Memories of Life in Lhasa Under Chinese Rule

"This is the first Tibetan autobiography to come out in English that isn’t mediated by a ghost writer, translated from the author’s text by a the gifted Tibetologist, Matthew Akester. Here we have the direct voice of Tubten Khétsun, who had left Tibet in 1983 but is able to talk about what happened in Lhasa in the 1950s, 60s and 70s with unusual precision. For the first time in English we get a sense of the detail, of the smallness of historical experience for those who lived through it. Not everything consists of massive episodes and crises such as those we read about in newspapers or normal histories – a revolution here, a massacre or atrocity there. Instead we are given insight into the nature of extreme control that continues over decades, its banality and its everyday effects. Tubten Khétsun was in prison for 20 years, and suffered terrible deprivation and abuse. But he talks about small things, like the incessant desperation of the Chinese cadres to impress Tibetans with good works, as with the irrigation of fields where hundreds of Tibetans were forced to dig canals that went uphill. At other times they were made to dig terraces on mountainsides to grow rice where nothing would grow, or add chemical fertiliser to their crops because this was seen as modernity, while actually it made the ground dry up. These were outcomes of the conviction of the Chinese that they were helping Tibetans by imposing modernisation on them – the endless, grinding detail of the everyday blindness of authoritarian benevolence. You see this on every page of the book, and it’s told as much through dark, sardonic humour as through condemnation. But at the same time, it helps us understand why officials promoted such policies, and why it is still so hard for them to accept criticism. I think it’s likely that many of the terrible experiences that people have under the Chinese or any other authoritarian system come in the form of everyday issues, and that these probably seemed well-intentioned to those who imposed them. I suppose we all have to learn to remind ourselves of other perspectives in order to see how such outcomes eventuate. Wide reading seems one of the best ways to do that. It’s also crucial to talk to people who have lived inside situations rather than outside them. So I feel we have to privilege books like this one, where a writer, even in profound disagreement, can still indicate how the Chinese thought they were doing good, as many of them are still convinced that they are. As outsiders, I think we have to factor that into our judgments, while still making criticisms and proposals as appropriate, in the hope of finding ways that can be heard by the other side. Of course the Chinese did bring some benefits to Tibet, along with the damaging effects of their policies in many other cases. So perhaps it’s a question of articulating ways to talk that don’t cut out these other perspectives and the Chinese sense of purpose, or diminish that of Tibetans and others who live there. I think we can learn to do that, and perhaps it can produce a better, more effective kind of politics."