What
do your father’s photos show?
Mostly mass meetings and “incidents.” By mass
meetings I mean large-scale gatherings such as the celebration by tens of
thousands of Chairman Mao’s launching of the Cultural Revolution. Incidents
include the destruction of temples and struggles against “monsters and demons.”
The photos contain many identifiable figures including the Communist leaders of
Tibet, the founder of the Tibetan Red Guards, individual Red Guards, as well as
nobles, clergy and officials of the old Tibet society who were targeted in “struggle
sessions.” In my investigations most of my efforts were focused on these
people, because it’s through them that the photos have their greatest value.
Over six years, I interviewed about 70 people in the photos.
How
do your photographs and your father’s, taken in the same locations, differ?
In 1966 and 1967, my father took photos of
mass meetings and rallies of Red Guards and the P.L.A. in front of the Potala
Palace. In 2012, when I went to the same place to take photos, two
self-immolations by Tibetans had taken place in Lhasa that May. As a result,
the government tightened its policy of ethnic segregation and took more
security measures against Tibetans, especially those from outside Lhasa. The
measures were first implemented in March 2008, when protests broke out across
the Tibetan region, and became more severe in 2012. As I took my photos, I
noticed a curious phenomenon: the palace square was filled with men in black.
They had umbrellas on their backs, which they would use to block people from taking
pictures if an incident broke out. They lined up in rows and monitored the
people passing by. They prohibited anyone from sitting in the square.
Another example: In 2014, I was standing
where my father had taken photos in front of the Jokhang Temple. What did he
see back then? Red Guards trying to hang Chairman Mao’s portrait on the roof of
the temple, where the Chinese flag was also planted. Though I didn’t see any
Mao portraits there, the flag was waving in the same place. Also, there were
quite a few believers kneeling and praying, as well as a crowd of tourists
fascinated by their actions. On the roof of a house diagonally across from the
temple there were sharpshooters from the armed police. Ever since 2008,
sharpshooters have been deployed on the roofs of buildings around the temple.
Comparing today with the Cultural Revolution,
there were no believers kneeling back then, and the temple was ruined, while
today the temple offers a bustling scene where believers may freely worship.
But these are only superficial differences. Religious worship is still strictly
controlled. Furthermore, there is now commercialized tourism, with gawking
tourists who treat Tibetans like exotic decorations and Lhasa as a theme park.
Who
was the founder of the Lhasa Red Guards?
Tao Changsong, born in Yangzhou, Jiangsu
Province. In 1960, he graduated from East China Normal University and
volunteered to move to Tibet, where he became a teacher of Chinese at Lhasa
Middle School. During the Cultural Revolution he was the main force behind the
creation of the Lhasa Red Guards, as well as commander of the Lhasa
Revolutionary Rebels Headquarters. When the Revolutionary Committee of the
Tibet Autonomous Region was formed, he became its deputy director, a position
equivalent to vice chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Region today. He also went
to Beijing many times and met with Zhou Enlai, Jiang Qing and other key members
of the Central Revolutionary Committee. In 2001, I interviewed him twice. I
didn’t show him my father’s photos, assuming he might not tell me the story if
he saw them, since he appears in one. It shows him at the Dalai Lama’s summer
palace, the Norbulingka, leading a team of Red Guards hanging up a poster on
which is written “People’s Park.”
There were two “rebel factions” in Lhasa
during the Cultural Revolution. One was the Revolutionary Rebels Headquarters.
The other was the Great Alliance of Proletarian Revolutionaries Command, or
Great Alliance Command for short. The two fought each other for power. In the
later period of the Cultural Revolution, the Headquarters faction lost ground,
while the other faction achieved total control, and retained it even after the
Cultural Revolution [which ended in 1976]. Headquarters members were purged
from the party. Tao Changsong was investigated on suspicion of belonging to the
“three types of people” — “people who followed the Lin Biao-Jiang Qing
counterrevolutionary faction,” “people with a strong factionalist bent” and
“people who engaged in looting and robbery.” After the mid-1980s, he worked at
the Tibetan Academy of Social Sciences and served as assistant editor of the
journal “Tibet Studies” and as deputy director of the Modern Tibetan Research
Institute. Now he’s retired and lives in Chengdu and Lhasa, where he is in good
standing with the government.
Mr. Tao is a lively talker with a sharp
memory. He also showed his cautious side when he began having difficulty
answering my questions about the Red Guards’ campaign against the “Four Olds”
at the Jokhang Temple. The statement in his account that left the deepest
impression on me concerned the P.L.A.’s crackdown on “second rebels” [Tibetans
who revolted in 1969]. He said: “The Tibetans are too simple-minded. If you
execute them they say, ‘Thank you.’ If you give them 200 renminbi they also
say, ‘Thank you.’ ”
Tibet was an exception to the general
practice of purging the “three types of people” after the Cultural Revolution.
