Nationalism and Famine: The Role of Hunger in the Tibet Conflict

Felix Wemheuer (University of Vienna)

This is a draft version. No quotation without the permission of the author.

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“We are what we eat”. As various food studies have shown national and social

identities are often constructed in terms of dietary practices. The rise of national cousins

developed as a parallel process to the nation building in 18 th and 19th century in Europe.

However, less is known about the relation between famine and national identity. In the case of

the Irish potato famine (1842-1848), the Ukrainian famine (1932-1933), Vietnamese famine

(1944-1945) and the famine in Tibet (1959-1961) the experience of mass starvation under the

rule of a “foreign power” play a significant role in nationalist narratives. Nationalist

politicians and historians claim that the famines were produced on purpose by the “occupying

power”. The struggle for independence is presented as a natural result of the famine

experience. In the Irish, Ukrainian and Tibetan cases, some authors even define the famine as

an act of genocide and part of a plan promoted by the “foreign” power to destroy the national

culture. The term genocide allows the creation of a national identity based on collective

victimhood, rather than on national heroes or achievements. The first part of this article will

review nationalist narratives of the Irish, Vietnamese and Ukrainian famines. For the Irish and

Ukrainian case, the central role of the Diaspora community in the development of this

narrative will be highlighted.

Against this background, the second and third part of the article will focus on the role

of hunger and famine in the context of the Tibet conflict. To reduce the Tibet issue to a

conflict about food would be a simplification, but this article will show that in the historical

narratives of Tibet promoted by the Tibetan government-in-exile and by the Chinese

government, hunger in modern times has an important function. This article will compare the

use of hunger and food metaphors in the arguments of both sides. In the second part, the

article will outline the master narrative which the 14th Dalai Lama, the head of the Tibetan

exile government, established in his autobiography written in 1962. The Dalai Lama has

argued several times that famines never took place in Tibet before 1951. Therefore, starvation

under “Chinese rule” is one focus of narratives of Tibetans in exile written after 1959. The

article will show how Tibetan authors are constructing cultural differences based on food,

such as the distinction between “barley eaters” and “rice eaters”.

The third part of the article will analyze the role of hunger in the official Chinese

narrative. In contrast to the exile Tibetan version, the Chinese narrative describes how the

soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) suffered of hunger and malnutrition while

they liberated Tibet peacefully in 1951. In the context of this narrative of liberation, hunger is

presented as a selfless sacrifice of the soldiers in order to unify the Chinese nation. Reading

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the official Chinese sources, one gets the impression that the Chinese government made many

efforts to feed the PLA and improve the nutrition of the Tibetans. In the context of the state-

sponsored “remembering bitterness” campaigns, the Tibetan peasants had to learn to narrate

the suffering and hunger in “Old Tibet”.1 Furthermore, the official data which the Chinese

government published provide no proof of mass starvation in Tibet after 1959. As John

Powers has shown in his study “History as propaganda,”2 for both the exiled Tibetans and the

Chinese government, historical writing is used to create national identity. This article is

considered as a contribution to understand the politicization of hunger under socialism and the

de-mystification of Tibet.

I. Politicization of hunger and nationalism

The historian James Vernon argues that we should not take sympathy for the victims

of famines for granted. In his book “Hunger: A modern history”, he shows that in late

Victorian Britain in the 19th century the idea of Malthus that famines are a natural result of

population growth against the background of limited recourses was very popular. Moreover,

religious narratives viewed famines as a punishment send by god for human sins. It was not

an easy task to overcome the Malthusian framework. The modern media print played an

important role to present starvation as “news”, especially to its readers from the English

middle class. The hungry became a figure of humanitarian concern only by the last decades of

the 19th century. Furthermore, nationalism contributed to the politicization of hunger. “In the

hand of Irish and Indian nationalists, famine came to represent the inhumanity and

incompetence of British rule: the British had promised free trade, prosperity, and civilization;

they had delivered famine and pestilence […]. Famine highlighted the moral strength of those

who suffered; and unnecessary colonial famines mocked the universal pretensions of classical

political economy. Here the nationalist use of famine to critique colonial rule became a claim

to sovereignty: they willed a new nation into existence by documenting its collective

suffering.”3 However, not in every nationalist narrative, famine plays an important role.

Despite the fact that Mohandas Gandhi used the technique of hunger strike, famine never

occupied a central place in his critique of the British rule in India.4 These are an interesting

1 For detail see Makley, Charlene: “‘Speaking Bitterness’: Autobiography, History, and Mnemonic Politics on the Sino-Tibetan Frontier”, in: Comparative Studies in Society and History (2005), Vol. 47, 40-78.2 Powers, John: History as propaganda: Tibetan exiles versus the People's Republic of China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).3 Vernon, James: Hunger: A modern history (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 434 Vernon, 2007, 69

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fact against the background that 12.2-29.3 million Indians starved to death under the rule of

the British Empire between 1879 and 1902.5 The historian Mike Davies even named these

famines the “late Victorian holocausts” which were caused by the British lassie faire

liberalism and its incompetence to deal with the climate change of the El Nino draughts in the

late nineteen century.6

Let us now go into detail and the cases of the Irish, Vietnamese and Ukraine famine

and nationalist narratives:

Ireland: The case of the Irish famine (1845-1848) shows a rapid rise and fall of its

place in nationalist narratives. The Irish famine was caused by several years of potato blight

and crop failure. At that time, large parts of the Irish laboring population lived almost

exclusively on a diet of potato. Like in many other cases, the response of the government is

the key factor determining whether or not a famine will result in mass starvation and death of

thousands. By the time of the famine, Ireland was ruled by the British government in

Westminster and had lost its own parliament. During the famine food was exported from

Ireland to England. At the same time, the British government imported Indian corn to Ireland

to relief the starving population. However, many Irish peasants who were used to a potato diet

did not know how to make the best use of the Indian corn. Wrong preparation of the corn with

an extremely hard shell caused severe stomach problems which become known as “Peel’s

brimstone”, named after the British Prime Minster Sir Robert Peel who was in office between

1841 and 1846.7 The British government relief program focused on public work to provide

employment. The infamous workhouses served as a place to nourish and “educate” the poor.

After this institution proved ineffective, in order to prevent mass starvation the British

government under Sir John Russell established soup kitchens in March of 1847, which

provided food to over 3 million people. In autumn, the government declared that the famine

already had reached its peak and closed the soup kitchens. At that time, infectious diseases

were already widespread. Especially the English print media presented the famine relief as a

bottomless black hole. Senior government officials blamed the famine on the laziness of the

Irish peasants and the unwillingness of the Irish landlords to modernize their estates. Ireland

was supposed to share the main burden of the famine relief by itself.8 The British government

5 Davis, Mike: Late Victorian holocausts: El Niño famines and the making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001), 76 Davis, 2001, 227 Kissane, Noel: The Irish famine: A documentary history (Dublin: Nation Library of Ireland, 1995), 388 Ó'Gráda, Cormac: Black '47 and beyond: The great Irish famine in history, economy, and memory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 82

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did not ignore the famine, but the relief program was not on its top priority list. Westminster

spent a net amount on the famine relief about 7 Million pounds. In contrast to the hungry Irish

people, the slave owners in West Indian received 20 Million pounds compensation for the

abolishment of slavery in the 1830.9 As a result of the famine, the population of Ireland was

reduced by 20 to 25 percent. Approximately between 1.1 and 1.5 million people died and

another 2.1 million people emigrated oversees between 1845 and 1851. 10

Studies of the Irish folklore have shown that many country people and catholic

clergymen interpreted the famine as an “act of god” in the aftermath of the event.11 However,

Irish nationalism politicized the famine and the event played a prominent role in its

narratives.12 For example, in 1861 the famous Irish nationalist John Mitchell wrote the book

“The last conquest of Ireland (perhaps)” in exile in the US. Mitchell portrayed the British

government as ignorant and incompetent. According to his view, the famine was use as a

weapon to conquer the Irish nation. While cattle and wheat as exported, the British

government imported the Indian corn only in order to blind the people to the fact that England

was exacting her tribute as usual. Mitchell estimated the death toll on one and a half million.

He came to the famous conclusion. “They died of hunger in the midst of abundance, which

their own hands created […]. Furthermore, I have called it an artificial famine: that is to say,

it was a famine which desolated a rich and fertile island that produced every year abundance

and superabundance to sustain all her people and many more […]. The Almighty, indeed, sent

the potato blight, but the English created the Famine.”13 This emotional narrative became

popular, because it could make sense of suffering. The Irish nationalists could focus their

attention on an outside force as the perpetrator, instead of remembering the breakdown of the

social order in Ireland and all its catastrophic results such as increasing crime rates,

prostitution, cannibalism and deprivation. The narrative could draw the line between the

victim, catholic Ireland, and the perpetrator, protestant England, instead of acknowledging the

facts that also many catholic landlords and head tenants took advantage of the famine by

dispossessing land of weaker Irish peasants. Furthermore, the protestant areas around Ulster

were hid by the famine as well. Despite of these contradictions, the narrative of the artificial

famine “served the deep psychological and political need of the post-Famine generations”, as

9 Gray, Peter: The Irish famine, (London: Harry N. Abrams, 1995), 9510 Miller, Kerby: “ ‘Revenge for Skibbereen’: Irish Emigration and the Meaning of the Great Famine”, in: Gribben, Arthur (Ed.): The great famine and the Irish Diaspora in America (Amherbst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 18111 Miller, 1999, 181 12 For the Irish nationalist debate see Vernon, 2007.44-4813 Mitchel, John: The crusade of the period: and Last conquest of Ireland, (perhaps.) (New York: Lynch, Cole & Meehan, 1878, pp.323

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Peter Gray points out.14 Especially for the Irish famine refugees in the US, the nationalist

narrative could provide a framework to maintain the Irish and catholic identity in a hostile

environment. The nationalists blamed “protestant” England for forcing them to leave their

home country.15 Popular songs and ballads called for revenge for the mass starvation in form

of the struggle against England under the green flag.16 All future Irish nationalist movements

were heavenly depend on Irish-American approval and funds. Although by the eve of World

War I most eyewitness of the famine had passed away, songs, ballads and newspaper articles

kept the collective memory of the famine within the Irish population of 4.5 million people in

the US Diaspora alive.17

However, since the early 20th century the memory of the famine lost its importance in

collective memory in Ireland. Things changed around the 150th anniversary in 1995 when the

Irish government funded a National Famine Commemoration Committee. Christine Kinealy

points out the new boom of literature that occurred in conjunction with the 150th anniversary

of the famine: from 1900 to the 1980s only two major publications were produced by Irish

historians; while between 1995 and 1997 more books were published on the famine than in

previous 150 years.18 However, the pro-British parties in Northern Ireland and conservatives

in England still feared that the memories of the famines could help the IRA (Irish Republican

Army). An official acknowledge and express of regret for the role of the British government

during the famine by Prime Minister Tony Blair was widely criticized in England and Ireland

for being unnecessary.19 In contrast to these concerns, the president of Ireland Mary Robison

did not draw an anti-British lesson from the famine, but emphasis the solidarity with starving

people and refuges in the developing countries in her address of 150 th anniversary.20 However,

the nationalist narrative which was developed by Mitchell is still alive. For example, a Famine

Genocide Committee was established in New York (see also the wall painting on page 1).

