Tibet in Agony: Lhasa 1959 by Li Jianglin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tibet in Agony: Lhasa 1959 by Li Jianglin Eric T. Schluessel Li Jianglin. Tibet in Agony: Lhasa 1959. Translated by Susan Wilf. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. 410 pp. $29.95 (cloth). Li Jianglin's Tibet in Agony is a masterful study of a fateful period in Tibetan history: the years leading up to the Tibetan uprising of 1959, which resulted in the end of Tibetan autonomy and the establishment of the Dalai Lama's government-in-exile in Dharamsala, India. It is a gripping story of deception, ambition, and faith that played out on the rocky ground among arrogant Tibetan aristocrats, fanatical Chinese officials, and organic popular movements. Li builds a detailed and credible account of this highly politicized event from extensive oral interviews, documents, and memoirs in Tibetan, Chinese, and English. Tibet in Agony demonstrates that the Tibetan uprising was not the creation of any one group's leadership but resulted from the failure of leadership on all sides. Li shows how, in the years preceding the Battle of Lhasa in 1959, land reform and its concomitant violence inflamed popular discontent across most of Greater Tibet. Meanwhile, officials of the Chinese Communist Party and People's Liberation Army (PLA) slowly enclosed Lhasa and the government of the Dalai Lama (1935–), even as the Tibetan leadership focused on appeasing the Chinese. The People's Republic of China (PRC) claimed to represent "the people"; the actual people of Tibet were dying from forced collectivization and supported the Dalai Lama instead, but the Dalai Lama's own government failed to represent most Tibetans' material and political concerns. Even when a group of commoners attempted to establish a popular government in Lhasa and when the Khampa militia arrived to defend the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan aristocracy's regional and class prejudices kept them from forming a unified front with either party. Meanwhile, the regional Chinese leadership communicated in missives laced with threatening innuendo. This lack of transparent dialogue between the major actors meant that each was operating according to very partial information and thus inclined to act rashly: the Chinese mounted preemptive strikes, setting the events of the Battle of Lhasa in motion; the Tibetan government stalled and hesitated before finally fleeing to India but kept the Khampas and commoners in the dark, leaving them unprepared for the PLA's eventual onslaught. [End Page E-29] Ultimately, Li's account shows that the blame for the Lhasa incident lies mainly with the PLA, which had a vast organizational and technological advantage over the Tibetan resistance. The asymmetrical conflict came about in no small part because of factional competition within the Chinese leadership and the demands of party loyalty, which prompted "bold" action on the part of the PLA Tibet Military Command without clear orders from Beijing. A jumpy and overprepared PLA unit massacred Tibetan soldiers and civilians, while the "armed fighters" that officers claimed to have put down were mainly uncoordinated groups of monks and commoners roused by faith or patriotism to take up scant and antiquated arms. However, the attempt to control the narrative of the Tibet uprising began even before shots were fired. Mao Zedong, Li shows, intended for there to be a final, violent reckoning over the "Tibet question" (Xizang wenti 西藏問題), which would be blamed on the agitation of the feudal ruling class. Li cuts through this historical shadow play by utilizing sources in multiple languages with a careful sense of the politics of representation playing out within each. Li is especially handy with Chinese documents and memoirs, which, as she demonstrates, played a role in the politics of history by framing the events in Lhasa even before they unfolded. Chinese sources by turns willfully manipulate the historical narrative (mainly by downplaying casualties or misrepresenting the nature of agency in the Lhasa incident) and bombastically celebrate the PLA's bloodiest achievements. While any critical reader would find reason to doubt these accounts, it has taken Li to triangulate among masses of inconsistent, yet officially licensed, Chinese narratives and the deeply personal, idiosyncratic perspectives of the Tibetan memoir literature. The result is that nearly every statement in the book is corroborated by at least two...