Anna Louise Strong Reference Archive
The Central Institute of National Minorities lies well out in the suburbs of Greater Peking, on the road to the old emperor’s Summer Palace. A well-known American educator, visiting it with me, said he thought no American university equalled its campus and buildings in beauty. I myself would not go so far. The main buildings, built in 1951, I find indeed unsurpassed in architecture; they follow the old Chinese style with sweeping curved roofs of tile in shining color. On later buildings they had to economize to handle the growing pressure of students: this forced a simpler style and I found it a pity. The trees are still too small for adequate shade; open-air classes crowd under them so closely to get out of the summer sun that they look a bit disorderly. This fault time will remedy. With these few lacks, it is a fine campus and a notable institution.
Founded in the second year of the Chinese People’s Republic, it was clearly one of the first priorities. When I saw it in spring of 1959, just before graduation, it had 2,400 students of 47 different nationalities. These figures were given us by Peng Hua-an, director of the general office, as he offered tea in the large reception room with cream walls and five big divans, set on a cream rug with floral design in rose and blue.
“Ours is a new type of institute of higher learning,” he told us. “The forty-seven national groups live here in equality and mutual help. Each national group is supplied with food not too different from its customary diet. For this we have eight dining-rooms, two different kinds of Moslem diet, one Tibetan and five others. The Tibetans at first all wanted tsamba, the parched barley flour that is their staple: but now they also like rice and steamed bread. Each group that wants it is provided with facilities for its religion. We have a special Moslem room and also a room for the Tibetans, furnished with Buddha statues and scriptures. We have here a miniature of the kind of mutual relations that we want to build in our multi-national country.”
China has eight institutes similar to this in purpose, Director Peng told us. The others are on provincial scale: this is the central one. It is not very different from the others, but students take pride in it, because it is in Peking, the capital of the motherland. They study first their own language and then the Peking language, which is the national language of China. They study history, politics and current events. They learn especially the history of the Chinese revolution and the policy towards minor nationalities. No technical training for industry or farming is given at the institute: for this some of the graduates go elsewhere. This institute is the first stage in training civil servants for the local governments of the different nationalities.
“The basic sense of national equality and mutual help between the nationalities is what we try here to instill,” said the director. “Technical help can be furnished from outside for a time: they can acquire technique later. But many of them still have to learn to read and write in their own language.” He added that the institute has a library of 470,000 volumes of which 70,000 are in minor nationality languages. It has also the newspapers and magazines of the various national groups.
“The students,” he said, “usually go back to the place they came from. That is their purpose and ours: to train local leaders.”
The largest national group here, I learned, was the Tibetan. Though Tibetans are only sixth in size among China’s minor nationalities, being outranked not only by the Han majority, but by the Chwangs, the Uighurs, the Huis and the Yis, of whom outsiders have rarely heard, the Tibetans have been pouring into the institutes in recent years because of the situation in Tibet. Most of them are runaway serfs, who fled for protection to the People’s Liberation Army, or to some of the civilian institutions of the Central Government in Tibet, to escape from servitude. There were 900 of them in this institute, of whom most were in the preparatory department, since they came not knowing how to read and write a word. Some, however, had had a bit of education with the army in Lhasa before coming to Peking. Two hundred were graduating, of whom half were going to study further: 50 in agricultural schools and 50 in medical schools, intending to work for the farming and the health of Tibetans. One hundred were going back to Tibet, already prepared to help organize the new reforms.
The institute has had a private view of the rebellion in Tibet. Its own history mirrored the changes. The first students that came from Tibet were from the families of nobles. “They came in from 1952 to 1954,” said Director Peng, “after the 1951 Agreement. The teachers, of course, were all from noble families in those days. Nobody else had enough education to teach in Tibetan, for serfs had never been permitted education. The first batch of five came to explore: later they joined the rebellion. After 1954, the nobles stopped sending their children. They feared their children would learn bad things from us: also the local chiefs of government in Tibet threatened them.”
