The Invasion of Tibet by China (1948)

By Tenzin Gyatso (HH Dalai Lama XIV)

In 1948, while I was still a student, the government heard there were Chinese Communist spies in the country. They had come to find out how strong our army was, and whether we were receiving military aid from any foreign power.

They cannot have found it very hard to discover the facts they wanted. Far from receiving military aid, we had only six Europeans in Tibet, so far as I am aware. Three of them, one missionary and two radio operators, were British. The other three were two Austrians and one White Russian, all of whom had been refugees from British internment camps in India during the war. None of them had anything to do with military matters.

As for the army, its strength was 8,500 officers and men.

There were more than enough rifles for them, but only about fifty pieces of artillery of various kinds—250 mortars and about 200 machine guns. The purpose of the army, as I have said, was to stop unauthorized travelers and act as a police force. It was quite inadequate to fight a war.

Soon after this first sign of impending trouble, more serious news was heard from the eastern parts of Tibet. The governor of eastern Tibet, whose name was Lhalu, was stationed in the town of Chamdo. close to the frontier, and he had one of the British radio operators with him, the other being in Lhasa.

Soon coded signals began to come in from the governor reporting that the Chinese were moving up strong forces and massing them along our eastern border. It was obvious that they intended either to attack or intimidate us.

As soon as this alarming information reached the Cabinet, they convened a meeting of the National Assembly. Evidently, Tibet was facing a far more serious threat from the east than it had ever faced in all the centuries before. Communism had conquered China, and given the country a military strength it had not had for many generations. So the threat to us was not only more powerful, it was also different in its very nature.

In past centuries, there had always been some religious sympathy between our countries, but now we were threatened not only with military domination, but also with the domination of an alien materialistic creed which, so far as any of us understood it in Tibet, seemed totally abhorrent.

The Assembly agreed unanimously that Tibet had neither the material resources nor the arms or men to defend its integrity against a serious attack, and so they decided to make an urgent appeal to other countries, in the hope of persuading the Chinese to halt before it was too late. Four delegations were appointed to visit Britain, the United States of America, India, and Nepal to ask for help. Before the delegations left Lhasa, telegrams were sent to these four governments, to tell them of the apparent threat to our independence, and of our government’s wish to send the delegations.

The replies to these telegrams were terribly disheartening.

The British government expressed their deepest sympathy for the people of Tibet, and regretted that owing to Tibet’s geographical position, since India had been granted independence, they could not offer help. The government of the United States also replied in the same sense and declined to receive our delegation. The Indian government also made it clear that they would not give us military help, and advised us not to offer any armed resistance, but to open negotiations for a peaceful settlement on the basis of the Simla agreement of 1914. So we learned that in military matters we were alone.

It happened that Lhalu’s term as governor of eastern Tibet was over, and at this crucial moment he had to be replaced by another official, Ngabo Ngawang Jigme. Ngabo left Lhasa for the eastern province, and as the situation was so delicate the Cabinet told Lhalu to stay at his post and help his successor, sharing the responsibility with him. But Ngabo soon said he was ready to take the full responsibility, and so Lhalu was recalled. Very soon afterwards, without any formal warning, the armies of Communist China invaded Tibet.

For a short time, and in a few places, the Tibetan army fought them back with some success, aided by volunteers from the local race of Khampas. But our army was hopelessly outnumbered and outmatched. The change of governor had confused the administration, and Ngabo began to move his headquarters back from Chamdo toward the west. When the Tibetan troops, retreating from the frontier, arrived at Chamdo, they found he had already abandoned the place, and so they had to bum the armory and ammunition store and join him in further retreat.

But retreat was of no avail. Ngabo found his line of communication cut, and himself outflanked by more mobile Chinese forces, and he and many Tibetan troops were forced to surrender.

The Chamdo radio transmitter and its British operator were also captured, and so for a time no news of what was happening reached the government. And then two officials arrived in Lhasa, sent by Ngabo with the Chinese commander’s permission, to tell the Cabinet that he was a prisoner, to ask for authority to negotiate terms of peace, and also to give the Cabinet an assurance from the Chinese commander that China would not extend her rule over more Tibetan territory.