Moreover, the Irish Pop star Sinead O’Connor wrote the song “famine”21 in 1995: “OK, I want to talk about Ireland

Specifically I want to talk about the "famine"

About the fact that there never really was one

There was no "famine"

See Irish people were only allowed to eat potatoes

14 Gray, 1995, 12715 Miller, 1999, 18916 Miller, 1999, 18117 Mulcrone, Mick: “The famine and collective memory: The role of the Irish-American Press in the Early Twentieth Century”, in: Gribben, 1999, 23418 Kinealy, Christine: The great Irish famine: Impact, ideology and rebellion (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 319 Kinealy, 2002, 1420 Kissane, 1995, 180.21 The video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVf2NCGkgTU

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All of the other food

Meat fish vegetables

Were shipped out of the country under armed guard

To England while the Irish people starved

And then on the middle of all this

They gave us money not to teach our children Irish

And so we lost our history.”

The song combines the narrative of an artificial famine with the popular rhetoric of

trauma. According to O’ Connor, the Irish nation could only rediscover its Christian roots and

overcome the “post traumatic stress disorder” through commemorating the famine. The line

“There was no famine” reflects the debate about how to label the event. While the word

famine emphasis the natural disaster and decline in production, nationalist authors preferred

the term “The Great Starvation” or the traditional Irish designation for “The Great Hunger”

(An Gorta Mor).22 Despite the reasonable criticism of the role of the British government, one

must acknowledge that the event could hardly be described as a “procurement famine”. In

1847, the potato harvest was only a quarter of normal and in 1848 only one-third of usual crop

could be saved.23 Even if no cattle and wheat were exported, mass starvation and death would

still have occurred. In the context of this paper, the raise of the nationalist narrative “They

starved us on purpose” is important and will also be analyzed in other cases.

Vietnam:

In the case of Vietnam, the famine of 1944-45 was linked to the founding of a new

independent nation state. The history of modern Vietnam before 1944 is known for starvation,

but not for famines that caused the death of millions.24 Since 1887, Tonkin, the northern part

of Vietnam, was under French protectorate and the south, French Indochina, under direct

colonial rule. In 1940, the Japanese army took over the control over Vietnam and forced the

French colonial administration to collaborate. Since than large quantity of Tonkin rice land

was converted to production of industrial crops, particular castor oil seed and jute. French

Indochina severed as the largest supplier of rice to Japan from 1940 to 1943.25 Meanwhile the

population had increased by 36 percent. In 1942 the French colonial administration had

signed agreement to supply Japan with the entire “exportable surplus” of the rice harvest.26

Furthermore, natural disasters had reduced the spring rice harvest in Tonkin of 1944 by 19

22 Kinealy, Christine: “The great Irish famine: A dangerous memory?”, in: Gribben, 1999, 24023 Kissane, 1995, VIII24 Dung, Bui Minh: “Japan’s role in the Vietnamese starvation of 1944-45“, in: Modern Asian Studies (1995), Vol.29, No.3, 58025 Dung, 1995, 59826 Bose, Sugata: “Starvation amidst plenty: The making of famine in Bengal, Honan and Tonkin”, 1942-45, in: Modern Asian Studies (1990), Vol. 24, No.4, 720

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percent.27 These factors would not have naturally created a large-scale famine. However, after

the harvest in autumn of 1944, a terrible famine took place. Bui Minh Dung argues that the

most important factor was the procurement policy of the Japanese with French assistance. In

late 1944, the French and the Japanese army decided to hoard up large amounts of rice in

order to store it for their armies. Both colonial powers ignored the fact that millions of

Vietnamese were starving. In Tonkin, the Viet Minh guerrilla forces could increase its

popularity by organizing famine relief and attacking granaries.28 With the strategy “seizing the

granaries, to solve the famine”, the Viet Minh combined famine relief with political

mobilization. Many party members starved to death, because they stayed close to the masses.

Some authors have seen this campaign against famine was “largely responsible” for the raise

to power of the Viet Minh in Tonkin and northern Annam.29 During that time, the Viet Minh

presented itself mainly as a patriotic and anti-colonial force. The united front strategy

emphasized the alliance of all patriotic Vietnamese against the foreign occupation, not class

struggle or communism.

When Ho Chih Min declared the independence of the Democratic Republic of

Vietnam on September 2 of 1945, he did not only make reference to the US declaration of

Independent and the French declaration of Human Rights, but also to the famine. “In the

autumn of 1940, when the Japanese fascists violated Indo-China’s territory to establish new

bases in their fight against the Allies, the French imperialists went down on their bended

knees and handed over our country to them. Thus, from that date, our people were subjected

to the double yoke of the French and the Japanese. Their sufferings and miseries increased.

The result was that from the end of last year to the beginning of this year, from Quang Tri

province to the North of Viet Nam, more than two million of our fellow-citizens died from

starvation.”30 The figure of two million deaths was later enshrined in official history books.31

David Marr believes that the figure of one million is more credible. This figure implies that

about 10 percent of the population in the affected region perished over a five-year period.32

However, in the context of this article, the role of the famine in the declaration of

independence is more important than the exact number of victims. The famine served as an

27 Marr, David G.: Vietnam 1945: The quest for power (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1995), 9628 For example see Marr, 1995, 508-50929 Bose, 1990, 72630 Ho Chi Minh, Ho, Chi Minh: Selected Works, Vol. III (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publication House, 1961), 1931 For example see History of the Communist Party of Vietnam (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publication House, 1986), 7532 Marr, 1995, 104

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argument that France had lost any legitimacy to rule Vietnam. Furthermore, the human rights

of the Vietnamese people and the development of the country could only be guaranteed by

independence. In October of 1945, Ho appealed to his compatriots to do without a meal every

ten days to help the poor to escape from death.33 In an open letter, he encouraged the peasants

to extensive planting in order to save the North from starvation and support the fight against

the enemy, the French army, in the south.34 The new government celebrated the elimination of

the famine as the “first great victory” of the people. The organization of famine relief for the

effected province in the north served as a part of nation building.

However, in the official history of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the famine

played no central role later on.35 The reason might be that the anti-imperialist wars against

France (1946-1954) and the US (1965-1973) could better serve the purpose of the patriotic

narrative, according to which the Vietnamese nation could only be saved under the leadership

of the communist party. War heroes and revolutionaries might be better characters in this

narrative than victims of famine. Furthermore, rural Vietnam had a strong traditional of

millenarianism which considered famine as act of heaven rather than as a result of

government policies.

Ukraine: After the foundation of the independent Ukrainian nation state in 1991, the

memory of the famine of 1932/33 (holodomor) under Soviet rule became the core of the

official nationalist narrative.36 According to the version of the Ukrainian government, Stalin

organized the famine in order to committed genocide against the Ukrainian nation. The

success story of this narrative started with Robert Conquest’s book “The harvest of sorrow”37

in 1986 and the establishment of an investigation commission of the US congress. It finally

became the founding myth of the Ukrainian nation state after 1991. The official term

“Holodomor” was developed in the Ukrainian diaspora in the US and Canada in order to

33 Ho Chih Min, 1961, 40p.34 Ho Chih Min, 1961, 4235 For example, an official textbook of the History of the Communist party from 1986 only provides a few lines on the famine. It describes that the mobilization for famine relief brought out anti-Japanese upsurge all over the country and attracted all classes from workers to the national bourgeoisie. (History of the Communist Party of Vietnam ,75) The books says that after the independence the famine was rapidly stamped out thanks to the collection of rice and the grown of subsidiary crops everywhere (History of the Communist Party of Vietnam, 90).36 For details see Wemheuer, Felix: “Regime Changes of Memory Creating the Official History of the Ukrainian and Chinese Famines under State Socialism and after the Cold War”, in: Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History (2009) Vol. 10, No. 1, 131–59.37 Conquest, Robert: Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)

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emphasis the “artificial” character of the famine. Like in the Irish case, the impact of the

diaspora played a grave role in setting up this narrative.

The Ukrainian government has launched several campaigns to archive support for the

definition of the famine as genocide on the international level. It provides large funding for

museums, exhibitions and official memorial celebrations since the mid nineties. While

Russian historians and politicians insist that this tragedy was part of the Soviet famine in the

aftermath of the collectivization of agriculture, Ukrainian historians and supporter of the

genocide thesis in the western academia try to cut out the event from Soviet history and

integrate it into a national Ukrainian history. They argue that the Soviet government enforced

the punishments, such as food boycotts in response to underfulfilment of grain quotas and the

blockade of regions, but only in places that were populated with Ukrainians, especially the

Kuban region which was part of the Russian Soviet Republic and belongs to Russia today.