“What bad things,” I asked, “since you permit their religion?”
Director Peng smiled. “We teach the equality and mutual help of human beings. Tibetan nobles did not believe in that. . . . But when the nobles stopped sending their children, we began to get a flood of runaway serfs. At present only about one hundred of the nine hundred are from noble families and about fifty from middle groups such as merchants. The rest are serfs.”
I asked how the two groups got on together as students. The director replied that they went through three stages. “Those from noble families at first consider that in all ways they are superior. They resent having to carry their own suitcases, make their own beds, look after their own room. This, they think, is the task of slaves: they are insulted because we expect them to do this. Some never accept it but go home; others accept it at last.
“The serfs at first fear the others and cannot sit at ease in the same room. In the next stage they have less fear but still feel separate and cannot mix. Only after some time and considerable discussion do they reach the stage in which they mix easily as fellow students, criticizing and helping each other.”
The first taste of the coming rebellion in Tibet hit the institute in 1957. At that time Surkong, one of the rebel leaders — he had not yet openly launched rebellion — passed through Peking to visit the Tenth Anniversary of the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, which had been established when the Chinese Communists already controlled the north but had not yet established themselves in Peking. Surkong did not visit the institute but secretly got the Tibetan teachers together outside the institute — they were all from noble families — and instigated them to make trouble. . . . They should refuse to learn the Han language or obey any discipline of the institute, but should publicize Tibetan independence and religion. They should also organize the students in that direction.
“There was quite a bit of uproar,” said Director Peng. “We got all the students together and explained the situation, and showed whither this new propaganda led. Quite a number of the Tibetan teachers left us at that time and went home to organize rebellion. Only one of Surkong’s agents stayed till early this year for purposes of spying on us. He went back to Lhasa also before the rebellion broke out.”
“Did it upset the institute badly?” I asked.
“Not too much,” said Peng. “By that time we had not only the big demand of the runaway serfs for education but also new teachers, with more progressive views.”
The runaway serfs, he said, had come fleeing for life and not knowing when they could go back. Until now they could not have gone back to Tibet without danger. They might have been picked up by the Tibetan army or some of the armed retainers of the nobles, and sent back to their masters. Anything then might have happened to them, up to torture and death. But now that the rebellion had openly broken out in Lhasa and been quelled, the way to reform was open, and many of the serfs were going back. Technically they were still serfs, for the laws in Tibet had not yet been changed. But practically, they knew that serfdom would now be soon abolished, and that the new local government of Tibet stood behind them in their freedom. One of the chiefs of the office in Lhasa of the Working Committee had personally come to Peking, to choose graduates who could be useful for the new Tibet. He was taking a hundred of the graduates from the institute back with him, and fifty more from other places in Peking.
I asked Director Peng to let some of the students call on me for longer interviews. So it was that I met Lochang, a girl from Lhasa, and Lachi and Gada, from the Chamdo Area, all of them still technically, but no longer actually, serfs.
The first who came was Lochang, a girl from Lhasa. She will not yet go back to Tibet, for she still has much to learn. She was small and very dark-skinned, reminding me that Tibetans are not all of one blood but mixed of many tribes. Unlike the Han women, who usually wear trousers, Lochang wore a long gray dress, jumper-style over a bright flowered blouse and under an even more colorful striped apron. Large brassy ear-rings hung in her ears. When I commented on her dress she told me that the institute furnished all students with proper clothes, each for his own nationality.
Lochang spoke the Han language so badly that we had to have two interpreters, from Tibetan to Mandarin to English. The simpler questions she understood in the Chinese “national language” but other questions had to be twice translated. And many questions she did not understand in any language at all. It is not easy, I found, to interpret from serfdom’s concepts to those of the modern world.
Our first confusion was about Lochang’s family relations. She first said her father was a carpenter in Lhasa and she, with her three brothers, all worked as his helpers. This seemed simple and clear. But later she said he “was not the real father,” and also that her mother “was not the real mother of the brothers.” It might have been a case of polyandry, or only a second or third marriage, with the earlier marriages broken by death or by the serfs being separated through different ownerships, as happens in Tibet. I did not pursue it further, for I was not investigating marriage, which tends to be confused among serfs.
