Forbidden Memory: Tibet during the Cultural Revolution

"For me, reading wise, this has been a year of reading a lot about the peripheries of the People’s Republic of China. These are peripheries that I used to think of as very different because Hong Kong was by far the freest and Tibet and Xinjiang the most tightly controlled, which is still true, but I do see the first three books on my list as fitting together thematically in certain ways. It’s been a year with a burst of publishing on Tibet and this isn’t the only good book that’s come out. Forbidden Memory is about the Cultural Revolution era, and the Mao years in general. Tsering Woeser is a woman originally from Tibet who is living in Beijing and is one of the most interesting critical intellectuals in the PRC right now. She’s another one who’s been trying to carry out a balancing act—of being a voice keeping attention on Tibet without ending up in prison, and she has managed it so far, though she’s been hassled in plenty of ways and had her movements constricted. The photographs in this book are powerful for many reasons. One is they show the way in which the Communist Party has convinced and coerced members of local populations to be complicit in the repression that goes on. I think of Xinjiang, Tibet and increasingly Hong Kong as colonial setups where there are members of the colonized population who are convinced, cajoled or coerced into carrying out repression; pressured, persuaded or forced to become collaborators. That’s clearly true in Hong Kong now with figures like Carrie Lam, but it’s been true in Tibet and Xinjiang as well. The photographs are largely of Tibetans engaged in loyalty rituals associated with Mao struggle sessions. They have Woeser’s own glosses on the photographs, which were taken by her father. The book is a beautiful work, but it also comes with an introduction by Robert Barnett, who is one of the leading writers on Tibet in the West . He’s written a great history, in very accessible short form, of Tibet up to the Mao era. “It’s almost as if the international imagination can only have one part of western China to focus on at a time” The story of Tibet in this period is a tragic and moving one because, initially, when Tibet was incorporated into the People’s Republic of China, there was a promise that it would be able to maintain its own distinctive way of life and that Tibetans would have a high degree of religious freedom. The term ‘one country, two systems’ wasn’t used, but as Isabel Hilton and others have argued, you can see the arrangements made in Tibet as a kind of precursor to the arrangements made for Hong Kong. That ended in a very tragic way in the late 1950s. Barnett gives a very good brief history of that, very well written, and that’s combined with the photographs and the explanation of the photographs. This was an important publication in Chinese, that circulated in Taiwan before, but this is the first translation. Like the Millward book, it’s both a new book and a reboot of an earlier one, in this case via assured translation work by Susan Chen. The story of it is, but it strives very hard to be a documentary record of a period that could be forgotten. Publications on Tibet are important this year, because the repression in Xinjiang is finally getting more attention, but it’s almost as if the international imagination can only have one part of western China to focus on at a time. For many years that was Tibet and Xinjiang was ignored, now it’s the other way around. But they’re connected. One of the main architects of the camp system in Xinjiang had been overseeing Communist Party policies in Tibet before being transferred to Xinjiang. There is a way in which the two places are seen as parallel problems, from Beijing’s point of view."