The facts that Russian, Germans and Poles also starved to death in the Ukraine and

perpetrator on the local level were mainly Ukrainians are hardly mentioned.38 The Ukrainian

nationalists are constructing the nation as a community of victims that includes the Ukrainians

beyond the borders of the nation state (see map on page 35 and 36). The government in Kiev

tries to rewrite the histories of the Ukrainian, Polish, Jewish, Lithuanian borderlands as

Ukrainian national history. The “holodomor” plays an important role in this context.

The genocide thesis was widely rejected in the western academia.39 The fact that the

Soviet government harshly exploded the peasant for industrialization by stetting too high

grain quotas after collectivization is undisputed, but many scholars question the thesis that

Stalin organized the famine on purpose. After the famine broke out in 1932, the Soviet

government lowered the grain quotas for the Ukraine several times. While the current

Ukrainian President, Viktor Yushchenko, promotes 10 million as the official numbers of

deaths, the French demographer Valin estimates the victims of the famine on 2.6 million.

Valin is criticized by Ukrainian historians because his number does not include the Ukrainians

who died in the Kuban region outside the Ukrainian Soviet republic. (The link between the

tally of victims and the definition of the nation is also important in the Tibetan context, as we

will see below. One reason that the number of deaths caused by the “Chinese occupation” of

38 Dietsch, Johan Making Sense of Suffering: Holocaust and Holodomor in Ukrainian Historical Culture (Lund: Lund University Press, 2006), ?39 For example see Davies, R.W/ Tauger, M.B./ and. Wheatcroft, Stephen G: “Stalin, Grain Stocks, and the Famine of 1932–1933,” Slavic Review (1995), Vol. 54, No. 3. and Green, Barbara: “Stalinist Terror and the Question of Genocide: The Great Famine,” in: Rosenbaum, Alan (Ed.): Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996), 137–61.

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the Tibetan exile government is much higher than the Chinese figure is that the exile Tibetan

side includes the Tibetans which lived outside the Tibet Autonomous Region.) In the

Ukrainian case, the official memory of the famine serves the purpose to justify the

independence from Russia, because “they starved us to death on purpose”. Like in the Irish

case, the nationalists consider the famine as part of a plan to wipe out the national culture by

the occupier. In the early thirties, the Soviet government also attacked the church which is

viewed was one backbone of the nation by the Ukrainian nationalists. Furthermore, Stalin

stopped the policy of “Ukrainization” in 1932, which had promoted the development of the

Ukrainian language and local cadres.

The term genocide in the context of famine is highly controversial. According to the

definition of the UN, the standard for genocide is only met, if a government intends to

exterminate a population or group as a whole.40 David Marcus argued that the existing

international law is not flexible enough to deal with famine crimes. Concrete prohibitions for

starving civilians exist only in the context of warfare and the Geneva Conventions since 1977.

As a result, Marcus calls for a reform of international law. To sum up, government and large

parts of the academia in the Ukraine and diaspora outside the country seem to be immune of

any criticism of the genocide thesis. They want to believe that Stalin and the “Russian

government” committed genocide against them. This “collective trauma” serves as the

foundation of the new national identity.

II. Hunger and Tibetan nationalism

After outlining of the role of famine in nationalist narratives, the second part of the

article will focus on the relation between hunger and Tibetan nationalism. It will analyze

English language memoirs and the website of the Tibetan exile government. Against the

background of the internationalization of the Tibet conflict since the eighties, these sources

are aimed to reach Western audience and to mobilize the support for the independence of

Tibet. Since 1988, the Dalai Lama is promoting the self-governing of Tibet in association

with the PRC. The degree of “autonomy” which the Dalai Lama claims is so far unacceptable

for the Chinese government. In order to support his goals, the Dalai Lama created a nationalist

counter-narrative to the official Chinese version of history. In the western media, the exile

Tibetan vision is often repeated without any critical considerations.

40 Marcus, David: “Famine crimes in international law”, in: American Journal of International Law, Vol.97, No.2, 267

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The rise of Tibetan nationalism

Tibetan nationalism is a relatively new phenomenon. According to the official Chinese

view, Tibet has been a part of China since the 13th century. John Powers describes the

propaganda war fought on the battlefield of historiography between the People’s Republic of

China (PRC) and the Tibetan exile government in India. While the Chinese historians make

huge efforts to find proofs that Tibet was a part of China, the Tibetans in exile try to emphasis

the fundamental differences between both cultures. Between 1911 and 1951 Tibet was in a

stage of de facto independence against the background of civil war and Japanese occupation

in China, but no country officially recognize Tibet as an independent state de jure.41 This

status changed after the foundation of the PRC in 1949 and the so-called “peaceful liberation”

of Tibet as a result of the “17 Point Agreement”. From 1951 to 1959, Tibet enjoyed a special

status within the new socialist state. The head of the Tibetan government, the 14th Dalai Lama,

acknowledged the “unification with the motherland”. In return, the Chinese government

agreed that the traditional theocracy could stay in power. The political mass campaign and

reforms that had been enforced in the rest of the country would not be implemented in Tibet.

In 1954, the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama even became Vice-chairmen of the Standing

Committee of the National People’s Congress. No other minority leaders were fawn over by

the Chinese government in such ways at that time. The alliance between the Communist Party

(CCP) and the Tibetan elite collapsed in April 1959 as the result of the uprising in Tibet and

the escape of the Dalai Lama to India.

In Dharamshala, the Dalai Lama established a Tibetan government in exile. Various

authors have argued that the people in Tibet hardly considered themselves as a nation before

1951. Nationalism developed mainly in exile. “In Benedict Anderson’s terms, the Chinese

incursion into Tibet, their shared suffering under Chinese rule, and the experience of being

forced to live together in exile have allow them to ‘imagine’ themselves as Tibetans, rather

than Kampas, Amdowas, Golokpas, and so on and have also made it possible to think of

people from distant regions of the Tibetan plateau as compatriots.”42 The Tibetan government

in exile created a secular nationalism with is linked to religious symbols. Every year the

government organizes a national ceremony on March 10, the day of the uprising in 1959. In

the schools, patriotic education that is based on symbols like the flag and national songs is

enforced. Nationalism was also been enforced by the introduction of the central Tibet Lhasa

dialect as the national language, the promotion of ethnic endogamy and high birth rates.

41 Goldstein, Melvyn C.: The snow lion and the dragon: China, Tibet and the Dalai Lama (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997), ?42 Powers, 2004, 156

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Furthermore, the government discourages the Tibetans to assimilate with the host

population.43

The Tibetan exile government defines Tibet very different to the Chinese authority

(see maps on page 34). The Chinese government identifies Tibet with the Tibet Autonomous

Region (TAR) established in 1965. This region is called U-Tsang by the Tibetan exile

government and presents the part that was traditionally the fiefdom of Lhasa and the Dalai

Lama. (In the following, I will identify this era with Tibet.) By contrast to Beijing, the exile

government defines the Tibetan nation within the boundaries of “ethical Tibet” or “Greater

Tibet” which includes Kham and Amdo. These regions are located in the provinces Qinghai,

Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan. “Greater Tibet” would cover almost one third of the Chinese

state and the Tibetans present less than 50 percent of the population. Important parts of the

Kham were already placed under administration of Sichuan in 1728 by the Qing

government.44 However, the Tibetan exile government established the myth that the

communists divided Tibet in five provinces in order to harm it. The narrative and statistics of

victims under “Chinese rule” of the exile government included the Tibetans in Amdo and

Kham. Like in the case of the Ukrainian famine, the remembering of the suffering of all

Tibetans serves the effort to create national identity and the mapping of the nation.

The master narrative: “No famine before the Chinese came”

In the nationalist historiography, the suffering under “Chinese rule” plays the major

role. Central arguments of this narrative have already been established by the Dalai Lama in

his autobiography “My land and my people” in 1962. The key argument is that the Tibetans

were forced to sign the “17 Point Agreement” and to collaborate with the Chinese. After the

“illegal occupation”, Tibet was transformed into a Chinese colonial. Furthermore, the Dalai

Lama accuses the PRC to committed genocide against the Tibetans. The famine that took

place in U-Tsang, Kham and Amdo is considered as part of this genocide. According to

official exile statistics over 1.2 million Tibetans died as a result of the Chinese “occupation”

between 1949 and 1979. 342,970 people would have starved to death. The statistic

distinguishes between 131,072 deaths by starvation in U-Tsang, 89,916 in Kham and 121,982

in Amdo.45

43 ? Roemer, Stephanie: The Tibetan Government-in-Exile: Politics at large (London: Routledge, 2008), 14744 Goldstein, 1997, 1645 The official website of the Central Tibet Administration Tibet: Proving Truth from the facts (1996) http://www.tibet.net/en/index.php?id=149&rmenuid=11

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In his autobiography, the Dalai Lama wrote in 1962: “First, although our territory was

large, there were only 7 or 8 million Tibetans and over 600 million Chinese […]. They often

suffered from famine, and they wanted Tibet as extra living space. In fact, they already settled

hordes of Chinese peasants in Tibet, and I have no doubt they look forward to a time when

Tibetans will form an insignificant minority. Meanwhile, Tibetan peasants are reduced to

conditions worse than those of the peasants of the conquering race. There had never been

famine in Tibet, in all its recorded history, but there is famine now.”46 The Chinese statistics

only show a Tibetan population of 2,753,000 in 1953 and 2,501,000 in 1964 in the whole of

China.47 Despite the increase of Han Chinese migration to the cities in Tibet, at no time after

1951 the Chinese government allowed a large number of Han peasants to settle in the region

and to cultivate land. The argument, “they want our space for their hungry peasants”, lacks

any historical evidence. However, the argument that no famine occurred in the traditional

Tibetan society is repeated over and over again. On the official website of exile government

one could read: “Year after year, the Chinese Government claims great economic

advancement in Tibet; bumper crops, industrial growth, improvement of infrastructure and so

forth. These claims were made even when Tibet was suffering its only famines in the nation's

recorded history (1961-1964 and 1968-1973) […]. In the periods 1961-1964 and 1968-1973

famine became widespread in Tibet's pastoral areas. Thousands upon thousands of Tibetans

had to survive on rodents, dogs, worms and whatever they could forage for survival.” 48 Like

in the case of the Irish famine, the exile Tibetans argue that the occupier forced them to eat

things which humiliated them as human beings. The Tibetans would have been reduced to a

“nation of tsampa49 beggars”.