One thing Lochang knew precisely. She knew who owned her. She belonged to a monastery two or three days’ journey away from Lhasa. She had never seen the monastery and nobody from the monastery had ever seen Lochang. The girl herself had taken care of that. But she nonetheless belonged to the monastery because her grandmother belonged to it, and ownership of girls descends in the female line.
“My grandmother worked in the fields for the monastery,” said Lochang. “She died from the hard work. That was before I was ever born. My mother was sickly and could not work the fields. So she got permission to go to Lhasa to look for work. For this she had to pay a tax to the monastery. It was collected on festival days when the monastery sent people to Lhasa to celebrate festivals. Then they collected the taxes from all the serfs they owned who were in Lhasa. When I was born in Lhasa, I was registered at once as the property of the monastery. They paid a birth-tax for me: later every year they paid a tax for me so that I could stay in Lhasa with my mother. My mother paid the tax for me and I stayed out of sight, so that the monastery would not see me and order me to go back.”
Lochang’s father, or stepfather, as the case may be, did not belong to the monastery. He belonged to a noble who also lived several days’ journey from Lhasa but in a different direction. The father being a carpenter and the noble having more carpenters than he could use, the man had been given permission to seek work in Lhasa, also on payment of an annual tax to his owner. Lochang’s three brothers, descending in the male line, were registered as the property of this noble. If at any time the noble should want carpentry work by the father, more than he wanted the annual tax, he could order the serf to come back to the estate and work. In that case the serf would work without wages but would be given some food. If this took the man away from his wife and children forever, that was not the owner’s affair.
All things affecting her ownership or her mother’s and father’s owner, were known by Lochang very clearly: these facts conditioned her life. She also knew clearly that when her father worked in Lhasa for the local government, the kasha, he got no pay in money but he got some food, “usually but not always,” she said. However, he found stray jobs for private people and these had to pay him in money. It was never a high wage. Lochang estimated that when she herself worked from dawn to dark carrying lumber or stone or cement as helper to her father, she got about 12 American cents a day. . . . Lochang was not very clear about money: by the time she had worked the figure out in Lhasa money and changed it to Peking money and I had changed it into American money, I would not have guaranteed it to a statistician. But Lochang was very clear on the fact that she never had enough to eat and nobody in her family ever had enough to eat, and any time the monastery wanted her mother or the noble wanted her father, they could take them back to work without pay. Even in Lhasa, she knew that her father worked from day to day, never knowing if there would be work on the morrow. Lochang herself never knew if on the morrow there would be food.
Lochang’s flight from Lhasa came in 1953. Her mother died in that year. Lochang asked her father to pay the tax for her, and the father did. But on this occasion, when he reported the mother’s death and the consequent smaller tax, the agent from the monastery said: “That Lochang of ours must be long since big enough for field work: she’s a full seventeen. Send her at once to our western estates to work.”
When the father told Lochang, the girl said she would run away. This disquieted the father, who feared he would be punished if the girl escaped. So Lochang decided to run away without telling her father. She was working at the time as a nursemaid in the family of a Han, an employee of the Central Government. The Han family was returning to Chengtu; Lochang went with them, and thence to Peking.
“Did they punish your father?” I asked.
“Maybe,” said Lochang. Then she added with optimism. “But maybe not. The monastery was not his owner and there were many excuses he could make. He could say the Hans took me away, and maybe they will just blame the Communists and not my father.” Lochang did not quite enjoy explaining this. This was when she said: “He was not my real father.” She added: “Anyway, he is dead now. He did too hard work.”
