RUTHFULLY YOURS

The recent depredations of the People’s Republic of China in East Turkestan/Xinjiang have had the unfortunate effect of obscuring and displacing a similar oppression that the Chinese perpetrated in another region: Tibet. More than half a century before it began persecuting the Uyghurs, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) engineered and executed a brutal, enduring domination of Tibet that persists today. But while the Tibetan cause enjoyed its heyday in the West in the 1990s, the region has largely faded from the headlines since.

Jianglin Li, a historian of Tibet, seeks to remedy this forgetfulness. In When the Iron Bird Flies, a masterly account of the CCP’s invasion and subjugation of the Tibetan regions in the 1950s, Li exhumes decades of archival Chinese records and interviews survivors of the onslaught. She tells the story through the eyes of the overwhelmed and ultimately defeated Tibetans, as well as from the point of view of the CCP officials who quelled their hard-fought rebellion.

While even the Chinese-nationalist government had sought to integrate Tibet into the Chinese body politic in the first half of the 20th century, the story truly begins with Mao Zedong’s rise to power. He was determined, no matter the cost, to swallow the Tibetan provinces of U-Tsang, Amdo, and Kham — which form more than a fifth of contemporary China by area. On January 2, 1950, Mao, visiting Moscow, cabled the CCP Central Committee, noting that “although the population of Tibet is not large, its international status is crucial. We must occupy Tibet and reform it into a people’s democracy.” Not for Mao the traditional religious and herding lifestyle of this peaceful people of the northwest steppe; they must be fundamentally remade in the image of Socialist Man.

The People’s Liberation Army entered Tibet in 1950, with Mao signing the so-called Seventeen-Point Agreement dedicated to “modernizing” the Tibetan regions. As part of its charm offensive, the CCP committed that “there will be no compulsion on the part of the Central Authorities” and that “the Local Government of Tibet should carry out reforms of its own accord.” In 1954, the Dalai Lama was fêted in Beijing, winning “election” as the vice-chairman of the First National People’s Congress standing committee, and Mao agreed to delay for six years implementing the socialist reforms he so urgently sought to impose.

But it didn’t take long for Chinese authorities to abandon this approach. In 1956, according to a CCP county-party committee document that Li cites, Chinese cadres were dispatched to Tibet, aiming to “enlighten[] the masses on the reasons for their own backwardness and poverty,” to “launch a grievance-venting campaign,” and to “arouse individual enmity among the peasants and then gradually induce class hatred.” Denunciation rituals and the equivalent of Two Minutes Hate assemblies followed, often accompanied by violence, in rural areas.

These concepts, foreign and menacing to the traditional agrarian lifestyle of the Tibetans, predictably rained down on inhospitable soil. That same year, Tibetans in Kham rose up organically over their “opposition to the forcible imposition of land reform, their refusal to hand over guns, their protest against taxation, their defense of their religion, and their demands for the withdrawal of Chinese cadres who were coercively changing their way of life.”

A dramatic battle ensued around the Lithang monastery in late March 1956, with Tibetan yak-herders and tribesmen resolutely defending their holy spaces against PLA troops and the Tibetan cadres that the PLA had impressed into service. But reinforcements sent from Beijing encircled the rebels, and when two Tupolev Tu-4 bombers — the “iron birds” of Li’s title — unleashed their fury on the temple complex, nearly all the Tibetans perished. (Those same warplanes would later bombard the Bathang and Chatreng monasteries as well, thereby defiling holy places and terrifying the populace.)

Across the region, however, local populations challenged the CCP interlopers, who in turn “annihilated” more than 11,500 of them between March and June 1956 alone. Chinese authorities also began to explicitly target the Tibetan Buddhist faith and its practitioners, aiming, per a July 1958 provincial resolution, to “thoroughly discredit religion until it collapses” and to “cause the majority of religious monasteries to disband.” Qinghai Province (encompassing most of Amdo), for instance, saw 70 percent of its religious leaders arrested or remanded to reeducation camps; throughout Tibet, Li reports, “the vast majority of monasteries were closed down, occupied, or dismantled by the beginning of 1959.”

The decisive battle for the region took place in March 1959 in and around Lhasa, the longtime Tibetan capital. Civilians escaping the violence in other provinces flocked there as the ragtag force of Tibetan irregulars mounted a last stand against the vastly more powerful PLA, whose advanced weaponry pounded ancient temples and the Dalai Lama’s palace complex in Norbulingka. Along with his entourage, the revered leader, no longer in favor in Beijing, raced across the Himalayas into India, along the way formally repudiating the now-dead-letter Seventeen-Point Agreement and declaring the establishment of a provisional government-in-exile.

After Lhasa, the PLA conducted a massive cleanup campaign in the nearby Lhoka and Namtso regions, aggressively deploying its iron birds against scattered rebel forces and civilians alike — the latter constituting 74 percent of casualties, according to Li’s calculations. The Tibetan resistance received limited support from the United States; the CIA’s covert ST CIRCUS program armed and trained a small number of Tibetan fighters in Camp Hale, Colo., but Li demonstrates that American aid amounted to little more than an “operation for gathering intelligence and for harassment.” Even had the United States intervened more forcefully, anything short of a Vietnam-style commitment would have been unlikely to turn the tide.

Ultimately, during its “pacification” campaign, the PLA deployed nearly 250,000 troops across 14 infantry, air force, and cavalry divisions; engaged in nearly 16,000 battles; and slaughtered nearly half a million Tibetans, or 17 percent of the population. As Li writes:

Wherever its iron heels trod, the flames of war were ignited, monasteries collapsed, scriptures were burned, people were killed, and leaders fled into exile. The political system, economy, military, culture, and society of the Tibetan people were completely destroyed.

The author records the heartbreaking tales of numerous Tibetans who fled the violence to neighboring India, including Drolkar Gye, who escaped the Battle of Lhasa and, 50 years later, still resided in the Dondrupling Tibetan Refugee Settlement. “How was it that I was now in this desolate place all by myself?” she recalls asking herself about her long, solitary flight to India in 1959. “I thought I must be dead and that my soul was passing through this place.”

We also hear the tragic, inspiring story of Tsering Dorje, who, along with his father and brother, fought the Chinese valiantly in Chamdo, in central Kham. Even after the Dalai Lama had decamped to India, Dorje tells Li, “we wanted to continue the guerrilla war in our homeland.” Eventually captured, released, and redeployed to fight in Tibet, Dorje witnessed the Chinese extinguishment of the final flames of rebellion before escaping to Dharamsala, India.

Li’s organization of this complex material and her occasional chronological and geographical jumps leave something to be desired, as does her uneven interweaving of small-scale and broader storylines; unfortunately, some nuance seems to have been lost in translation from her original Chinese. A sharper and more sustained focus on the key elements of China’s strategy and a more detailed history of pre-invasion Tibet would have helped the reader immensely.

But When the Iron Bird Flies is nevertheless a careful, illuminating study of the vicious CCP campaign to dominate Tibet in the 1950s. Li unveils hitherto unpublished details of the cruelty of the PLA’s crusade. While liberating Tibet may not be realistic at this stage, the Western world must at least engage with the origins of its plight. Indeed, as none other than the Dalai Lama himself proclaims in the book’s foreword, Li’s exposé enables her readers “to deepen their approach to and understanding of the Tibet problem in the spirit of seeking truth from facts.”