The same report claims: “Famine and starvation were unheard of in independent Tibet.

There were, of course, years of poor harvest and crop failures. But people could easily borrow

from the buffer stock held by the district administrations, monasteries, aristocrats and rich

farmers […]. From 1950 onwards, the Chinese military and civilian personnel were fed on the

state buffer stocks and, they forced the Tibetan populace to sell their personal holding of

grains to them at nominal prices.”50 The argument that the Tibetan would face starvation,

because they had to nourish the PLA is also another popular argument in the narrative of the

46 Dalai Lama: My land and my people (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1962), 22347 Yang, Kuifu: Zhongguo shaoshu minzu renkou [The population of the minority nationalities in China], (Beijing: Zhongguo renkou chubanshe, 1995), 2148 Tibet: Proving Truth from the facts (1996) http://www.tibet.net/en/index.php?id=150&rmenuid=11 (viewed March 4 2009)49 Tsampa is the traditional staple food stuff in Central Tibet. It is usually roasted barley flour which can be mixed salty tea butter. 50 Proving Truth from the facts (1996) http://www.tibet.net/en/index.php?id=148&rmenuid=11 v

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Tibetan exile. In his book “The story of Tibet: Conversation with the Dalai Lama” Thomas

Laird even affirms that after the PLA march into Lhasa in 1951 they stopped paying for grain

altogether and began requisitions without compensations.51

The narrative that no famine occurred in the traditional Tibetan society abroad already

up in the most important Tibetan document on the famine of the Great Leap Forward (1958-

1961): In the 70,000 character petition of the 10th Panchen Lama to the Chinese government

from 1962. This document, which was published in the full version for the first time in

London in 1997, is one of the most open descriptions of the famine by a high-ranking PRC

official.52 After the escape of the Dalai Lama to India in 1959, the Panchen Lama was

appointed as the chairman of the Preparatory Committee Tibet Autonomous Region. In

contrast to the Dalai Lama, the Panchen Lama welcomed officially the crack down of the

uprising by the PLA and supported the following “democratic reforms” which transferred

land for the monasteries and aristocrats to the Tibetan peasants. Therefore, many exile-

Tibetans considered the Panchen Lama as a “Chinese puppet” for a long time. In the

aftermath of the Great Leap Forward, the Panchen Lama made an inspection tour of the

Tibetan-speaking areas in Sichuan, Qinghai, Yunnan and Gansu. In contrast to Tibet (U-

Tsang), which was excluded from the Great Leap, the Tibetans in Amdo and Kham

experienced all campaigns such as the introduction of the People’s Communes, the public

dining halls and the steel campaign. The report of the Panchen Lama was written carefully in

a language of a state official. While the report acknowledged the improvements of the food

supply situation and moderate taxation in Tibet53, it drew a horrifying picture of mass

starvation and political repression in the “brother provinces”. Peasants told the Panchen Lama

that they only received five kilo of grain per month or even less. The people started to eat the

fodder for horses and donkey, grass roots and grass seeds. “After processing this, they mixed

it with a bit of foodstuff, made it into a thin gruel like pig food and gave it to the people to eat,

and even this was limited in amount and could not fill their stomach. Because the anguish of

such several hunger had never been experienced in Tibetan history and was such that people

could not imagine it even in their dreams, the masses could not resist this kind of cruel

51 Laird,  2006, 31552 In the beginning, the leadership of the CCP accepted the report as a valuable criticism. Mao Zedong even met with the Panchen Lama to discuss the petition. After Mao had attacked the United Front Work Department in the summer of 1962, things changed and the report was consider as “anti-socialist” and a “poisoned arrow”. Especially the passage that the Tibetan nationality was closed to death was unaccepted for Mao. In December of 1964, the Panchen Lama was dismissed from his post as chairman. During the Cultural Revolution he was taken to Beijing for several struggle sessions of the Red Guards and was not release from prison before 1977. 53 Panchen Lama: A poisoned arrow: the secret report of the 10th Panchen Lama; the full text of the Panchen Lama's 70,000 character petition of 1962, together with a selection of supporting historical documents (London: Tibet Information Network , 1997), 82

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torment.”54 This statement implies that the Tibetan herdsmen and peasants had serious

difficulties to deal with famine, because they had never experience this kind of hunger before.

The Panchen Lama warned: “… for a period, because the life of the masses was poverty-

stricken and miserable, many people, principally the young and old, died of starvation […].

Consequently, there has been an evident and severe reduction in the present-day Tibetan

population.” This development would be a “great treat to the continued existence of the

Tibetan nationality, which was sinking into the state close to death.”55 In the report linked the

famine with the threat of the existence of the Tibetan nationality and their culture. Without

using the term, this definition is close to genocide.

Later, we will see that the Chinese version of this story is very different. According to

these sources, the CCP undertook many efforts to feed the PLA and the Tibetan population.

Hungry for butter tea: Food in the Tibetan exile memories

In the memoirs of the Tibetan exile food and hunger plays a surprisingly important

role. In these context, I will analyze the narrative of food and hunger the three memoirs: “Red

star over Tibet” by Dawa Norbus, “New Tibet: Memoirs of a Graduate of the Peking Institute

of National Minorities” by Tsering Dorje Gashi and “Life in the Red Flag People’s

Commune” by Dhondub Choedon. All three eyewitnesses worked for the Chinese state and

fled to India during the Cultural Revolution. The memoirs that were translated in English and

addressed to Western audience were published a decade before the Tibet issue became

internationalized and the rise of the Dalai Lama to a global pop star.

In his book “New Tibet”, Gashi describes the transformation of his eating habits while

studying in the mid fifties at the elite institution for the training of minority cadres, the

Institute of National Minorities. After his arrival in Beijing the old students offered him hot

water in cups and told him jokingly: “Nowadays we do not have to dirty ourselves by lot of

grease and oil as we used to do in Tibet. We need not trouble ourselves with luxuries like

butter tea.”56 In the propaganda of the CCP, consumption of butter tea and the burning of yak

butter for religious purpose served as symbols for waste and corruption in the traditional

Tibetan society. In a discussion, other students argued against religion: “Religion is poison.

Religion has given us neither anything to eat or drink. On the contrary tsampa and butter have

to be wasted as offerings of mud and bronze.”57 In his memoirs, Norbu describes the situation

54 Panchen Lama, 1997, 11255 Panchen Lama, 1997, 10356 Gashi, Tsering Dorje: New Tibet – Memories of a Graduate of the Peking Institute of National Minorities (Dharamsala: The Information Office of H.H. the Dalai Lama, 1980), 1157 Gashi, 1980, 25

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in the rural cooperative near Xigaze after “democratic reforms” in 1959. The served tea was

now black and bitter. According to Norbu, they were not allowed to drink chang58 anymore,

because it was considered as “anti-Motherland sabotage” .59 The Tibetans had to learn to make

self-criticism of their “wasteful” habits. A peasant women said: “How foolish and backward I

have been to waste butter on the lamps before my altar, when I don’t have butter for my

tea.”60 Norbu acknowledges that in the past the Tibetans workers could drink thick buttered

teas and strong chang only on special seasonal working days. However, the “Chinese

overlords” would drive them to despair and hunger.

The CCP established a narrative of waste around food offering already during the land

reform campaign in the Han Chinese eras. In the famous propaganda movie Baomaonü (The

white haired girl, 1947), a girl, who is driven into the mountains by the oppression and abuse

of a landlord, tries to prevent starvation by stealing offering food from a monastery. The

director of the movie Nongnu (Serf, 1963) worked with the same metaphor in the Tibetan

context. In the story, a hungry Tibetan serf steals offering food from an altar. As a result,

monks are demanding to cut out this tongue as a punishment for stealing “Buddha’s” food. In

contrast to the Chinese propaganda, the Tibetan authors are describing how the critique of the

tea butter and the reduction of food to starvation rations went hand in hand. Norbu mentions

the joke that the two reductions (which meant the reduction of loans and interest rates

according to the CCP) would turn out to be on chang and tea.

Choedon who belonged to the serf class (wulagpas) and had served as a local cadre in

the rural co-operative describes in her memoirs how the Chinese introduced a system to save

food after the establishment of the People’s Commune in 1965. The peasants were required to

make schemes for their livelihood that were too low to feed the family adequately. “The

Chinese will then ask: how will you live by this amount? We have to answer: ‘not eating dry

but drinking liquid- meaning we will not eat pahg (tsampa dough) but drink thugpa (porridge

type); substituting greens for grains – less grain and more vegetables; drinking no chang and

eating no ‘Yoe’ (roasted barley)’ – because, the Chinese say, it is not food and hence a

waste.”61 This narrative also appears in “Tibet under Chinese communist rule: A compilation

of refugee statements 1958-1975”. This volume that was published by the Tibetan exile

government includes a statement of Tesum, a former beggar who fled to Kathmandu in 1961.

He told the following story: After the distribution of alms after a death of a head of a wealthy

58 Chang is a beer made of barley.59 Norbu, Dawa: Red star over Tibet (New York: Envoj Press, 1987), ?60 Norbu, 1987, 21661 Choedon, Dhondub: Life in the Red Flag People’s Commune (Dharamsala: The Information Office of H.H. the Dalai Lama, 1978), 37pp.

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family forty Tibetans cooked thukpa (a broth prepared with dough, meat and vegetables)

outside his house. All of sudden, Chinese accused them to waste food by practicing

“reactionary” customs.62

The idea to reform the eating habits in order to accumulate resources for the

modernization of the country is quite typical for the whole Mao era. Under the slogan “eat

less to build the country" (shaochi jianguo), the party accepted sacrifice from every citizen

and launched several campaigns to save grain. For example, during famine of the Great Leap

in 1960, the government called to save food. Another famous example is the campaign

“Prepare for war, prepare for famine, for the people” (beizhan, beihuang, wei renmin) in

which the population was educated to prevent any waste of food. In the memoirs of Choedon,

she describes this regime of saving and sacrifices in ethnical terms. She argues that the

Chinese forced “us” to change our eating habits by drinking watery porridge and eating more

vegetables for the purpose to explode Tibet.

