A man stands in front of a sign marking 70 years of Chinese rule over Tibet Autonomous Region in Potala Palace Square, Lhasa, Tibet, June 1, 2021.(Martin Pollard/Reuters)
When the Iron Bird Flies: China’s Secret War in Tibet, by Jianglin Li (Stanford University Press, 576 pp., $35)
The recent depredations of
the People’s Republic of China in East Turkestan/Xinjiang have had the
unfortunate effect of obscuring and displacing a similar oppression that the
Chinese perpetrated in another region: Tibet. More than half a century before
it began persecuting the Uyghurs, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) engineered
and executed a brutal, enduring domination of Tibet that persists today. But
while the Tibetan cause enjoyed its heyday in the West in the 1990s, the region
has largely faded from the headlines since.
Jianglin Li, a historian of
Tibet, seeks to remedy this forgetfulness. In When the Iron Bird Flies,
a masterly account of the CCP’s invasion and subjugation of the Tibetan regions
in the 1950s, Li exhumes decades of archival Chinese records and interviews
survivors of the onslaught. She tells the story through the eyes of the
overwhelmed and ultimately defeated Tibetans, as well as from the point of view
of the CCP officials who quelled their hard-fought rebellion.
While even the Chinese-nationalist
government had sought to integrate Tibet into the Chinese body politic in the
first half of the 20th century, the story truly begins with Mao Zedong’s rise
to power. He was determined, no matter the cost, to swallow the Tibetan
provinces of U-Tsang, Amdo, and Kham — which form more than a fifth of
contemporary China by area. On January 2, 1950, Mao, visiting Moscow, cabled
the CCP Central Committee, noting that “although the population of Tibet is not
large, its international status is crucial. We must occupy Tibet and reform it
into a people’s democracy.” Not for Mao the traditional religious and herding
lifestyle of this peaceful people of the northwest steppe; they must be
fundamentally remade in the image of Socialist Man.
The People’s Liberation Army
entered Tibet in 1950, with Mao signing the so-called Seventeen-Point Agreement
dedicated to “modernizing” the Tibetan regions. As part of its charm offensive,
the CCP committed that “there will be no compulsion on the part of the Central
Authorities” and that “the Local Government of Tibet should carry out reforms
of its own accord.” In 1954, the Dalai Lama was fêted in Beijing, winning
“election” as the vice-chairman of the First National People’s Congress
standing committee, and Mao agreed to delay for six years implementing the
socialist reforms he so urgently sought to impose.
But it didn’t take long for
Chinese authorities to abandon this approach. In 1956, according to a CCP
county-party committee document that Li cites, Chinese cadres were dispatched
to Tibet, aiming to “enlighten” the masses on the reasons for their own
backwardness and poverty,” to “launch a grievance-venting campaign,” and to
“arouse individual enmity among the peasants and then gradually induce class
hatred.” Denunciation rituals and the equivalent of Two Minutes Hate assemblies
followed, often accompanied by violence, in rural areas.
These concepts, foreign and
menacing to the traditional agrarian lifestyle of the Tibetans, predictably
rained down on inhospitable soil. That same year, Tibetans in Kham rose up
organically over their “opposition to the forcible imposition of land reform,
their refusal to hand over guns, their protest against taxation, their defense
of their religion, and their demands for the withdrawal of Chinese
A dramatic battle ensued around
the Lithang monastery in late March 1956, with Tibetan yak-herders and
tribesmen resolutely defending their holy spaces against PLA troops and the
Tibetan cadres that the PLA had impressed into service. But reinforcements sent
from Beijing encircled the rebels, and when two Tupolev Tu-4 bombers — the
“iron birds” of Li’s title — unleashed their fury on the temple complex, nearly
all the Tibetans perished. (Those same warplanes would later bombard the
Bathang and Chatreng monasteries as well, thereby defiling holy places and
terrifying the populace.)
