Book Review: "Warriors of Tibet - The Story of Aten and the Khampas' Fight for the Freedom of Their Country," by Jamyang Norbu

It will soon be time to move beyond book reviews and begin putting what I've learned from these books into essays here in my blog. But for now, I've got one more review to write, and it's the tale of Aten, a Khampa of Eastern Tibet at the time of the Chinese invasion. As Aten could not write, he dictated the story to the nominal author, Jamyang Norbu. It's a short little volume, not any longer than one of the Goosebumps or Boxcar Children books I filled my time with in elementary school But oh, how much gut-wrenching, heart-piercing emotional turmoil can one pack into 152 pages?
In my two previous reviews I noted how the Dalai Lama and Heinrich Harrer tend to play softball when it comes to condemning China for their invasion. Let the record plainly show, however, Jamyang Norbu does not.

It's Less About the "Fight" Than the Reasons For It

The subtitle of the book is a bit misleading. The story of the author's actual fight against the Chinese does not even begin until near the end of the book, by which time the PLA is so firmly entrenched in Tibet that it is less a "fight for freedom" than a "flight to freedom" with constant Chinese pursuers as the Peasants Liquidation Army People's Liberation Army fought to prevent anyone with knowledge of their atrocities from escaping to the outside world.
Instead, the story comes in three main parts. Life in Eastern Tibet (now erroneously known as the "Chinese" Province of Qinghai) before the Chinese invasion forms one part. The slow, subtle, "frog soup" way by which the Party inched Tibet closer and closer to oblivion forms another. The reality of life under the barbarically murderous Chinese regime forms the final third of the book.

That was Then...

"I am an old man now." Thus the book begin, as the narrator nostalgically describes his youth in the land of his forefathers, the land of Kham.

...[T]the lives we led there, though simple and hard, were happy.
Then the Chinese came. (p. 9)

That contrast doesn't leave much ambiguity, does it? And it goes on from there to make plain that the story of China's barbaric invasion of Tibet was no "misunderstanding," no mere case of "conflicting interests" or "overzealous local officers."

Then the Chinese came. At first with soft words and bright silver and later with guns and death. Took away my fields, my animals, and my home. They looted, desecrated and burnt the temples and monasteries I worshipped in. Like vermin, they slew my friends, relatives, lamas [clergymen], and all the people dear to my heart. On a frozen wasteland, thinly covered with wind-swept snow, I left behind me the twisted, bullet-ridden carcasses of my family and my only little daughter. (p. 9)

As one whose children live in a country constantly subject to Chinese predations, where China makes illegal and laughable territorial claims not unlike the ones they made regarding Tibet, this had my attention from the beginning. And I have to say, the author holds much the same view of China that I do, and the book leaves no doubt if his reasons why.
The book gives a glimpse into the pre-invasion life of the Khampas of Eastern Tibet (a region now infuriatingly known as the “Chinese” Province of Qinghai). Having grown up in Kham, it goes without saying that the author portrays the Khampas in a more positive light than Harrer did in Seven Years in Tibet, wherein he asserted that the words “Khampa” and “bandit” seem to be synonymous. He speaks of his fondness for the Tibetan Epic of Gesar (p. 18 & 19), an epic which China now tries to claim as their own (Zheng, 86). He speaks of his family's place in Kham's long history of helping to defend Tibet against Chinese would-be conquerors.
On that score, if any should try to parrot the popular line that China was a peaceful place until the Communists came along (which I've already debunked at length), the author shreds that notion swiftly. China's lengthy heritage of both brutality and cowardice, through the Nationalist Era, down through the Qing and even all the way back to the much-vaunted Tang, gets attention.

Ever since my birth, Nyarong and the major portion of Eastern Tibet, or Kham, had been conquered and occupied by the Chinese Nationalist Army. Although they claimed to act under the directives of the Nationalist Government, they were more or less an independent army under the ruthless leadership of the war lord, Liu Wu Hen. Prior to the Nationalists, we had been under the occupation of Imperial Manchu troops for eight years. (p. 23)