Let us now focus on the presentation of famine in the Tibetan-exile memoirs. Gashi

experienced the famine of the Great Leap Forward by himself at the Institute in Beijing. By

the end of 1959, the relatively ample food supply was reduced to a ration, which was just

enough for 25 days a month. The authorities of the institute told the students that the country

was going to a difficult time and only by eating less and increasing inner strength hardship

could be overcome. The students should remember the suffering of the Long March when the

soldiers of the Red Army were forced to eat dead bodies, dead horses and dogs.63 Despite the

fact that it would be very unlikely that a party official would talk about cannibalism in the

Red Army, this argument is very similar to the narrative of the PLA soldier who marched into

Tibet in 1951. For the sake of the unity of the motherland, they tightened their bells and even

ate mice. After the party sent the Tibetans students back to Tibet in the winter of 1961, Gashi

realized that the situation in the countryside was much worse. The railway station in Chengdu,

the capital of Sichuan province, was filled which starving people. Nobody gave food to the

starving or helped each other. After working for the Xizang Ribao (Tibetan Daily), Dashi

went back to his hometown Phari in the South of Tibet, located near the Indian border.

According to his memoirs, he became more and more disillusioned with the New Tibet after

he realized the level of political oppression and the low standards of living. Despite the fact

that his family could hardly be feed with the food rations, Dashi emphasized that Pahri was

much better off than the rest of Tibet, because border areas were allowed to cultivated larger

62 The Information Office of H.H. the Dalai Lama (Ed.): Tibet under communist rule: A compilation of refugee statements 1958-1975 (Dharamsala: The Information Office of H.H. the Dalai Lama, 1976), 7363 Gashi, 1980, 73

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private plots and they did not have to pay the “patriotic grain tax” (aiguo liang) and the

“surplus grain sales tax”. 64 Finally, in 1966 Gashi fled to India. Like Gashi, Norbu does not

mention any death by starvation in his memoirs, but he describes hunger in detail. According

to him, the harvest of 1959 was excellent, but the peasants were hungry. In the past, the

peasants were able to borrow grain from the upper classes and the rich. This practice became

under attack during the “democratic reforms”, because of the extra ordinary high interest

rates. Norbu remembers that the peasants ask “the Chinese” to borrow grain from the People’s

granaries, but the authorities refused it. Using an almost Marxist argument, Norbu points out

that he supported the land reform and the distribution of wealth among the poor, but he

realized that “the Tibetan proletariat received mainly useless objects while the real wealth was

taken by the Chinese.”65 Furthermore, he concludes that China would “milk” Tibet.

The memories of Choedon are also packed with complains about low food rations and

hunger. Such as Norbi, she claims that despite of the improvement of production after 1959,

the Chinese did not provide the people with a full stomach. She describes in detail the

working and living conditions in the Red Flag Commune established in 1965. “Since essential

items like meat, butter and oil are very scare more foodgrain has to be eaten to make up for

our bodily requirements. But where can one get more foodgrain? Especially in summer and

autumn we have to cut down our intake of food grain and eat lots of wild vegetables. On

many occasion this scarcity of food made people’s faces odourless and greenish, which no

outsider would have recognized. Many people became sick and their faces got swollen. Many

died of starvation.”66 Like the Chinese propaganda, Choedon operates with a comparison of

the food supply in the past and the presents. Unlike the Chinese narrative, she uses data of

food ration to show that the Tibetans had less to eat after the “democratic reforms” and the

establishment of the People’s Communes. Paradoxically, the Chinese organized

“remembering bitterness”-session in which the Tibetans had to recall the hunger of the past.

“They even introduced all over Tibet a ‘Dug-gnal Drenso Thugpa’ or Remembering suffering

Thugpa watery thin porridge of tsampa, without salt, which is given to all Tibetan […].

During this occasion, some Tibetans youths will ask their elders: Was this want you really

received in the old society? They have to answer: The masses had only this type of thugpa

because the three serf-owners gorged themselves during extravagant banquets.”67 The CCP

had introduced practice of “remembering bitterness” during the land reform in order to launch

64 Gashi, 1980, 10665 Norbu, 1987, 21266 Choedon, 1978, 3667 Choedon, 1878, 62

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class struggle in the villages. According to Choedon, the cadres even prepared watery

porridge in order to demonstrate the terrible level of consumption in the “old society”.

The memoirs of Gashi, Choedon and Norbu are in some ways within the framework of

the master narrative that the Dalai Lama had established in his autobiography. The Chinese

would have occupied Tibet and would exploit the country for their own good while the

standard of living of the Tibetans are reduced to the level of starvation. Furthermore, the

books of Gashi and Norbu have even been published by the “Information Office of His

Holiness the Dalai Lama”. However, the stories differing from the Tibetan exile narrative of

today to some extent. The authors set the focus not on the abuse of human right and genocide,

but on the hardships of the Tibetan population and they struggle against hunger. The main

accusation against the “Chinese masters” is that they did betray their own ideals and did

nothing to improve the standards of living. The fact that all three authors emphasize their own

believes in the Chinese modernization effort in the beginning makes the argument even

stronger. In the memoirs, the Tibetans were forced to change their habits of food consumption

for the sake of the Chinese exploitation and as a result of hunger.

The journalist Jasper Becker who interviewed some eyewitnesses of the famine of the

Great Leap Forward even makes a comparison with the Ireland. According to Becker, cadres

did not only force Tibetan nomads to settle in Amdo, but also forced them to eat unfamiliar

and unsuitable grains instead of tsampa. “Much like the peasants in Ireland, who could not

make bread from the wheat imported after the potato crop failed, the Tibetans, especially the

nomads, had no idea how to eat wheat or maize. And, while many Chinese peasants knew

from experience how to endure famine, this was a hardship virtually unknown among

Tibetans.”68 On the one hand, Becker reflects the two standard arguments of the exile-Tibetan

discourse (“No famine in independent Tibet” and “They forced us to eat strange things”). On

the other hand, Becker also mentions that more Tibetans would have died, if the Han Chinese

immigrants would not taught them how to eat leaves or wild grasses. According to Becker,

Tibetans and Han suffered a like in Gansu, Qinghai and Sichuan. This conclusion contrasts

the memories of the exile Tibetans in which the line is also drawn between the Tibetans and

the “Chinese masters”.

III. Hunger and famine in the Chinese narrative

The Chinese official historiography on Tibet

68 Becker, Jasper: Hungry ghosts: China's secret famine (London: Murray, 1996), 16820

Against the background that the official historiography in China went through

significant changes after the death of Mao Zedong, the continuity of the official view on the

history of Modern Tibet is astonishing. If one compares the propaganda brochures of the early

fifties about the building of the new highways and propaganda in the context of the

Goldmund-Lasha railway today, the messages are very similar to the current.69 These

connections with the Chinese motherland would bring development, prosperity, education,

modern infrastructure and health care to Tibet. Tibet was, is and will be a part of China is the

main messages. In the periods between 1951 and 1959, the alliance of the CCP with the

Tibetan elites, and since the beginning of the reform policies in 1978, the narrative is more

focused on the achievements in Tibet than on the “atrocities” of the theocratic regime than

during the “democratic reforms” in the early sixties and during Cultural Revolution.

Despite the fact the policies of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) towards the

minorities is consider as a disaster, “leftist mistake” are only briefly mentioned in the official

history books on Tibetan. Since the last years, some Chinese publications have carefully

questioned the narrative of class struggle within the context of the land reform (1947-1953),

but in the Tibetan context the description of the exploitation of the Tibetan serfs is unchanged.

The story that Tibetans were liberated twice, ones in 1951 from Imperialism and in 1959 from

serfdom is retold again and again. In the publications since the nineties, the Chinese scholars

are making more references to Western research, especially to scholars such as Tom Grunfeld

or Melvyn Goldstein who are considered as “objective”. One goal of the Chinese research is

to deconstruct the counter-narrative of the Dalai Lama.

Tibet is one of the most sensitive political issues in China. Therefore, even critical

Chinese academics who are publishing their books on the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural

Revolution in Hong Kong did not dare to touch the impact of these campaigns in Tibet. Two

major publications of PRC scholars on the Great Leap which were published on Hong Kong

do not include a chapter on the famine in the Tibetans eras.70 The limits of the accessibility of

useful population statists might only be one reason for this gap. Despite the lacking research

on the famine in the Tibetan eras, the topic of food and hungers appears in the official

Chinese narrative frequently. However, the description of hunger is used in a very different

way than in the Tibetan exile narratives as we will see below.

69 For example see Xie, Weiming: Kangxi gonglu jixing (Shanghai: Shanghai chubanshe gongsi, 1955) andGong, Sixue: Xin zhongguo de xin Xizang [The New Tibet of New China], (Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 1955).70 See Yang Jisheng: Mubei – Zhongguo liushi niandai da jihuang jishi, (Xianggang: Tian di tu shu you xian gong si, 2008) and Cao, Shuji: Da jihuang, (Xianggang: Shi dai guo ji chu ban you xian gong si, 2005).