While these disasters were taking place in the distant eastern marches of Tibet, the government in Lhasa was consulting the oracles and the high lamas, and guided by their advice, the Cabinet came to see me with the solemn request that I should take over the responsibility of government.

This filled me with anxiety. I was only sixteen. I was far from having finished my religious education. I knew nothing about the world and had no experience of politics, and yet I was old enough to know how ignorant I was and how much I had still to learn. I protested at first that I was too young, for eighteen was the accepted age for a Dalai Lama to take over active control from his Regent. Yet I understood very well why the oracles and lamas had caused the request to be made. The long years of Regency after the death of each Dalai Lama were an inevitable weakness in our system of government. During my own minority, there had been dissensions between separate factions in our government, and the administration of the country had deteriorated. We had reached a state in which most people were anxious to avoid responsibility, rather than accept it. Yet now, under the threat of invasion, we were more in need of unity than ever before, and I, as Dalai Lama, was the only person whom everybody in the country would unanimously follow.

I hesitated—but then the National Assembly met, and added its plea to the Cabinet’s, and I saw that at such a serious moment in our history, I could not refuse my responsibilities.

I had to shoulder them, put my boyhood behind me, and immediately prepare myself to lead my country, as well as I was able, against the vast power of Communist China.

So I accepted, with trepidation, and full powers were conferred on me with traditional celebration. In my name a general amnesty was proclaimed, and every convict in prison in Tibet was given freedom.

At just about that time, my eldest brother arrived in Lhasa from the east. He had returned, as Abbot, to the monastery of Kumbum, near the village where we had been born. In this Chinese-controlled territory, while he was Abbot, he had been witness to the downfall of the governor under Chiang Kai-shek’s regime, and the advance of the armies of the new Communist government. He had seen a year of confusion, oppression and tenor, in which the Chinese Communists had claimed that they had come to protect the people, and had promised them freedom to pursue their own religion, and yet at the same time had begun a systematic undermining and destruction of religious life. He himself had been kept under a strict guard and subjected to an almost continuous course of Communist argument, until finally, the Chinese had explained to him that they intended to reclaim the whole of Tibet, which they still insisted was a part of China, and to convert it all to communism. Then they tried to persuade him to go to Lhasa as their emissary, and to persuade me and my government to agree to their domination. They promised to make him governor of Tibet if he succeeded. Of course, he refused to do anything of the kind. But at last he saw that his life would he in danger if he continued to refuse, and he also saw that he had a duty to warn me of the Chinese plans. So he pretended to agree, and thus managed to escape from Chinese supervision and reached Lhasa with a detailed warning of the dangers we were facing.

By then, the Cabinet had taken steps to put our case before the United Nations. While we were waiting for it to be considered, it seemed to me that the first of my duties must be to follow the advice of the Indian government, and try to reach an agreement with the Chinese before more harm was done. So I wrote to the Chinese government, through the commander of the army which was occupying Chamdo.

I said that during my minority relations had been strained between our countries, but that now I had taken over full responsibility and sincerely wanted to restore the friendship which had existed in the past. I pleaded with them to return the Tibetans who had been captured by their array, and to withdraw from the part of Tibet which they had occupied by force.

At about the same time, my Cabinet convened the National Assembly again, in order to test public opinion about the threat which confronted us. One result of this Assembly was very unwelcome in my eyes. The members pointed out that the Chinese armies might advance to Lhasa and capture it at any moment, and they decided that I should be requested to leave the city and go to the town of Yatung, near the border of India, so that I would be out of any personal danger. I did not want to go at all. I wanted to stay where I was and do what I could to help my people. But the Cabinet also urged me to go, and in the end I had to give in. This conflict was often to occur again, as I shall tell. As a young and able-bodied man, my instinct was to share whatever risks my people were undergoing, but to Tibetans, the person of the Dalai Lama is supremely precious, and whenever the conflict arose I had to allow my people to take far more care of me than I would have thought of taking of myself.

