The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier by Benno Weiner

Author:Benno Weiner
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2020-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

We Will Take Up Guns and Attack the Government!

Amid this uncertainty, in late spring 1956, Zeku County established its first PPC, the Guanghui Experimental Pastoral Cooperative. Soon afterward, a second PPC and eight MATs were founded within the Ködé Karing chiefdom.94 By then, however, Xining had begun to concede that its pastoral cooperativization campaign had overreached. In its May 22 “suggestions,” the Huangnan Prefecture Party Committee had given its lukewarm endorsement to the plan to construct the Guanghui Cooperative. In seeming contradiction, however, it also revealed that provincial authorities recently had ordered “the implementation of pastoral cooperatives in pastoral regions temporarily halted.” No specific reason for the reversal was given other than admit it was in response to “current conditions.” The directive added that local authorities should “refuse to dissolve” existing cooperatives and instead “consolidate and rectify” them. In the meantime, the prefecture ordered Zeku’s Party committee to “thoroughly investigate actual conditions” and promote the development of MATs according to the “principles of voluntariness and mutual benefit, in order to lay the future foundation for experimental cooperatives.”95

Taken as a whole, the directive was shorthand for an acknowledgment that the transition from individual herding to MATs to full pastoral cooperatives had been too rushed. This had caused production to drop and a deepening rift to develop between the Party and local society. This is confirmed by a series of reports issued over spring and into summer. Details are few and far between. Allegedly, however, “counterrevolutionaries” had exploited “the specific conditions of pastoral society and economy” and “not a few mistakes that exist in our own work” to wreak havoc.96 Influenced by (or, as later Chinese sources claim, in league with) uprisings in northern Sichuan and southern Gansu, conditions were particularly grave in Qinghai’s far southern prefectures of Guoluo and Yushu as well as among the Mongols of Henan County (see chapter 7).97 Yet the Rural Work Department conceded that “relatively serious cases” of rebellion were ongoing in Hainan and Huangnan Prefectures as well. In Tongde, for instance, a lama allegedly inflamed tensions by publicly announcing, “If they wish to establish cooperatives, we will take up guns and attack the government!” As the county slid toward lawlessness, a report claims that “bandits who had snuck into our Party used the pretext of being drunk to assault our district Party secretary [likely Han] and activists [likely Tibetan].” In other words, the alleged assailants were members of the Chinese Communist Party. In another episode, “evildoers” in Tongren purportedly attacked Party cadres with stones.98

While many of the recorded incidents sound more like spontaneous protests, riots, or even drunken brawls than they do organized rebellion, the Rural Work Department insisted that “scattered bandit gangs” were operating in both Zeku and Tongren Counties. It also claimed that misinformation about collectivization had led “tribes” in several counties to flee into the grasslands. This included fifty households from Zeku who set off toward Central Tibet. Perhaps as alarming for a provincial leadership that since 1949 had linked social stability

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