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Eating mice for the liberation of Tibet

The narrative of the Tibetan exile portrays the Chinese troops in Tibetan as a heavy

burden for the population. As a matter of fact, the feeding of the PLA became one of the

biggest challenges for the Chinese government during the “peaceful liberation”.71 After a long

and dangerous march with horses and mules through the highlands, the PLA reached Lhasa in

late 1951. An official textbook which was published in 1984 describes the suffering of the

PLA soldiers who carried food for just seven days on their own back: “The large majority of

the cadres and soldiers were tightening their belts […]. Sometimes they could not even eat

two meals of millet gruel a day. When masses and patriots saw this situation, many of them

felt sorry. Sometimes at night they brought bags with barley to the base of the soldiers.”72

Memoirs of PLA soldiers and official textbooks are emphasizing the suffering of soldiers on

this “Long March” for the sake of the unification of the motherland. The lack of a good road

made the import of large amount of grains from inner China almost impossible. For example,

in the memoirs of two PLA soldiers who marched over the highlands from Ganzi to Lasha,

the search for food plays an important role. This book was published as part of a series in

order to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the “peaceful liberation” of Tibet in 2001. Huang

Daojun describes how the PLA soldiers, in Ganzi tightened their bells in order not to harm the

local Tibetan population. Mao Zedong had ordered that the PLA should not to eat local grain

while entering Tibet. Against the background that the level of production was low, no grain

was available for purchase in Ganzi. The soldiers received rations below 400 gram per day

while they performed hard labor to build an airstrip which would allow food to be brought in

by plane. In order to fight the hunger, the soldier ate all kinds of weed (wa yecai cong ji).

Some soldiers even caught mice and ate them (zhua dishu cong ji).73 (The story of mice eating

PLA soldiers is also told in the book “Blood is speaking for Tibet” of two Chinese journalists

in great detail74 and mentioned in the “grain gazette of the Tibet Autonomous Region”75.)

When the local population saw the soldiers working while starving, they helped the PLA to

build the airstrip. Huang remembers: “Under the condition of a serious shortage of grain, we

71 Goldstein writes a whole chapter on “the food crisis” of 1951/52. See Goldstein, Melvyn C.: A history of modern Tibet 1951 - 1955: The calm before the storm (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2007), 245-26372 Xizang zizhiqu gaikuang bianxiezu: Xizang zizhiqu Xkuang [The general situation of the Tibet Autonomous Region] (Lasa: Xizang renmin chubanshe, 1984), 58273 Wang, Gui/ Huang Daojun: Shiba jun xianqian zhenke jin zang jishi, (Beijing: Zhongguo zangxue chubanshe, 2001), 3474 Yan, Yan: Xue dui Xizang shuo [Blood speaks to Tibet], (Shenyang: Shenyang renmin chubanshe, 1993), 36-43.75 Zizang zizhiqu difangzhi bianzuan weiyuanhui (Ed.): Xizang zizhiqu liangshi zhi [The grain gazette of Tibet Autonomous Region], (Beijing: Zangxue chubanshe, 2007), 21 (below quoted as liangshi zhi)

22

did not purchase on pound of grain. We would rather be hungry than to increase the burden of

the Tibetan countrymen.”76 After the airstrip was built, the nutrition of the soldier improved.

On the march into Tibet, the PLA became the order that individuals or subunits were not

allowed to purchase any food on the market or buy things in small shops. The purchase and

distribution of food was centralized under the Department for Finance and Trade. However,

some hungry soldiers violated the discipline and bought things in small restaurant or teashop

in Lhasa.77 Huang also describes a clash of cultures in the terms of eating. In the beginning,

some comrades felt like barfing when they smelled yak butter (suyou). Furthermore, they did

not know how to make tsampa (zanba) and butter tea. Later, the Tibetan comrades taught

them how to use yak butter and prepare tsampa. Finally, the Chinese soldiers began to like

it.78 In the story of Huang, food is used to describe the ability of the PLA soldiers to fit in the

new cultural environment and adopted Tibetan customs.

Breaking the “grain boycott” to feed the PLA

In 1951 Lhasa had a population around 30,000 people. A Chinese source says that the

8,000 PLA troops in Lhasa needed 5.7 million pounds of grain per year for the men and 1.3

million pound for the horses.79 According to the “17 point agreement”, the local government

should assist the purchase and the transport of food. The Chinese government was aware that

a requisition or purchase of Tibetan grain could cause unrest. In April of 1952, Mao Zedong

outlined how to solve the problem. In contrast to Xinjiang, the absence of Han Chinese in

Tibet meant that the implementation of rent reduction or land reform would not be possible

within the next three years. PLA should promote its own production and became self-

sufficient. Mao was also concerned that reactionary forces in the Tibetan upper class could

use a food crisis to attack the PLA. Therefore, a decline of the standards of living of the

Tibetan population should be prevented. Furthermore, highways must be built to alleviate

large imports from inner China and India. Mao warned: “In the case that India in the future

one day does not give us grain, our troops still should be able to make a living.”80 Later, this

policy of Mao was concluded with the saying “When the PLA enter Tibet, it not should eat

local food” (jiefangjun ru Xizang, but chi difang). In the early fifties, self-sufficiency of the

PLA was more a goal than reality. One Chinese source says that in 1952, the PLA planted 943

76 Wang Gui/ Huang Daojun, 2001, 3477 Wang Gui/ Huang Daojun, 2001, 158, see also Goldstein, 2007, 25678 Wang Gui/ Huang Daojun, 2001, 5379 Goldstein, 2007, 24580 Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian yanjiu shi (Ed.): Mao Zedong Xizang gongzuo wenxian [Documents of the Tibet work of Mao Zeodong], (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 2008), 42

23

hectares and could produce all of their vegetables and 30 percent of the grain needs.81 As a

result, grain and rice had to be imported and purchase from the Tibetan aristocrats and

monasteries. With the permission of the Indian government, the Chinese shipped 28 million

pounds of rice from Guangdong province to West Bengal and than from there to Tibet.82 From

India the rice had to be transported via Phari to Lasha on mules, yaks and horse carts. In 1952,

the Chinese government organized a large land transportation program from Sichuan. More

than 66,900 animals and over 15,600 laborers were used in this effort. As one could imagine

these imports were extremely costly. Therefore, the building of the Qinghai-Tibet highway

and the Xikang-Tibet highway became the major project of PLA. The highways were finally

completed in 1954. The CCP published several books to praise the heroism and the suffering

of the soldiers and Tibetan contract workers who built the highway and make scarifies for the

sake of the nation.83 However, Tibetan guerilla fighters were able to interrupt the highways

temporally until the early sixties.

Nevertheless, the imports and the self-production of the PLA were not adequate to

feed cadres and soldiers. Against the background that the grain stores in Tibet where

controlled by the monasteries and the aristocracy, the Chinese were depend on the co-

operation of the local elite. An official Chinese textbook of 1984 blames the “reactionary”

forces of the Tibetan elite for organizing a grain strike. In contrast to the patriotic Tibetan

masses, reactionary parts of the upper classes and the Tibetan government “gloated over

other’s misfortune” (xing zai le huo). They were happy to see the Chinese soldiers starving

and try to boycott the selling of grain to the PLA according to the motto “If we can’t defeat

the PLA, hunger will force them to leave.”84 In the official Chinese narrative, hunger is used

to draw lines between friends and enemies. While the PLA soldiers suffered for the sake of

the nation, the Tibetan masses supported them and the reactionaries try to use hunger as a

weapon to force the Chinese troops to leave. The official “grain gazette” of the TRA says that

the reactionary clique of the Tibetan upper class closed down the grain market (shixing

liangshi fengbi) and caused a shortage of grain (zhizao lianghuang).85

Bapa Phüntso Wangye (known as Phünwang) reports in his memoirs about the threat

of a grain boycott. Phünwang was a communist and the only Tibetan in the so-called Tibet

Work Committee (Xizang gongwei) which was set up under the leadership of the PLA

commander Zhang Guohua and represented the Chinese government. In his memoir which

81 Goldstein, 2007, 25782 Goldstein, 2007, 26083 See Xie Weiming, 1955, 84 Xizang zizhiqu gaikuang bianxiezu, 1984, 583pp.85 Liangshi zhi, 2007, 2

24

was published by Western scholars Phünwang presents himself as a critical Tibetan

communist who was not afraid of conflicts with the Chinese government for the good of a

Socialist Tibet. According to him, Lukangwa, a member of the aristocracy and the acting

Premier Minister of the Tibetan government, said to Wang Qimei, a senior commander in the

18th army: “Now, after you have defeated our troops, you have arrived in Lhasa promoted to

‘Commander Wang’. But we here will not be easy to suppress. Leaving everything else aside,

the grain for the soldiers will not last.”86 The Anti-Chinese Prime Minster Lukangwa was

dismissed from office in 1952.

It might be the case that some Tibetan aristocrats planed to organize a grain boycott

again the PLA, but there is no evidence that a boycott took place on a large scale. According

to Phünwang, the real problem was not the shortage of grain per se, but rather the lack of an

efficient system to get surplus grain from the countryside to Lasha.87 In order to limit the food

shortage in Lhasa and inflation, the PLA encouraged the Tibetan government to establish a

new joint grain authority with Phünwang was the vice director. The central government in

Beijing provided hundred thousand of silver dollars for the purchase of grain to this

institution. However, the collection of grain was not a simple task. The Chinese were shocked

when they found out that 140,000 pound of grain were stored in granary below the Potala

Palace for fifty year.88 This grain was inedible. The story that the clergy allowed that

mountains of grain were rotting while the Tibetan peasants had not enough to eat fit into the

class struggles narrative which the CCP established in their publications on Tibet after 1959.

The 140,000 pounds of rotten grain in the Potala Palace is the only event which the

chronology of “grain gazette” mentions for the year of 1951. 89 To sum up, the official

Chinese narrative differs from the exile Tibetan version in striking ways. While some Tibetan

authors accuse to the PLA for confiscation without compensation, the Chinese sources

emphasizing the great efforts to avoid any burden for the Tibetan population, even though the

import of grain was dangerous and expensive.

Feeding and securing Tibet

After the highways to inner China were built in 1954, the food situation improved in

Tibet. According to Chinese sources, no food for the PLA soldiers and party cadres was

86 Goldstein, Melvyn C. (Ed.): A Tibetan revolutionary: The political life and times of Bapa Phüntso Wangye (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2004), 16187 Goldstein (Ed.), 2004, 17388 Goldstein, 2007, 25089 Liangshi zhi, 2007, 293

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purchase in Tibet later on, but huge amounts of grain were imported from China.90

Furthermore, the Chinese government provided famine relief and low rate credits for the

victims of the flood in 1954 and 1955. In the eras of Jiangsong and Bailiang 170 villages were

affected by a natural disaster, 691 people and 8000 cattle died in the flood.91 An official

textbook of 1984 describes the heroic actions of PLA soldiers to save the Tibetan peasants

from the flood. From their own recourses, the PLA gave over 200,000 pounds of grain to the

flood victims. Despite this great effort to help the Tibetans, reactionary forces in the Tibetan

upper class spread the rumor that large amounts of the relief grain was embezzled by the PLA.