This page goes on to describe the low quality of the Chinese troops, the corruption and pay-skimming by officers that led to this, and the heroic 1931 revolt against the Chinese occupiers led by the monks of Dhargay. He goes on to describe how it was Gonpo Namgyal, a Khampa from Nyarong, who commanded an army so powerful that he “made the Manchu Emperor of China quiver in his satin shoes” (p. 25), and how the impotent Chinese, unable to defeat Gonpo themselves, schemed to have Gonpo censured by the Dalai Lama (to whom Gonpo was fiercely loyal) through China's eternally preferred tactic: lies and accusations (p. 27 & 28). Finally, he acknowledges how the Qing took advantage of this division and conquered Tibet, in the year 1903, and even that was only the Eastern part of Tibet, and it only lasted for 30 years (p. 28).
You read that right. China's first-ever conquest of Tibet, was in 1903. So much for “ancient and inalienable part of China,” hm?
And then, to give an account of why Chinese rule was a fate that could not be accepted, the author goes on to describe an execution he witnessed as a child (p. 30 - 32), where the brigands China euphemistically refers to by the ill-deserved honorative of “soldiers” took three days to publicly torture and humiliate a Tibetan man before decapitating him. His crime? When his oxen crossed the path of a Chinese captain, the Chinese captain had the entire herd shot (condemning the herdsman to poverty and likely starvation without having committed any crime other than being in the way of a Chinese officer on his way to lunch), and the herdsman had the unmitigated audacity to... (gasp of all gasps) actually utter a protest!
The nerve of these Tibetan barbarians!
The author also describes a typical Tibetan contest of horseback marksmanship, much like the one Harrer described.

Then from the back of their racing steeds, the riders shoot at their targets with bows and rifles. They also shoot their rifles with one hand from under the running horse. (p. 42, emphasis mine)

There are more instances, but you get the idea. The first half of the book is about the pastoral simplicity and martial prowess of the Khampas (who remind me of some mix of the Ukrainian Cossacks and Star Trek's Klingons, with just a hint of the rural American “for God and Country” rifle-wielding ethos) wrapped around the eternal struggle against the seemingly unending predations of a nearby imperialist occupier calling themselves “Celestial Empire” and “Central Nation,” who send one army after another. Occasionally these armies win for a while, but the Tibetans always drive them back and reclaim their land.
And then, there is the ominous foreshadowing at the end of chapter 5.

The Tibetan inhabitants of this town had seen many armies of various Chinese regimes tramping through their streets. I was their on that early spring day in 1950 when the first Communist divisions marched through Kanze into Tibet. (p. 77)

...And This is Mao

When the Communist army invaded Eastern Tibet, most of it was already under the rather desultory occupation of the Nationalist Chinese...
...To us Tibetans it made no difference. Chinese armies under many regimes had come and gone through our land. All of them had been brutal and tyrannical, yet thankfully indifferent, inefficient and corrupt. (p. 79)

With this, the author begins the second act of this brief, three-act book. The description of the rag-tag PLA, with nothing impressive about them except their sheer numbers, meshes perfectly with every other account of the PLA, from Korean war records to Vietnamese civilian accounts of the 1979 Chinese invasion, to Mao's own rhetoric of “Human waves” made by simply having more soldiers than your enemy has bullets.
The author reinforces his earlier statement about how the Chinese came into Tibet (first with soft words and bright silver), through an account echoed by Laird (305 & 306) and Harrer (306).

They were the first Chinese soldiers I had ever seen who did not loot and bully the populace. Instead, the soldiers were courteous to the extreme, and even went out of their way to help the local people with their harvests and other chores. It was a pleasant novelty. (p. 79)

[The military governor] repeatedly stressed that the only thing the Communist government wanted was to better the conditions of the ordinary people and to remove the vices of the past. (p. 80)

We were to propagate the Chinese goal of converting Tibet into a “democratic” nation... They emphatically stated that the Chinese had only come to teach the Tibetans how to rule themselves. When this objective had been achieved, they would return to their own country. (p. 81)

Ooooh, Tibet. If only there'd been a few refugees among you from colonial Africa, or the Native American tribesmen, or the American colonies in the 1770's, when this was said. Then they'd have warned you what inevitably follows when an army enters your land with such words. If only someone from Troy had been there to warn you what was inside that horse.
And of course, should it be said that the Chinese colonizers “learned this trick from the West,” then this doesn't fly because Warren Smith (in a book I'll review later) cites numerous Han Dynasty Chinese sources showing that the Chinese have always favored this tactic for “civilizing (read 'Sinicizing')” the non Chinese states on their border (Smith, p. 26 - 33).
Of course, it didn't take long for the Tibetans to find this out for themselves, as it is the very next page where the PLA orders Tibetan villagers to begin building the airstrip the PLA intended to use to launch bomber assaults on western Tibet. And when the Tibetans, for some inexplicable reason, were not willing to assist...

Undeterred by this protest, the Chinese simply threatened the poor villagers with armed reprisals if they did not comply.

Behold, the invasion which Chinese sources are require by law to refer to as “the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet.” And then of course, there is this short passage which the Chinese today deny.

”Tibet must be ruled by Tibetans,” he would say. “We Chinese are only here as guides to help you. In a year or two we will leave, and you will have to manage on your own. Even if you ask us to stay then, we will not do so.”
It is a humiliating admission to make, but we really believed him. (p. 82)

From here, the book swoops into an in-depth case-study on Chinese “thinking,” if that's really the term you want to use for the process that takes place between a PRC citizen's ears. From the condescending “we're here to help you grow from your barbaric selves and be more like us, which we know is what you want” mentality with which the self-anointed “Central Nation” views all other nations...