So I prepared to go. Before I left, I appointed two Prime Ministers—a high monk official called Losang Tashi, and a veteran and experienced lay administrator called Lukhangwa.

I gave them full authority and made them jointly responsible, and told them they need only refer to me in matters of the very highest importance.

It was in the minds of my ministers then that if the worst came to the worst I might have to go to India for refuge, as my predecessor had done when the Chinese invaded us forty years before. I was advised to send a small part of my treasure there. So some gold dust and bars of silver were taken from Lhasa and put in a vault across the border in Sikkim, and there they lay for the next nine years. In the end, we needed them badly.

The next grievous blow to us was the news that the General Assembly of the United Nations had decided not to consider the question of Tibet. This filled us with consternation.

We had put our faith in the United Nations as a source of justice, and we were astonished to hear that it was on British initiative that the question had been shelved. We had had very friendly relations with the British for a long time, and had benefited greatly from the wisdom and experience of many distinguished servants of the British Crown; and it was Britain who had implied her recognition of our independence by concluding treaties with us as a sovereign power. Yet now, the British representative said the legal position of Tibet was not very clear, and he seemed to suggest that even now, after thirty-eight years without any Chinese in our country, we might still be legally subject to China’s suzerainty. The attitude of the Indian representative was equally disappointing.

He said he was certain a peaceful settlement could be made and Tibet’s autonomy could be safeguarded, and that the best way to ensure this was to abandon the idea of discussing the matter in the General Assembly.

This was a worse disappointment than the earlier news that nobody would offer us any military help. Now our friends would not even help us to present our plea for justice. We felt abandoned to the hordes of the Chinese army.

Of course, looking back at our history now, it is easy to see how our own policies had helped to put us in this desperate position. When we won our complete independence, in 1912, we were quite content to retire into isolation. It never occurred to us that our independence, so obvious a fact to us, needed any legal proof to the outside world. If only we had applied to join the League of Nations or the United Nations, or even appointed ambassadors to a few of the leading powers, before our crisis came, I am sure these signs of sovereignty would have been accepted without any question, and the plain justice of our cause would not have been clouded, as it was, by subtle legal discussions based on ancient treaties which had been made under quite different circumstances. 

Now we had to learn the bitter lesson that the world has grown too small for any people to live in harmless isolation.

The only thing we could do was pursue our negotiations as best we could. We decided to give Ngabo the authority he had requested. One of the two officials he had sent to Lhasa took a message from myself and my Cabinet, in which we told Ngabo he should open negotiations on the firm condition that the Chinese armies would not advance any further into Tibet. We had understood that the negotiations would be held either in Lhasa or in Chamdo, where the Chinese armies were stationed, but the Chinese ambassador in India proposed that our delegation should go to Peking. I appointed four more officials as assistants to Ngabo, and they all arrived in Peking at the beginning of 1951.

It was not until they returned to Lhasa, long afterwards, that we heard exactly what had happened to them. According to the report which they submitted then, the Chinese foreign minister Chou En-lai had invited them all to a party when they arrived, and formally introduced them to the Chinese representatives. But as soon as the first meeting began, the chief Chinese representative produced a draft agreement containing ten articles ready-made. This was discussed for several days. Our delegation argued that Tibet was an independent state, and produced all the evidence to support their argument, but the Chinese would not accept it. Ultimately, the Chinese drafted a revised agreement, with seventeen articles.

This was presented as an ultimatum. Our delegates were not allowed to make any alterations or suggestions. They were insulted and abused and threatened with personal violence, and with further military action against the people of Tibet, and they were not allowed to refer to me or my government for further instructions.

This draft agreement was based on the assumption that Tibet was part of China. That was simply untrue, and it could not possibly have been accepted by our delegation without reference to me and my government, except under duress.

But Ngabo had been a prisoner of the Chinese for a long time, and the other delegates were also virtual prisoners. At last, isolated from any advice, they yielded to compulsion and signed the document. They still refused to affix the seals which were needed to validate it. But the Chinese forged duplicate Tibetan seals in Pelting, and forced our delegation to seal the document with them.