Lochang, one sees, was not a heroic figure and she knew it. She was just a serf, wanting life. Now that she has some education she can tell you that she “wants to work for the Tibetan people” and “do whatever the Party tells me because the Party gave me my education and my life.” When she says these words, they sound a bit like a slogan. They do not yet quite sound like a part of Lochang. Lochang is not going back to Tibet yet. She doesn’t know enough. An illiterate serf does not become an organizer of her people in a few short years.
A few days later two other young people came to my room from the Institute of Nationalities. They were Lachi, a girl of twenty-two years and Gada, a youth of twenty-four. Both had come from the Chamdo Area. They had both run away as early as 1950 to the People’s Liberation Army. Both had had an earlier initiative and a longer schooling than Lochang. They did not need a special interpreter: they used my interpreter, for they talked the Han language. A breath of energy touched with joy came with them into my study. They told me at once that they were going back to Tibet.
“Tomorrow, with the first train,” said Lachi, who was the easier of the two in self expression. “It is a great honor to be chosen for the first group.”
Lachi was a small, slight girl in a green dress with pale pink lining at the neck, with eyes clear and direct under thin bangs of hair. She was thirteen when she ran away to join the army, in the Batang area, even before the battle of Chamdo. She has thus had nine years’ knowledge of the new ideas, but she herself had ideas when she began.
“My parents belonged to a big serf-owner, but he did not need their work, so he let them work for a small landowner who had only thirty workers. To get this permission they gave gifts to the big owner every year and also whenever he had a wedding in his family. If he does not like their gifts, he does not permit them. Any time he wants from them free work he orders it. For him they do work without pay.”
“Is there anything at all the big owner gives them for working?”
“He gave them the use of a piece of land,” replied Lachi, “but this land was far away and of bad quality. My parents had no means to work it. So they got permission to work for the small master. It is not very hard to get this permission if the small master lives near by . . . because then the big master can always give orders if he wishes. It is hard to get permission to work a long distance away.”
“We had a big family, twelve people, my father and mother, three brothers, five sisters, an uncle and a cousin. Most of them worked in the fields but my mother was a house servant. Their master would not accept me to work (she was ten at the time) because he could not use so many. So I worked for another landowner, a woman. The small master paid us some grain, some tea, some salt and a little money but always far below need. So sometimes we got other work in cutting hay or wood for other people who paid us money.”
“Did your parents work for the small owner long?” I asked.
“Ever since I remember,” said Lachi, “we worked for the small owner for grain and we worked sometimes for the big owner without pay.”
“Did you ever get any education?” I asked.
“By custom serfs had no right to education,” replied Lachi. “But the big serf-owner had a tutor in his family for his children. This tutor was progressive. Secretly he taught some serf boys in his own room. If this were known, he would lose his job and perhaps even worse would happen. He did not teach me for I could not go to his room. He taught my elder brother to read and write a little: my brother taught a little to me. I did not even learn the whole alphabet. But I learned there was such a thing as education and that there could be a different life than ours.”
“What freedom had the serfs, if any?” I asked.
“No freedom,” she replied. “The serf must get permission to go anywhere, even for a short absence. The serf must get permission to marry. If he marries, he may be separated by his owner from his family, if the owner wants him to work in another place. The owner can do anything to the serf, even torture and death. That serfs were killed by owners was not unusual. Serfs also were sold.”
“If serfs married,” I asked, “did the owner have the right of the first night of the bride?” Lachi had never heard of such a custom, so I explained it. She shook her head.
“With us it was a different way. All pretty serf girls were usually taken by the owner as house servants and used as he wished.”
“As concubines?” I asked.
“Not concubines,” said Lachi. “Concubines have rights. These were just slaves without rights. The owner uses as he wishes and throws away. Marriage is not permitted between owner and serf. Married serfs can be separated as the owner wishes. The boy child goes with the father and the girl with the mother.”
“What happens to children of women serfs by the owner?”
Lachi replied that such children were usually serfs. “But it may happen that a bright boy is liked by the father, who adopts him. Then the mother has no right to him for he becomes the owner’s son.”
