Tibet in Agony: Lhasa 1959 by Jianglin Li (review)

Jianglin Li's Tibet in Agony gives both the context of greater Tibet in the late 1950s and a detailed chronicle of the events leading up to the Lhasa uprising and subsequent flight of the Dalai Lama to India. Li puts the reader in the middle of the action, and then pulls back to consider and weigh her sources. The book also manages to be a page-turner, even for a reader who already knows how things turn out.

The book is translated from the Chinese by Susan Wilf, in a clear prose style. Li's narrative is bolstered by her engagement with both Tibetan and Chinese sources, and recent interviews with people who lived through the events. Her interest in unraveling the often-contradictory accounts of these historic events serves scholars of Tibet and Chinese history well. The outcome is well-known, but providing such a comprehensive account backed by sources exposes the gaps or contradictions, leads to fresh insights, and contributes to a deeper understanding of the last 60 years of Tibetan/Chinese history. Li's background as Han Chinese and the daughter of Communist Party members — someone who grew up steeped in the ideology of the Chinese state — makes her contribution, which often reveals the ideological and factual basis of Chinese accounts to be on shaky ground when compared with Tibetan claims, all the more powerful.

A principal contribution of the work is a careful examination of the contentious events leading to the uprising, including the stated fear of the Tibetan leadership and Tibetan public that plans were being made by Chinese leadership to abduct the Dalai Lama, as well as whether or not the People's Liberation Army (pla) tried to exclude the Dalai Lama's guards from accompanying him to a performance at military headquarters. Li presents recollections of participants, as well as a wealth of Chinese and Tibetan sources, but leaves the final determination open for the reader's interpretation.

The first chapters of the book set the stage for the Lhasa rebellion through an examination of events in Derge County, Kham, a border area in Eastern Tibet where the newly minted People's Republic of China (PRC) carried out their initial reforms in a more intensified way — including task forces that began to re-engineer class divisions by declaring lamas and monks an "exploiting class" (5), disarming the population, and spreading the process of Land Reform that had already transformed Han Chinese areas of the PRC. The rebellion in Lithang led to the initial exodus of Khampas, who went to Lhasa to warn the Tibetan leadership about the true nature of PLA actions in the East.

Li's account of the Dalai Lama's trip to India with the Panchen Lama in 1956, where they met with both Jawaharlal Nehru and Zhou Enlai, depicts the wariness with which the Dalai Lama viewed China's intentions and policy in Tibet. It also shows the pressures each leader was under, as well as the international and diplomatic tensions that shaped their responses to each other at a time when independence from colonial rule, as well as Communist revolution, were re-shaping geopolitics in the region.

Li's inclusion of letters, cables, reports, and memoranda clearly illustrate the intentions and long-term PRC strategy in Tibet. Further, the ideological language and ideas that saturate these accounts, which frame each confrontation in the language of class ideology and reform, undermines the credibility of PRC truth claims, and serve to underscore the Tibetan viewpoint. The Chinese accounts of military action are in some ways even more poignant in retrospect as it is clear how outnumbered, outgunned, and weak the Tibetan government and people were in the face of the seminal PRC desire to conquer Tibet. Author interviews with Juchen Thubten, Ngari Rinpoche, Jampa Tenzin, Thinley Phuntsok, and Tenzin Soepa, as well as the 14th Dalai Lama, add emotional resonance as well as important details on how actors felt...