The textbook claims that after the flood of 1954/55 never again Tibetans died as a result of

natural disasters thanks to the effective relief system.92

The “grain gazette” tells also the story how huge amounts of grain were shipped in

from inner China to stabilize the market in 1956 and to fight the inflation.93 However, the

source does not mention that the transfer of Han Chinese cadres to Tibet was one reason for

this inflation. The Chinese bought many buildings from the Tibetan aristocrats in order to

provide housing for these cadres. In 1957, the government began to establish a rationing

system for Han and Tibetan workers, cadres and students. Rice and wheat flour was provided

to Han, while Tibetans mainly received their rations in barley. The Tibetan uprising in April

1959 and the following “democratic reforms” resulted in a transformation of the grain supply

system. The Indian government which sympathized with the Tibetan rebels stopped the

exports to China and closed the land way to ship Chinese grain over India to Tibet. As a

result, the Tibetan Work Committee decided to abolish the free trade of grain and established

a state monopoly.94 Like in the rest of China since 1953, purchase and distribution was state

organized in Tibet from 1960 on. In the same year ration cards were introduced to the whole

urban population and also to the nomads. From that year on, the Tibetan peasants had to pay

the “patriotic taxes” (aiguo liang). The tax was set on 8 percent of the agriculture income of

every rural household. In 1961 the Tibet Work Committee made the decision that the tax rate

should be 7 percent of the income for the next five years.95 The tax was very moderate

compare to inner China where the tax burden peasant had increased, despite of the famine of

the Great Leap Forward. Furthermore, areas which were strongholds of the Tibetan uprising

could pay taxes later, because the Chinese government wanted to secure these areas.

90 Liangshi zhi, 2007, 291 Wang, Gui: Xizang lishi diwei bian [On the status of Tibet in history], (Beijing: Minzu chubanshe, 2003), 51892 Wang, Gui, 2003, 51993 Liangshi zhi, 2007, 394 Liangshi zhi, 2007, 2295 Liansghi zhi, 2007, 9

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At the beginning of the democratic, the Tibet Work Committee and the Preparatory

Committee for the Establishment of the Tibetan Autonomous Region did not have their own

granaries. Therefore, they heavenly depend on the grain stores of the monasteries. In 1962,

over 39 percent of the grain seeds were stored in monasteries and over 26 in private

households in the Lhasa and Linzhi era.96 It took until 1966 to build an independent granary

system. For the authorities it was a difficult task to secure the granaries on a local level,

because Anti-Chinese guerilla and “reactionaries” attacked, burned down the granaries or

stole the stored food. In 1963, 20,083 kilos of grain were stolen or rotten in the granaries.97

The government set up a local responsible system to monitor the granaries.

Chinese and Tibetan exile sources are claiming that the first two harvests after the

“democratic reforms” are good and production increased after the peasants worked on their

own land. The reader of the “grain gazettes” get the impression that Chine government

promoted a very moderate policy Tibet and no famine took place. The authors make no

references to the development in Kham and Ando at all. In the year 1960, during the high tide

of mass starvation in inner China, huge amounts of grain were shipped into Tibet to feed the

PLA and secure the region after the uprising. The Tibetan peasants paid moderated taxes and

the number of Tibetans who had the right to receive food rations from the state increased. Are

the arguments and statistic in the “grain gazettes” only a part of the propaganda narrative that

the Chinese government eschewed no effort in order to help and feed the Tibetan population?

Grain gazettes from other provinces such as Henan show a sky rocking increase of the tax

burden and a serious decline of the agriculture production. In the case of Tibet it is likely, that

the Chinese state was not able to transfer many resources of food to the Chinese cities or other

provinces, even if the government wanted to do so. The main instruments for this transfer

(collective agriculture, a state controlled granary system and the hu kou) were not

implemented in Tibet in the early sixties. The state grain monopoly had just been introduced

in 1960. The government did not fully enforce the hukou-registration before 196498 and the

People’ Communes were established between 1968 and 1973. The Chinese leadership was

aware of the strategic importance of Tibet. In 1962, the border war with India broke out just

three years after the Tibetan uprising.

Who should feed all the monks and nuns? A clash of ways of living

96 Liangshi zhi, 2007, 7797 Liangshi zhi, 2007, 9298 Ma, Rong, 1996, 34

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The “democratic reforms” revolutionized the economic and political system of Tibet.

In the context of his article it is interesting how the destruction of the theocracy changed the

food supply for the monks and nuns. In his autobiography the Dalai Lama argues that the

actions of the Chinese government would qualify as genocide, because the policies were

aimed to destroy Tibetan Buddhism.99 The Chinese government never officially questioned

the “freedom of religion”. However, with the beginning of the “democratic reforms” of 1959

in Tibet, the CCP began to attack the system of theocracy. The transfer of land from the

monasteries to the peasants undermined the power of the celery and made it impossible for the

monasteries to support a huge number of monks and nuns. I would describe this process as an

attempt to secularize the Tibetan society and to break the economic and political power of

religious institutions in every day life.

To understand the link between the destruction of the theocracy, Great Leap Forward

and the famine, one has to take the development outside Tibet into account. The “democratic

reforms” started in the Tibetan eras in Amdo and Kham already in the mid-fifties and caused

violent uprisings in 1956 in Sichuan and 1958 in Gansu and Qinghai. A significant number of

rebels and refugees fled to Lhasa after the crackdown of these uprisings by the PLA and

became the center of the Anti-Chinese opposition. Before the Great Leap Forward, the CCP

treated minority eras as special cases100 and was aware of the problems which a radical social

change would cause. However, the Great Leap Forward radicalized the policies toward the

minorities. With the establishment of the People’s Communes in 1958, “backward costumes”

became under attack. For example, Tibetan women in Gansu Province were said that the

weight of their elaborate headdress slowed down work in the fields.101 In 1958, the CCP

launched class struggle in the nomadic eras and mobilized the poor herdsmen against the herd

owners. Literally over night, peasants in the minority eras, who did not have experienced the

lower stages of collectivization, were organized in People’s Communes in a “single strike”.102

New multi-ethnical communes broke down the borders of the villages and increased the

pressure for assimilation.

One characteristic of Tibetan Buddhism is the extra ordinary high percentage of

monks and nuns of the population compared to other Buddhist countries such as Thailand,

Burma or Laos. According to Chinese sources, 10 percent of the whole population in Tibet of 99 Dalai Lama, 1962, 223100 Dreyer, June T.: China's forty millions: Minority nationalities and national integration in the People's Republic of China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University. Press, 1976), 158101 Dreyer, 1976, 161102 For example, an article in Minzu tuanjie about the Tibetan eras in Gansu was title “Communalization in a Single Strike”, in: Union Research Institute (ed.): Tibet 1950-1967 (Hong Kong: Union Research Institute, 1968), 330-333.

28

the early fifties served as monks and 50 percent of the population in the cities.103 Two

ordinaries families had to support one monk on the average.104 Chinese authors like to

emphasis that the high percentage of the male population in the monasteries was one reason

for the tradition of polygamist marriages and a high number of unmarried women with

illegitimate children.105 Without the exploiting of the peasant, the monasteries had no budget

and could not feed the monks and nuns. For example, in 1959 the three biggest monasteries in

Lhasa owned 147,000 mu of land, 111,000 cattle and 40.000 serfs were subordinated to their

authorities.106 In 1958, 2771 monasteries hosted 114,103 lamas. The “democratic reforms”

caused a large decline of the monk population and the numbers of monasteries. In 1960, 370

monasteries included a lama population of 18.104.107 Many monks and nuns were sent to the

countryside or had to perform forced labor.

The CCP considered the wiliness of monks and nuns to work and to produce the food

with the own hands as part of their transformation from a “parasite” way of living to a

socialist one.108 In order to draw a class line between the “feudalist” higher clergy and poor

lower clergy, the poor monks and nuns were encouraged to “speaking out bitterness”. The

food rations and the standards of living of the ordinary monks and nuns were indeed very low.

The US-Journalist and sympathizer of the CCP, Anna Louise Strong, traveled to Tibet after

the crackdown of the uprising and attended some “speaking bitterness” meetings and struggle

sessions. Her reportage is very close to the official line of the CCP during that time. The

whole tour of the journalist was organized be the party. Like the peasants, the ordinary

monks and servants in the monasteries learned to speak out the bitterness regarding hunger

before liberation. A servant told her: “For food he (the master) gave me the spoiled-over

tsamba, and of this two small bowls a day. My hunger was never stilled. When anything went

wrong I was beaten for it.” 109 Strong wrote that lower lamas told her that the best grain went

to the upper lamas while they had to eat poor grain mixed with chaff and gravel. Furthermore,

the obligatory “four bowls of buttered tea” which were served daily were water rather than

real tea. After a committee confisticated the food storage of the monasteries, all monks were

probably feed, so Strong. Just like in the context of the land reform, the party used the

103 Ma, Rong, 1996, 176104 Ma, Rong 1996, 177105 For example see Sun Haiyang, 1999, 94 and Yan, Hao: “Tibetan population in China: Myths and facts re-examined”, in: Asian Ethnicity (2000), Vol.1, No.1, 17106 Ma, Rong, 1996, 174107 Ma, Rong 1996, 184/ According to the petition of the Panchen Lama, 110,000 monks and nuns lived in 2,500 monasteries before the “democratic reform”. This number was reduced to 70 monasteries with a population of around 7,000 people, which would be a reduction by 93 percent (Panchen Lama, 1997, 52).108 “Lamas must take the socialist road” in: Union Research Institute, 1968, 232-234109 Strong, Anna Louise: When the serfs stood up in Tibet (Beijing: New World Press, 1965), 214

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symbolic of food to draw the class line in the monasteries. The CCP could archive several

goals at the same time with the means of the “democratic reforms”: The reduction of the

burden of the peasant and the “unproductive eaters” in the monasteries. Because the religious,

economic and political power of the clergy was linked, it could be destroyed in one single

strike.