Lachi’s younger brother was known as a “bright boy,” though both parents were serfs. He was offered a chance in the monastery.
“In our area were two temples,” said Lachi. “Every big estate had a temple. If anyone was sick, we went there to pray and give gifts. We also went there to borrow money. The interest was very high. You borrow four dollars and in ten days you must give back five dollars. Nobody can pay in such short time, so the debt grows and some debts last from father to son and son’s son. But once a high lama came to our house and said my younger brother was an incarnation, and could be a Living Buddha. The lamas said this to bright boys. But you had to have money to become a Living Buddha and since we could not give money he was not chosen. None of my brothers went into the monastery.”
Lachi broke away from serfdom through the coming of the People’s Liberation Army and by her own act. It was in 1950.
“We liberated ourselves where I lived,” she said proudly. “First there came all kinds of rumors, spread by the Kuomintang. It was said the Communists killed all old people because they were useless for work, and put all women in brothels for common use. Many people believed this and were terrified. My brother and I did not believe the rumors: his teacher told us differently. Then came underground Communist workers, mostly of Tibetan nationality. They were very different from the Kuomintang. They were kind to old people and to children and they helped the peasants with hay-cutting and harvesting. Later they organized local people and told us we should liberate ourselves. So one night the underground Communists and some of our young people arrested the local Kuomintang officials suddenly and set up our own government. This was late in 1949 before the People’s Liberation Army came. The serf-owners were taken by surprise and had to pretend to accept it. Later they organized rebellion. That was the Khampa rebellion in 1955. When it was put down, the Khampas went into Tibet to do banditry there.”
“How did you yourself join the PLA?” I asked.
Lachi said that after her elder brother helped liberate the locality, he went with other youths to Chengtu for education. He sent word to her to help the PLA when it should come. “When the PLA came, they were different from anything we ever knew. They told us to work for our own liberation and the liberation of Tibet. I always wanted to learn to read and write and I got my parents’ permission to join their school.
“My mistress did not permit. When I told her I wanted to study in their school she called me ungrateful and began to beat me. I yelled for help and the PLA was already in the court. The PLA saved me: I went away with them and never went back.”
Lachi was thirteen when she joined the army. “Wasn’t the work in the army too hard for you at that age?” I asked. She gave me a strange smile.
“When I was ten I had to carry my mistress on my back,” she said. “No work the army gave me was as hard as that.”
“What work could you do that the army needs?” I asked.
“Many things,” replied Lachi. “My first work was after the battle of Chamdo. I went to the hospital to visit the wounded Tibetan prisoners. I was not a regular worker in the hospital: for that work men were used. But I went as visitor to the wounded. They expected death by torture, for that was the custom where we lived. I told them not to kill themselves and not to fear, for the PLA would not torture them but would treat them well and cure them and teach them and set them free.
“Later I went with the army on the march and went into the villages and explained to the Tibetan people what the PLA was like. Then I became a member of the song and dance ensemble and did propaganda with song and dance. I walked with the PLA all the way to Lhasa. It was a long, hard march through high mountains, sometimes making our road on the way. But the Han comrades took good care of us.
“When conditions were hard, none of the Hans complained. When we camped in a swampy place, and there was a small, dry place, they gave the dry place to their Tibetan helpers and themselves slept in the damp place. When it was a steep, rocky place and there was a small flat place, they gave the small flat place to us. I never had even imagined people like that.
“I saw two Han comrades give their lives for the building of the road to Lhasa. One was killed by an explosion and one by falling rock. They were wounded and did not die at once: they talked before they died. They did not talk of themselves but encouraged the others to go forward. Never shall I forget those men. When I, as a Tibetan girl, have difficulties, I think of them and it gives me courage. For they underwent hardship and death to open a road for the Tibetan people.”