In Tibet there were few purges of that kind. When Hu Yaobang came to Lhasa in
1980, he put an end to the purging of the “three types.” Why? Because there
were many Tibetans among them. Hu thought if you purged them, the party
wouldn’t be able to find reliable agents among local Tibetans. So the party
couldn’t purge them. And some of them not only were shielded from purges but
even received promotions. As a result, the people who rose in power during the
Cultural Revolution still dominate Tibet, whether Tibetan or Han.
Tell
us about the people in the photographs who were victims of the struggle
sessions.
There were about 40 of them. They belonged to
a variety of professions in the old Tibet: monks, officials, merchants,
physicians, officers, estate overlords and so on. The settings included
struggle sessions at mass assemblies, in the streets and at local neighborhood
committees that methodically conducted their sessions by turns. The time frame
was from August to September 1966. After that, the division between the
factions led each to conduct its own separate struggle sessions. The people
attacked in these sessions were incorporated into the “monsters and demons”
unit, where they were ordered to attend long-term labor and study sessions at
their assigned neighborhood committee.
What’s most interesting about these victims
is that most were members of the upper class whom the Communist Party from the
1950s to the eve of the Cultural Revolution had designated as “targets to be
won over.” And since they did not follow the Dalai Lama and flee the country
during the 1959 uprising, the party rewarded them with many privileges. In
other words, they were partners of the party. One of them, a monk, even served
as an informant for the military.
But after the Cultural Revolution began they
were labeled “monsters and demons” and suffered humiliating attacks. In the end
they were overtaken by madness, illness and death. Some died during the
Cultural Revolution, others afterward. Most of the victims died. Of the few who
survived, some went abroad. Some, however, remained in Tibet, where they took
up the party’s offer and joined the system to regain their high status. Today
these people are found in the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference,
the National People’s Congress and the Buddhist Association, where they fulfill
ceremonial functions needed by the party.
Given the fate of most of the victims, the
people I interviewed were mostly their relatives, or in some cases the
disciples of victimized monks. They told me so many stories.
Such
as?
There was the Lhasa nobleman Sampho Tsewang
Rinzin, from one of the most renowned noble families in Tibet. Sampho began
working with the party in the 1950s and benefited from that. But he was cruelly
struggled against during the Cultural Revolution, as you can see in the photos.
The Red Guards who were beating him made him wear the uniform of a senior
minister in the Tibetan government, which as much as it made him look splendid,
brought him so much humiliation and stripped him of all dignity, so that in the
end he was sobbing in front of everyone. He died soon after this.
Then there was the “female living Buddha” —
an erroneous term; we call them rinpoche — Samding Dorje Phagmo Dechen Chodron.
Historically there have been very few female living Buddhas in Tibet. She was
the most famous. In 1959 she followed the Dalai Lama and escaped to India. But
she was persuaded by party cadres to return to Tibet and was held up as a
patriot who had “resolved to shun the darkness and embrace the light.” She even
met with Mao. After the Cultural Revolution started she was labeled a “monster
and demon” and humiliated at struggle sessions.
In the photo where she is shown being beaten,
she was only 24. She was weak then, because she had recently given birth to her
third child. Her husband was the son of the great Lhasa nobleman Kashopa. The
couple eventually divorced. It was her ex-husband who told me about her
experiences as well as those of her parents after I showed him the photos.
Today, Dorje Phagmo is vice chairwoman of the
Tibetan Autonomous Region and a member of the Chinese People’s Political
Consultative Conference Standing Committee. She often appears on television
attending various conferences.
Did
you interview the Red Guards in the photos?
In one of my father’s photos there is a
female activist, a quite vicious one during the Cultural Revolution. She once
led a team to ransack a house where she not only seized the owner’s property
but set fire to manuscripts bequeathed to the owner by the great Tibetan
scholar Gendun Choephel. A Tibetan scholar called this a major crime against
Tibetan history and culture. Later this woman became party secretary at the
Wabaling neighborhood committee. When I found her there, she looked quite
insignificant. As soon as I brought up the Cultural Revolution, her facial
expression immediately changed. She refused to give an interview or let me take
her photo.
There was also a former monk I interviewed
who had smashed Buddhist stupas and burned scriptures during the Cultural
Revolution. Afterward, he volunteered to be a janitor at the Jokhang Temple and
worked there for 17 years. He told me: “If it weren’t for the Cultural
Revolution, I think I would have lived my entire life as a good monk. I would
have worn monk’s robes. The temples would still be there. Inside the temples I
would have devotedly read scriptures. But the Cultural Revolution came. The
robes could no longer be worn. Though I have never looked for a woman or abandoned
monastic life, I am not fit to wear the robes again. This is the most painful
thing in my life.”
