Memories of Life in Lhasa Under Chinese Rule (review)

"What went on in Tibet during the twenty years of Maoist rule between 1959 and 1976," writes the translator of this volume, "is still only vaguely known to the outside world, even to most Tibetans born in exile." Tubten Khétsun's riveting Memories of Life in Lhasa Under Chinese Rule provides an invaluable if disturbing account of this tragic and forlorn period of modern Tibetan history. It is, he tells us, an account of his life "as a human being subject to animal servitude by another people in my own country."

Born in 1941 to an upper-class family—some of them Tibetan government officials prior to 1951—Khétsun took part in the 1959 rebellion against Chinese rule, "after the brazen military invasion and subjugation of our independent country." Of the result, he writes, "No single person could thoroughly or comprehensively describe the inexpressible destruction of the country and way of life of the Tibetan people by the Chinese invaders," but it is up to those who experienced it to tell what they know. So Khétsun begins his lugubrious story of forced labor, agony and death, and human and environmental degradation at China's hands that befell Tibet in the decades prior to Mao's death.

After the rebellion was put down, Khétsun was arrested and sentenced to a four-and-a-half-year imprisonment. Thereafter, he was placed in a succession of prisons or prison worksites. Much of his book describes his experience in them in meticulous, often heartrending, detail. At the Nga-Chen Power Station construction site, for example, he estimates that "tens of thousands" worked in grueling day and night shifts, less than a year of which reduced prisoners to hollow shells, and young men "walked as if they were seventy or eighty years old." Here large numbers were seriously injured or died in accidents caused by reckless guards, crushing work quotas, and grossly inadequate food, rest, shelter, and medical care. Humans were systematically treated worse than animals.

Khétsun was sustained in this ordeal by his wits, his youth, and especially his family, who at key moments managed to provide the extra food that, however paltry, along with sheer luck, kept him alive. Many prisoners far from their families starved to death or committed suicide. Space limitations make it impossible to convey the depth of torment and suffering endured in Khétsun's telling by untold thousands working in what amounted to a Tibetan gulag, equal in its vicious and stark inhumanity to its Soviet equivalent described by Solzhenitsyn. Throughout this work, Khétsun is eloquent, too, in relating the everyday sufferings of ordinary Tibetans at Chinese hands.

Back home from prison in 1963, Khétsun's situation only marginally improved. As a class enemy, he was subject to various disabilities, such as being paid stipulated wages insufficient for sustenance and subject to invasive home inspections. Along with many others, he was often required to work at no pay.

Three years later the Cultural Revolution erupted, and Tibet's sufferings multiplied. The familiar litany of Red Guard practices in China was replicated in Tibet. Struggle meetings humiliated the formerly influential; those with valuables were terrorized into giving them away, selling them on the cheap, or throwing them away. Nepalese were said to have built multistory hotels with such profits. Treasures cast into rivers one day were fished out the next by the poor, who might, it was said, gain enough to lead a spendthrift existence for four or five years.

As in China, the Tibetan Cultural Revolution yielded numerous suicides: "[P] eople killed themselves by drowning, jumping off heights, cutting their own throats, or hanging themselves rather than endure" their torments. Khétsun describes his despair at the burning of sacred writings and the pillaging of monasteries and temples, some of which were transformed into latrines and abattoirs. He depicts in...