In Chinese books on Modern Tibet the argument that “unproductive” monks and nuns

live on cost of the peasants is sometimes combined with assumption that the Tibetan

government was also subsidize by the central government in Beijing. From 1952 to 1959 the

subsidies from Beijing covered 89 percent of the income of the Tibetan government and in the

early nineties even more.110 The Chinese authors also point that the government under the

leadership of the Dalai Lama spend more than half of its budget on religious affairs. The

critique of the “unproductive” way of living in the monasteries must been seen in this context.

Instead of feeding “unproductive” population, organizing wasteful religious festivals and

burning ton of Yak butter for religious purpose, the CCP is using the recourses for

modernization, education and social progress of Tibet. In this the core of a critique of the

traditional Tibetan society in which food plays an important role as a metaphor.

Did no famine occur in Tibet? Examining the story behind the Chinese statistics

The “grain gazette” keeps silence about the famine. If one look at the population

statistics, it is obviously that “something” must have happened in Tibet.

The development of the Tibetan population in China111

1953 1964Total 2.753.000 2.501.000ProvinceTibet 1.275.000 1.209.000Yunnan 67.000 65.000Sichuan 234.000 607.000Qinghai 494.000 423.000Gansu 205.000 193.000

110 Ma, Rong, 1996, 199111 Yang, Kuifu: Zhongguo shaoshu minzu renkou [The population of the minority nationalities in China], (Beijing: Zhongguo renkou chubanshe, 1995), 21

30

Between 1953 and 1964, the Tibetan population declined by 9.9 percent which means

a total loss of 270,000 people. Tibet itself lost about 66,000 people in total. The population of

China declined between 1959 and 1961 by 13,480,000 people112, but the statistics still show

an increase of the population between the first national population survey in 1953 and the

second in 1964 in contrast to Tibet. The Tibetans belong to the very few nationalities which

lost population in total during that period of time. The population of other larges minorities

such as the Mongols, Hui, Miao and Uigures increased.113 In contrast to other regions, birth

and death data of the Tibetan population for this period of time are not available. As a matter

of fact, in all provinces the Tibetan population declined, except for Sichuan, because the

province Xikang was abolished in 1956 and integrated into Sichuan province.

How do Chinese authors explain the population loss of the Tibetans? Liu Juan argues

that the “period of economic difficulties” (1959-1961) must have effected the Tibetan

population as well.114 However, she does not explain why Tibet lost population, despite the

fact that the Great Leap Forward was not implemented in this region. She considers the

numbers of 1964 as a proof that the Tibetan population grown faster outside Tibet, because

the “democratic reforms” were enforced earlier and the standards of living were higher there.

This implies that she links the decline of population in Tibet with the bad nutrition and health

condition under the rule of the Tibetan elite. The Chinese scholar Ma Rong questioned the

correctness of the numbers at all. In 1953, the Tibetan government was in charged for the

population survey and a hukou system did not exist. He considers the number of 1953 as

guess which might be too high. He doubts the number of 1964 as well, because the hukou

system was not fully implemented. 115 Furthermore, the migration of tens of thousand Tibetan

to Southeast Asia after the crack down of the uprising in 1959 contributed also to the decline

of the population. The Australian trained demographer Yan Hao estimated the missing

Tibetan population between 1953 and 1964 on 152,000 which also includes around 90,000

people who fled with the Dalai Lam to India or migrated elsewhere. As a result, only the

missing of 60,000 people had to be explained in relation to the famine, political repression

112 Yang, Kuifu, 1995, 21113 Shen, Lin: Sanza ju shaoshu minzu tongjin yu fenxi, (Beijing: Minzu chubanshe, 2003), 28114 Yang, Kuifu, 1995,, 21115 Ma, Rong, 1996, 35

31

and the uprising.116 Yan estimated the excess death of the Tibetan population during the entire

famine period on less than 30,000.

It seems that Yan Hao is doing accurate academic demographic experiments with

official statistics. Despite the fact that the article was published in a Western journal, his

arguments in order to downplay death by starvation show a lack of understanding of the

historical circumstances of the Great Leap Forward. He argues that more than half of the

Tibetan population is made up of self-sufficient nomads to these days. Their livelihood would

seldom depend on external food supply. He ignores the fact that during the Great Leap the

nomads in Amdo and Kham were organized in People’s Communes and were forced to

“combine agriculture with animal husbandry” (nongshou jiehe). Some of them were forced to

settle down. Official documents of the Central government from 1962 described the disastrous

results of this policy and criticized this practice. The loss of the Tibetan population in Gansu

and Qinghai province show that the nomadic population was not immune of the famine.

Furthermore, Yan questions claim of Warren Smith that large amounts of agricultural and

pastoral products were trucked out of Tibet. Yan argues that the government exempted

Tibetan peasants in the TRA from all agriculture taxes at that time. By contrast to Yan, the

official “grain gazette” says after the “patriotic grain tax” was introduced in 1959.

Yan goes on: “What was the point of loading barley on small trucks and sending them

along the zigzag road 3,000 meters above sea level to feed numerous and rice-easting

Sichuanese a thousand miles away, especially since the Soviet Union had cut off oil supplies,

so that fuel was seriously short in China at the times.”117 The Sino-Soviet split took place in

spring 1960. Against the background that most Soviet experts were employed in the industry,

this event was hardly responsible for the famine in the countryside. As matter of fact, the

Soviet did not cut off the oil supply or launch an economic embargo against the PRC at that

time. It might be true that no food was trucked out of Tibet, but Yan’s explanation deserves a

deeper examination. A Tibetan refuge in his statement quoted a very similar argument of a

Chinese official in the early sixties: “Recently, the reactionaries have been circulation

malicious rumors to the effect that we transport barley to China. The Chinese do not eat

tsampa, so why do we need barley? All the truckloads of barley that is being transported are

taken to feed the nomads of the northern regions.”118 Why would starving peasants in Sichuan

116 Yan Hao, 2000, 24 According to statement of Tibetan exile government of 1976, 5,000 to 10,000 Tibetan died in the uprising. A Chinese book which was later banned says that 93,000 Tibetans in the rebel forces were killed, wounded or imprisoned in Central Tibet between 1959 and 1961 (Blondeau, Anne-Marie (Ed.): Authenticating Tibet: Answers to China's 100 questions (Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 2008), 105 117 Yan Hao, 2000, 21118 The Information Office of H.H. the Dalai Lama, 1976, 89

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rather die than eat barley? Are the Han “rice eaters” and the Tibetan “barley” eaters so

different in terms of culture that Tibetan products could not be used to feed Han Chinese? A

chooser reading of Yan’s article shows that there is a relativistic story behind his demographic

arguments.

My article shows that it is worse to treat the statists which were published in the PRC

as part of the official narrative. The suffering of the Tibetans is excluded, because the

tabooing of the famine as an event of Tibetan history and the lack of statistics make it difficult

to write about starvation in the Tibetan eras at all. The Chinese sources do not claim that no

famine did occur in the Tibetan eras, but the extent of it can only be guessed. By contrast, the

data from other provinces and various books and memoirs on the Great Leap Forward made it

possible to reconstruct the event in inner China in more detail.

Epilog

To sum up, hunger is an important factor in the Tibet conflict. In the narratives of the

Chinese and the Tibetan exile, memories of starvation are used to create nationalists version

of history. While Tibetan exile narratives focus on famine as a result of the Chinese

“occupation”, the Chinese sources emphasis the suffer of the PLA soldiers to liberate Tibet

and the great effort of the Chinese government to nourish the army and the people in Tibet.

Tibetan authors are describing the transformation of the food habits in under the socialist

regime of accumulation in nationalist terms. The ‘Chinese” forced “Tibetans” to eat things

which humiliated them as human beings. Furthermore, the Tibetan exile government is using

the famine to map the nation and claim that Tibet should include Kham and Amdo.

More research has to be done. In his latest book, Melvyn Goldstein describes the

Nyema (Nimu) Incident of 1969 has a bloody peasants uprising in order to reduce the heavy

tax burden in the context of the factions struggles during the Cultural Revolution. In Nimu

county, near Lasha the Maoist Gyenlo faction attack the grain collection and promised the

peasants that the rations would be increase from 12 khe (168 kilograms) to18 khe.119 This

research shows one of bloodies events of the Cultural Revolution in Tibet in a new light.

119 33

Maps

The map of the Tibetan exile government

“TIBET here means the whole of Tibet known as Cholka-Sum (U-Tsang, Kham and Amdo).

It includes the present-day Chinese administrative areas of the so-called Tibet Autonomous

Region, Qinghai Province, two Tibetan Autonomous Prefectures and one Tibetan

Autonomous County in Sichuan Province, one Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture and one

Tibetan Autonomous County in Gansu Province and one Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in

Yunnan Province.”

http://www.tibet.net/en/index.php?id=13&rmenuid=8

The official Chinese map of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR)

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Remember the suffering, mapping the nation

The Ukrainian Soviet Republic during the famine of 1932/33

Before 1945, the West Ukraine (Galicia) was a part of Poland and Crimea was part of the

Russian Soviet Republic. Galicia became ethical “Ukrainian” as a result of the population

transfer between Poland and the Soviet Union. The Kuban region remains a part of Russia

until today. However, maps of the “genocide famine” work with the Ukrainian ethnographical

borders. In the two maps below, the mapping of starvation is used to define an ethnical

Ukraine and community beyond the borders of nation state.

“The genocide famine of the Ukraine 1932-33”

http://www.faminegenocide.com/resources/famine_map.html

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The „genocide famine“ and the Ukrainian ethnographical Borders

http://www.faminegenocide.com/kuryliw/map.jpg

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