The long march to Lhasa continued Lachi’s education. “All along the way I saw the misery in which the Tibetan people live. I saw people living in enclosures of dry grass without even a roof. Winter came and rain and snow and people died. When we entered Lhasa I saw the bad behaviour of the Tibetan army, and also I saw many children begging in the streets. Old people and sick people lay on the steps of the Potala Palace, begging food from passers-by. Some threw them tsamba (parched barley, the staple food in Tibet), and they lived a little longer. There was not enough tsamba and they died.
“I saw packs of homeless dogs hunting food by day and night in the streets of Lhasa. At night these old, sick people would grasp a dog and hold it to their bodies, trying to keep warm with a wild dog. But I saw the nobles, in fine silks and furs and with many servants, one to carry their tea-pot, one to carry their pipes, and others to carry other things they wanted. So I began to understand that the great misery of the people came from this injustice, that a few nobles have everything while the people cannot even live.
“The PLA sent me to school in Lhasa,” Lachi concluded. “Later they sent me to study in Peking. I have studied in Peking three years. Tomorrow I am starting back to Lhasa. For now the rebellion is crushed and serfdom will soon be ended. We must go back to end it.
“I am going with the very first group from our institute. We go to Lhasa first to be assigned our tasks. For the rebirth of Tibet, for my own people, I will do anything.”
Young Gada was sitting quietly on my divan while Lachi told her story. He was more restrained in manner than she, and a bit older, twenty-four to her twenty-two. He sat quietly smoking a cigarette, a solid, husky youth in white shirt and blue trousers. When Lachi with shining eyes finished her story, he took up his own tale. His life had been tougher than Lachi’s: he was fifteen before he got away. He had been many times flogged, once to the verge of death.
“Before liberation,” said Gada quietly, “I think I was not much different from a yak or any other draft animal for I could not read or write a word and knew nothing at all. For generations my family belonged to a big serf-owner who had five hundred families of serfs, working both in farming and in livestock. I wore the same sheepskin winter and summer and it was my only garment. It was so old that there was no wool on it any more nor any warmth, but only plenty of lice. I was always hungry.
“Ever since I remember, I wanted to run away and many times I ran. Always they caught me. I did not know how to run away but the owner had armed men who knew how to catch you. The big owners all had their private armies. These were not serfs, but armed men who hunted runaways. That is what the old Tibetan army was mostly used for. Tibet is very large and very wild and many serfs run away and the armed men know how to hunt them. That is why the old Tibetan army would never become part of the PLA, even though it was promised. They were needed to hunt serfs. All these armed men from many private armies — those are the ones who became rebels now.
“The first time they caught me running away, I was very small, and they only cuffed me and cursed me. The second time they beat me up. The third time I was already fifteen and they gave me fifty heavy lashes, with two men sitting on me, one on my head and one on my feet. Blood came then from my nose and mouth. The overseer said: ‘This is only blood from the nose: maybe you take heavier sticks and bring some blood from the brain.’ They beat then with heavier sticks and poured alcohol and water with caustic soda on the wounds to make more pain. I passed out for two hours. I am twenty-four now, and it is nine years past, but if I take off my shirt or push back my hair, you can see the scars of that beating still.
“When I came to, they had thrown me into a corner and they told me to come back in a week for another beating. But they did not dare beat me again. For the PLA was coming and they were afraid they would be reported to the PLA if they killed me by beating. So the PLA saved me even before it came.”
After the PLA took Chamdo, they settled there for some months while awaiting the negotiations between the Dalai Lama and Peking. They set up in Chamdo a school. “I wanted to go to that school,” said Gada, “but I was afraid to run away again. So I waited till winter, when farm work is less and they do not watch so carefully. Then I ran away to the Chamdo school and they let me join the PLA and go with them to Lhasa.
“My first impression with the PLA was how differently they treated people. Never had I had proper clothes, but now I had food and regular clothes and a chance to study. Next I saw how hard they worked to build the road to Tibet for the cause of liberating Tibet. Then they worked hard to build housing for the people: they put up buildings where there were none before. All of this impressed me. Still later when they sent me to Peking in 1954, I passed through Chamdo and saw what changes were already in my home area. There were people who always used to be beggars and thieves, because they stole in order to eat. Now these people had work and had become honest folk.
