A Tibetan Revolutionary: The Political Life and Times of Bapa Phuntso Wangye (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Tibetan Revolutionary: The Political Life and Times of Bapa Phuntso Wangye A. Tom Grunfeld (bio) Melvyn C. Goldstein, Dawei Sherap, and William R. Siebenschuh. A Tibetan Revolutionary: The Political Life and Times of Bapa Phuntso Wangye. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2004. xxiv, 371 pp. Hardcover $24.95, ISBN 0-520-24089-8. History books are often dense with detail as historians labor to ensure that events are depicted accurately and complexities fully explained. Not only have I used such texts in my teaching, I have favorably reviewed them and, indeed, have even written some. Yet as valuable as they may be I often find myself coming to the same conclusion as Melvyn C. Goldstein, the principal author of this book, who observes that "An individual's life experience often can illuminate the nature of a general problem with great clarity" (p. xiii). I would go even further and contend that, at times, the account of an extraordinary life of a particular individual can permit a far better understanding of a historical period than a more encyclopedic account, especially for general readers and students. Two of the authors of the book under review have ventured into the realm of historical biography before, with The Struggle for Modern Tibet: The Autobiography of Tashi Tsering,1 which told the deeply moving and compelling story of a poor rural Tibetan whose uncommon life cast light on modern Tibetan history to the extent that it remains, to my mind, the most accessible introductory text on modern Tibet. The present book may rival that. Here we are presented with the biography of Phuntso Wangye (Phunwang for short), who was born in 1922 in Batang, eastern Kham.2 The narrative is in the first person, yet it is not an autobiography, nor even an "as told to" biography. Rather, the information was acquired through an extensive series of interviews over several years. These interviews were originally meant to explore Phunwang's role in the historical and political events of his time with the results planned for use in other histories. The three authors apparently surmised that the data they had gathered provided sufficient material for an (auto?)biography. The first-person narrative works exceedingly well in telling the story. For historians, however, there will be some uneasiness. While Phunwang has directly contributed a "Comment," which is more a summary of his life than a comment on the text itself, the implication is made that he did not read the final manuscript (p. xiv). This raises questions about accuracy, tone, and nuance, and historians will surely wonder if he would have offered anything different from the authors' choreography of his life story. Putting that aside, this is an indispensable book. The Sino-Tibetan struggle is usually presented as a "conflict in stark black-and-white images," as Goldstein aptly points out, "good Tibetans against malevolent Chinese communists" (p. xiii). [End Page 351] But this book is about the knottiness of that struggle, the subtleties, the human frailties, not the stereotypes that are so common. "Phunwang's life suggests that the problem in China/Tibet is not so much that of a clash between incompatible ideas and values—the forces of 'modernization' verses 'religion' and 'traditionalism.'" "Rather," Goldstein observes, "it is predominately a clash between the political dominance of a majority nationality, the Han, and the political subordination of a minority nationality, the Tibetans. It is, in essence, a clash about the very idea of what kind of a nation the People's Republic of China is and should be"—that is, either multiethnic or a Han Chinese-dominated state (p. xiii). As a child Phunwang attended a Chinese government-sponsored school in Batang that had been established to prepare ethnic Tibetans for work in the Guo-mindang (GMD) government. As his education progressed Phunwang became increasingly disillusioned with the GMD and, coupled with a traditional Khampa (a person from Kham) disenchantment with the Tibetan government in Lhasa, he sought alternative ideologies. It was one of his teachers who introduced Phunwang to socialist ideas, lending him Russian communist books such as Joseph Stalin's On Nationalities, and it wasn't long...