A Tibetan Revolutionary

"This is an extraordinary book, the first of its kind. It’s more or less the first time we hear the voice of a Tibetan still living in Tibet, in the form of an autobiography. In fact, it’s semi-autobiographical, co-written with the great American Tibetologist Melvyn Goldstein and a colleague, but even so it retains its distinctive voice, one that is crucial to understanding modern Tibet and its history. The person at its heart, Bapa Phüntso Wangye (sometimes spelt as Baba Phuntsog Wanggyal), was one of the main people whom Hisao Kimura knew in Lhasa. It was Phüntso Wangye who talked to Kimura about the democratic ideals of the Japanese constitution and their potential as a basis for a new Tibetan nation-state – not knowing that Kimura was himself Japanese and only disguised as a Mongolian. This book is of great importance because here, even in the 1940s, we can see young Tibetan intellectuals like Phüntso Wangye already thinking: How can we modernise this society? How can we prevent the disaster of being swallowed up in the future? This biography describes Tibetan attempts to change their society and create a modern Tibet by themselves, a project that is underscored by the tragedy that followed from the 1950s onwards. Phüntso Wangye eventually found that he has no choice but to do this by working with the Chinese Communists. He has been seen by more superficial writers as a collaborator, because he joined with the Chinese Communist Party in 1950 when they advanced into Tibet and then worked with them at a very senior level. But actually the book is quietly telling us about a very different story that couldn’t be spoken of until very recently, namely that Phüntso Wangye saw himself as his own communist, not as a Chinese one. He had become a communist secretly in the 1930s with less than ten other Tibetans, and it seems that then they had no intention of being part of the Chinese Communist Party. This book seems to be a carefully worded, and indeed dangerous, indication that the Tibetan Communist Party was founded by him and others as part of a vision of constructing a modern but separate Tibetan nation. In 1950 they had no other choice but to change the name of their group to the “Tibet branch of the Chinese Communist Party”. As with other Leninists and communists in the early part of the 20th century, they didn’t really believe in nations taking over other nations. They thought this wouldn’t happen under communism, and that individual nations would be able to make their own futures, as the Chinese Communists had themselves promised in the 1930s. Phüntso Wangye believed this promise until the truth arrived in the form of the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] in 1950. And some seven years afterwards, even though he was then the highest level Tibetan in their ranks, the Chinese discovered that he had this internationalist view of communism. He spent the next 18 years in prison, all of it in solitary confinement."