“When I first joined the PLA,” Gada concluded, “it was just that I wanted to revenge myself on the men who beat me. I thought I will become strong in the army and have a gun. But then I learned that it is not just for myself, but a whole system must be changed. . . . And I myself changed from something like a yak to a human being, who can think about life and about the future of Tibet.”
Gada, with nine years of such experience behind him, was also among those chosen to return to Tibet in the first group.
Next morning I went to the station to see them off. More than fifteen hundred runaway serfs were reported now going back to Tibet: eleven hundred from a school near Sian, four hundred from the Chengtu Institute, and one hundred and fifty-three from Peking.
At the main railway station the platform was crowded, not only with those departing but with many more students and teachers who were seeing them off. As I approached, Lachi ran out of the crowd and seized my hand, and then Gada saw me and came more slowly. They announced to the others who I was and everybody clapped everybody else. They introduced me to their leader, a man named Sung Yi-liang, head of the Lhasa office of the Working Committee, who had come all the way to Peking to help select the ones who were to go.
Both Lachi and Gada had spoken of it as an honor, but more was involved than their honor. The honor of China was involved. Peking had announced that the coming reform would be bloodless, that serf-owners who had taken no part in rebellion would be compensated for their lands and serfs. But Peking knew very well that not all the serf-owners would easily agree to sell out, and that when serfs are suddenly freed, their acts are not easily controlled. Men who have suffered brutally will think of brutal vengeance. Now was the time when every young organizer counted, when people like Lachi and Gada would influence thousands, and perhaps even tens of thousands before the job was done. Now their nine years of training counted. Sung had come to Peking to pick workers like Lachi and Gada, who had known the torment of serfdom in their own bodies but who had learned to seek not personal vengeance but a brighter future for Tibet.
I asked Sung: “Could any of these have gone back three months ago?” He shook his head.
“They would have been safe in our central offices,” he replied, “but they could not have gone safely into the countryside, for the armed retainers of the serf-owners might have caught them.”
“And now?” I asked.
“Now they can go safely with only normal caution,” he replied. “For the serf-owners concentrated all those armed retainers, both from Tibet itself and from Tibetan areas in the adjoining provinces, and made rebellion. And the armed rebels are beaten and scattered, some to India and some captured, and some hiding out in distant hills. Now these young people can go into the villages. For not only are the serf-owners beaten, but the serfs themselves have awakened, and are ready to greet the reform. Everywhere in Tibet they have seen that the great whips and the torture implements of the owners were confiscated when the PLA, putting down rebellion, swept through the land.”
The returning group from Peking was going two days by fast train to Lanchow, thence by local train to Shatung, then by truck to Kermo and Lhasa, a journey of eleven days in all. A few years earlier this trip would have taken months. They were a sturdy, energetic, happy, youthful group, in dark blue and light blue, in white shirts or dark jackets, with visored caps or no caps, with pig-tails and sun glasses, and certainly not in uniform.
They pulled me along to see their special cars. From past knowledge of trains in the USSR I expected to find hard wood sleeping bunks. But here were no bunks at all, just hard benches into which they were packed like sardines, bolt upright for forty-eight hours with hardly room to turn their heads. Then nine days more, probably standing up packed into trucks.
“It’s great to be young when you start on a long, hard trip,” I said, trying to soften what seemed to me the hard eleven days. They stared at me in surprise.
“Hard trip?” exclaimed one. “But the hard times are now behind us. This is a pleasure trip!”
The train pulled slowly out of the station, with the friends of the chosen group running along the platform to shake hands through the windows and ask for letters from Lhasa. As I left the station I thought of a man I had interviewed earlier, Apei the serf-owner, now Secretary-General of Tibet’s local government, committed to abolish serfdom. He also had gone back to Lhasa: he had gone by plane.
I wondered how the oppressed and oppressors of more than a thousand years would do this job together. It could not be a simple job.