主题：【原创】这是俺翻译的一封藏独的信，这里高手多，请大家批判 -- 龙二

Tibetans and the Cultural Revolution

by Grain

It is important to understand the involvement of Tibetans during the Cultural Revolution.

I have done some research on the subject of Tibetan involvement during the Cultural Revolution. One informative book is "The Struggle for Modern Tibet, the Autobiography of Tashi Tsering", by one of the foremost American scholars on Tibet, Melvyn Goldstein, and William Siebenschuh, and Tashi Tsering.

Melvyn Goldstein had known Tashi Tsering for over two decades, and finally helped Tsering write an autobiography which is now an important record of one Tibetan's life through the old Tibetan society to the modernization of Tibet.

This book also happens to relate many details about the life of a Tibetan serf boy who worked for the Dalai Lama, came to the U.S. to study, then returned to China to end up participating in the Cultural Revolution. I will attempt to give a brief overview of the riveting accounts given by Tashi Tsering in his book.

Tashi Tsering is quite an ordinary and common name in Tibet. Many boys have this name. In Tibetan, "Tashi" means "good luck", and "Tsering" means "long life". One boy given this name was born a serf in the traditional Tibetan system. At the age of ten, he became his village's tax to the Dalai Lama's ceremonial dance troupe. He said, "In our village everyone hated this tax, as it literally meant losing a son, probably forever." (p. 11, The Struggle for Modern Tibet.)

His mother cried for days, and tried to bribe the village elders to spare him from being chosen, to no avail. Tashi himself was actually happy at the prospect of joining the troupe. For him, the task was a chance for education. He wanted very much to learn how to read and write.

At the dance school, Tashi quickly learned that "the teachers' idea of providing incentives was to punish us swiftly and severely for each mistake." (p.17)

"They constantly hit us on the faces, arms, and legs. When we ran to line up at the beginning of morning, for example, the first boy in line got to punish the later-comers with a slap across the face. Each boy got to punish the one below or behind him. It was terrible. I still have some of the scares from the almost daily beatings." Tashie soon learned that, "the teachers' methods had been used for centuries. They did exactly what their teachers had done to them, so these methods were considered perfectly normal and reasonable." (p.17)

Once, when Tashi missed a performance, he had to strip off his trousers, and was stretched to the ground to be lashed across his bare buttocks with long thin switches made from tree branches. "This centuries-old Tibetan punishment was the most painful kind of beating." (p. 4)

In addition to being physically beaten, he was also sexually assaulted by monks in the monastery that schooled him to dance. He said, "The incident reawakened my ambivalent feelings toward traditional Tibetan society. Once again its cruelty was thrust into my life. I wondered to myself how monasteries could allow such thugs to wear the holy robes of the Lord Buddha. When I talked to other monks and monk officials about the dobods, they shrugged and said simply that that was the way things were." (p. 29)

Tashi was not the only one suffering. The old China was a feudal society with many landlord taking advantages of the poor peasants. All across China, the rich abused the poor; the landlords often owned servants whom they beat and raped. And the peasants across China revolted.

China was trying to fight her way out of feudalism.

However, having lived for all of his life in Tibet, Tashi did not know much about central China. Being uneducated, some local Tibetans believed in rumors. They heard that the communists were atheists and enemies of the rich. "Rumors of all sorts flew everywhere; some even said that the Chinese were cannibals." (p. 36)

This is only thing I do not like about this book. I noticed that, to the local Tibetans, the people from central China were considered to be "Chinese". The reality is in central China, there are many different ethnics of people, including Tibetans who had migrated there. However, I can see "the Chinese" as a provincial term used by the Tibetans.

According to Tashi: by 1952, the PLA were more of a presence in Lhasa. His account of the beginning is quite interesting:

"The first troops had appeared in the city in September 1951, but initially they kept a low profile. However, as their number increased, they became more active and visible. I became fascinated by the ways they did things, which were so different from our ways. They fished in the rivers with worms on a hook and set out to become self-sufficient in food by using dog droppings and human waste they collected on the river. These were things we would never have thought of doing and, to be honest, found revolting. The Chinese wasted nothing; nothing was lost. So despite the revulsion, I was also overall fascinated by the extent of their zeal for efficiency and their discipline. They would not even take a needle from the people." (p. 40)