”We understand it is very hard for you to see our point of view. You have not developed a political consciousness,” Trou the Commissar would say earnestly. “You will learn these things in the future. You must accept the advice we are giving you as a genuine lesson in political thinking, and begin to act accordingly.” p. 82 & 83)

”We have great hope in you and therefore have taken you into our confidence. Hence you must do your best and prove yourself worthy of the trust we have placed in you. Only then can you ever call yourself a true Communist.” (p. 85)

...to the casually Macchiavellian way they slaughter the leaders of states they invade...

”[Y]ou have not yet fulfilled the most important part of your mission. You must try to locate those who are intimately associated with the people, who possess the power to alter public opinion and who have the trust of the people. It is also important to know how much gold, silver and cash each family has... It is of paramount importance to recognize the people who are acknowledged by the masses as reliable men and leaders... The first and quintessential step [in establishing Communism and Chinese hegemony] is to sever the bond between the masses and their traditional leaders, or the people they normally look to for guidance.” (p. 85)

...to the way NOTHING China does for “goodwill” is ever free of ulterior motive.

In 1955 we were sent on a publicity mission... to distribute free food and clothing to the villagers in an attempt to win them over to Communism... But there was a catch. As each family received its share of food and clothing, the head of household had to declare the amount of property and wealth that he possessed... In this manner the Chinese managed to get an accurate and complete list of all the prominent people in the district and the amount of wealth in every household. (p. 86)

The rest of this chapter is fairly familiar. Political indoctrination lectures, Maoist “self-criticism” sessions designed to guarantee an atmosphere of perpetual fear and mistrust (as well as a readily available excuse for the arrest of anyone deemed inconvenient), re-education camps, summary executions, it's basically the way every survivor's account of China in that era (or North Korea in ANY era) reads.
In the midst of it all though, there was one chapter that filled me with laughter. Not because it was humorous in itself or because I found it in any way difficult to believe, but because of the sheer number of times I found myself saying “yep! I remember the way they do that!” That is Chapter 7, entitled “Learn from the Wisdom of Chairman Mao.” In this chapter, the narrator (who has been appointed by the Party as a local collaborator patsy leader due to his family's status before the invasion; ironic, from a self-styled Marxist revolutionary army, isn't it?) is selected for the “honor” of being carted off to Chengdu to attend a Communist indoctrination program for ethnic minorities. The author makes it plain that the Chinese seemed to expect him to be flattered by this opportunity to eradicate his entire identity and remake himself in the image of the Chinese.

You do not realize what a marvellous opportunity this is,” argued Trou impatiently. “You will have the chance to study Marxism properly and also brush up on your Chinese. This could mean a lot you know. Don't you want to be a member of the Party?”
I wanted to tell him what he could do with his scholarship and his party, but instead I replied, “It is a great honor...” (p. 89)

And once the author gets to that school, that's where the book takes a Harry Turtledove turn into the alternate universe mythology China peddles as history, all sprinkled with a healthy dose of Chinese ethnonarcissism of course.

During World War II, we were told, China, helped by Russia, fought against the Axis Powers. The victory of the “workers and peasants army” in their great war against the Japanese was solely due to the brilliant leadership of Mao [Zedong]. It was also revealed to us that had it not been for Communist China the entire world would have been subjugated by the Axis Powers...
...The rest of the world had been liberated by Russia and China, and had welcomed Communism with open arms. Then the instructor pointedly stated that it was only stupid and backward people like the Tibetans, the Lolos and the Turks of Sinkiang [Xinjiang] who did not welcome Communism with open arms and flowers. (p. 92 & 93)

”As the Chinese are superior in the brotherhood of nationalities. Our superiority is not just dogma we are imposing on you, it is a historical fact. The Chinese are the most culturally advanced pioneers of civilization.” (p. 96)

And when anyone notices that there may be something wrong with any of this, such as the issues a Tibetan raised with the hypocritical Han rhetoric of “racial equality under the Great Han (p. 96) or when the author asks how China can be both “democratic” and “centralized,” (p. 94) the all-purpose Chinese answer, which no Chinaman will dare to question, is always there.

Our instructor said there was no difference, and he told us that even Chairman Mao had said so. (p. 94)

Nge Tu Ring explained that the policy of nationalities had been approved by Mao [Zedong] and the Great National Assembly of China, and hence should be believed implicitly - without silly questions being asked by impertinent and foolish people. (p. 97)

Herein you have the crux of the Chinese mindset. There exists, in their minds, no definition of “empirical truth” other than “because China's leaders said so.” Even if the book held no other value (which is not the case), then it would be worth reading simply for the number of times it shows that this is, in fact, how the Chinese think. And of course, the author does not fail to notice one of the same things anyone who has ever debated a wumao online can attest to.