Across the region, however,
local populations challenged the CCP interlopers, who in turn “annihilated”
more than 11,500 of them between March and June 1956 alone. Chinese authorities
also began to explicitly target the Tibetan Buddhist faith and its practitioners,
aiming, per a July 1958 provincial resolution, to “thoroughly discredit
religion until it collapses” and to “cause the majority of religious
monasteries to disband.” Qinghai Province (encompassing most of Amdo), for
instance, saw 70 percent of its religious leaders arrested or remanded to
reeducation camps; throughout Tibet, Li reports, “the vast majority of
monasteries were closed down, occupied, or dismantled by the beginning of
1959.”
The decisive battle for the
region took place in March 1959 in and around Lhasa, the longtime Tibetan
capital. Civilians escaping the violence in other provinces flocked there as
the ragtag force of Tibetan irregulars mounted a last stand against the vastly
more powerful PLA, whose advanced weaponry pounded ancient temples and the
Dalai Lama’s palace complex in Norbulingka. Along with his entourage, the
revered leader, no longer in favor in Beijing, raced across the Himalayas into
India, along the way formally repudiating the now-dead-letter Seventeen-Point
Agreement and declaring the establishment of a provisional government-in-exile.
After Lhasa, the PLA conducted
a massive cleanup campaign in the nearby Lhoka and Namtso regions, aggressively
deploying its iron birds against scattered rebel forces and civilians alike —
the latter constituting 74 percent of casualties, according to Li’s
calculations. The Tibetan resistance received limited support from the United
States; the CIA’s covert ST CIRCUS program armed and trained a small number of
Tibetan fighters in Camp Hale, Colo., but Li demonstrates that American aid
amounted to little more than an “operation for gathering intelligence and for
harassment.” Even had the United States intervened more forcefully, anything
short of a Vietnam-style commitment would have been unlikely to turn the tide.
Ultimately, during its
“pacification” campaign, the PLA deployed nearly 250,000 troops across 14
infantry, air force, and cavalry divisions; engaged in nearly 16,000 battles;
and slaughtered nearly half a million Tibetans, or 17 percent of the
population. As Li writes:
Wherever its iron heels trod, the flames of war were ignited,
monasteries collapsed, scriptures were burned, people were killed, and leaders
fled into exile. The political system, economy, military, culture, and society
of the Tibetan people were completely destroyed.
The author records the
heartbreaking tales of numerous Tibetans who fled the violence to neighboring
India, including Drolkar Gye, who escaped the Battle of Lhasa and, 50 years
later, still resided in the Dondrupling Tibetan Refugee Settlement. “How was it
that I was now in this desolate place all by myself?” she recalls asking
herself about her long, solitary flight to India in 1959. “I thought I must be
dead and that my soul was passing through this place.”
We also hear the tragic,
inspiring story of Tsering Dorje, who, along with his father and brother,
fought the Chinese valiantly in Chamdo, in central Kham. Even after the Dalai
Lama had decamped to India, Dorje tells Li, “we wanted to continue the
guerrilla war in our homeland.” Eventually captured, released, and redeployed
to fight in Tibet, Dorje witnessed the Chinese extinguishment of the final
flames of rebellion before escaping to Dharamsala, India.
Li’s organization of this
complex material and her occasional chronological and geographical jumps leave
something to be desired, as does her uneven interweaving of small-scale and
broader storylines; unfortunately, some nuance seems to have been lost in
translation from her original Chinese. A sharper and more sustained focus on
the key elements of China’s strategy and a more detailed history of
pre-invasion Tibet would have helped the reader immensely.
But When the Iron Bird Flies is nevertheless a
careful, illuminating study of the vicious CCP campaign to dominate Tibet in
the 1950s. Li unveils hitherto unpublished details of the cruelty of the PLA’s
crusade. While liberating Tibet may not be realistic at this stage, the Western
world must at least engage with the origins of its plight. Indeed, as none
other than the Dalai Lama himself proclaims in the book’s foreword, Li’s exposé
enables her readers “to deepen their approach to and understanding of the Tibet
problem in the spirit of seeking truth from facts.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/06/27/the-crushing-of-tibet/