So when we heard this version [of history], most of us howled with laughter. Our instructor was genuinely surprised at our reaction. I never really understood whether he believed implicitly in the rubbish that he taught us, or whether he was surprised that we barbarians were not so gullible after all. Most Chinese students never laughed or sniggered at our “history” lessons as we Tibetans and Lolos did. Maybe they believed... maybe they just wanted to believe. (p. 94)

Herein lies the crux of the problem when discussing ANYTHING with a PRC citizen. They've been fed their government's bizarre version of history from the cradle to the grave and they have been taught it is a sign of insanity and barbarism to question it. You cannot, absolutely CANNOT, get through a level of conditioning so thick that a person has been immersed in it, saturated with it, every moment of their life. Trying to do so is like a case-study in Plato's Allegory of the Cave: they've lived all their life seeing only shadows, and when you try to tell them about anything more real, they say you're insane.
...But again, I digress. Anyway...

The book holds a few more lessons in the inhuman brutality that is the defining trait of Chinese... eh, let's say “civilization” for lack of a better word.

On his return from the pass, [Colonel Len] was describing the trip when he made a comment that revealed the extent of Chinese intentions.
”...and of course, when we got there, there was nobody, and a good thing for them too … otherwise we would have wiped out every single one of them.”
We were shocked upon hearing this and Lama Pema Tenzin asked him whether it was Communist policy to execute innocent people, even women and children.
”No of course not,” the Colonel replied. “But these people are rebels. And as far as rebels are concerned, our instructions are very clear. We are to exterminate them all, even the women and children. I mean, who will feed the women and children anyway? It is better that they die. Little rebel children will grow up and make trouble in the future. If you squash the nits, there will be no more lice. These were the orders given to me by the General.” (p. 112, emphasis mine)

What makes this even more chilling is the way it is casually delivered to a group of Tibetans, over dinner, by a Chinese officer who calls the author and his fellows, “friends.” I want to reiterate. THIS is why this book is a must-read. Nowhere else, in anything I have ever read during my seven years among the Chinese, is China's mindset made more perfectly manifest than it is in this brief little book. When China speaks of “win-win cooperation,” when they speak of a “Human Community of Shared Destiny,” when they speak of “cooperation,” all of civilization should spit in their faces and then carve lines from this book into their flesh until they bleed to death.

I won't ruin the book for its readers. Though the author openly tells the reader on the first page how the story ends so there are no surprises, the final battle (which is more a PLA massacre than a battle, and most of those killed are women and children who were fleeing) managed to squeeze tears from me anyway, and on page 113 there is one speech directed at a Chinese General by a Tibetan man named Shanam Ma that actually made me throw my fist in the air while reading and audibly shout out “YES!” (which got something of a curious reaction as I was sitting in the waiting room at a clinic waiting on a test for Chinavirus-19 at the time). Let it simply suffice to say I finished the book in a day and a half, and the only time I put it down was to eat, sleep, and work.

So Who Should Read It?

This book should be on the required reading list at some level of high school in the entire English-speaking world, as well as every country that shares a border with China. Further, a copy should be issued to every member of the armed forces of any country bordering China, to every national-level elected or civil official in every ASEAN country, and regular discussion sessions of it should be part of the duties of all of the above. If I succeed in my goal of opening a private school in the Philippines, this book will be required reading for every senior in their last semester before graduating.
Why?
Simple.
Because what the Chinese did to Tibet in this book, is their goal for every country they come into contact with. Every nation China approaches with soft words, needs to see the sword concealed behind their serpentine smiles. China's racist view of Filipinos is identical to their racist view of Tibetans, and they are in the process of annexing the Philippines piece-by-piece, just as they did with Tibet. And yes, they have proven they are as bloody now as they were then.
And when the world finally gets tired of China and crushes them, this book needs to be read, in its entirety, to the broken, humiliated, defeated Shi-Na Minzoku once a week, and governors should be placed over them to make sure to inflict upon them every cruelty described in this book.
But that is for later. For now, suffice it to say the book stands as a stark warning to any who would be foolish enough to trust the Chinese, and it is alarming that so few people have read it.

Works Cited

Harrer, Heinrich. Seven Years in Tibet. New York, 1997. Putnam.
ISBN 978-08747-788-85

Laird, Thomas. The Story of Tibet – Conversations With the Dalai Lama. New York, 2006. Grove Press.
ISBN 978-0-8021-4327-3

Smith, Warren W. Jr. Tibetan Nation. Boulder, 1996. Westeview Press.
ISBN 978-8129114792

Zheng Qian. Trans. Hou Xiaocui, Rong Xueqin & Huang Ying. China's Ethnic Groups and Religions. Beijing, 2010. China Intercontinental Press.
ISBN 978-7-5085-1685-1