Neither I nor my government were told that an agreement had been signed. We first came to know of it from a broadcast which Ngabo made on Peking Radio. It was a terrible shock when we heard the terms of it. We were appalled at the mixture of Communist cliches, vainglorious assertions which were completely false, and bold statements which were only partly true. And the terms were far worse and more oppressive than anything we had imagined.

The preamble said that “over the last one hundred years or more,” imperialist forces had penetrated into China and Tibet and “ carried out all kinds of deceptions and provocations,” and that “under such conditions, the Tibetan nationality and people were plunged into the depths of enslavement and suffering.”

This was pure nonsense. It admitted that the Chinese government had ordered the “People’s Liberation Army” to march into Tibet. Among the reasons given were that the influence of aggressive imperialist forces in Tibet might be successfully eliminated, and that the Tibetan people might be freed and return to the “ big family” of the People’s Republic of China.

That was also the subject of Clause One of the agreement: “The Tibetan people shall unite and drive out imperialist aggressive forces from Tibet, The Tibetan people shall return to the big family of the Motherland~the People’s Republic of China.” Reading this, we reflected bitterly that there had been no foreign forces whatever in Tibet since we drove out the last of the Chinese forces in 1912. Clause Two provided that “the local government of Tibet shall actively assist the People’s Liberation Army to enter Tibet and consolidate the national defense.” This in itself went beyond the specific limits we had placed on Ngabo’s authority. Clause Eight provided for the absorption of the Tibetan army into the Chinese army. Clause Fourteen deprived Tibet of all authority in external affairs.

In between these clauses which no Tibetan would ever willingly accept were others in which the Chinese made many promises: not to alter the existing political system in Tibet; not to alter the status, functions, and powers of the Dalai Lama; to respect the religious beliefs, customs, and habits of the Tibetan people and protect the monasteries; to develop agriculture and improve the people’s standard of living; and not to compel the people to accept reforms. But these promises were small comfort beside the fact that we were expected to hand ourselves and our country over to China and cease to exist as a nation. Yet we were helpless. Without friends there was nothing we could do but acquiesce, submit to the Chinese dictates in spite of our strong opposition, and swallow our resentment. We could only hope that the Chinese would keep their side of this forced, one-sided bargain.

Soon after the agreement was signed, our delegation sent a telegram to tell me that the Chinese government had appointed a general called Chang Chin-wu as their representative in Lhasa. He was coming via India, instead of the long overland route through eastern Tibet. Yatung, where I was Staying, was just inside the Tibetan border on the main route from India to Lhasa, and so it was clear that I would have to meet him as soon as he set foot in our country.

I was not looking forward to it. I had never seen a Chinese general, and it was a rather forbidding prospect. Nobody could know how he would behave—whether he would be sympathetic, or arrive as a conqueror. Some of my officials, ever since the agreement had been signed, had thought I should go to India for safety before it was too late, and it had only been after some argument that everyone agreed I should wait until the general came, and see what his attitude was before we decided.

Some of my senior officials met him in Yatung. I was staying in a nearby monastery. There was a beautiful pavilion on the roof of the monastery, and we had arranged that I should meet him there. He insisted in Yatung that he and I should meet on equal terms, and we got over any difficulties of protocol by providing chairs of equal merit for everybody, instead of the cushions which were the custom in Tibet.

When the time came, I was peering out of a window to see what he looked like. I do not know exactly what I expected, but what I saw was three men in gray suits and peaked caps who looked extremely drab and insignificant among the splendid figures of my officials in their red and golden robes. Had I but known, the drabness was the state to which China was to reduce us all before the end, and the insignificance was certainly an illusion.

But when the procession had reached the monastery and climbed up to my pavilion, the general turned out to be friendly and informal. The other two gray-coated men were his aide and his interpreter. He gave me a letter from Mao Tse-tung, which more or less repeated the first clause of the agreement by welcoming us back to the great motherland, a phrase I had already come to detest. Then he said the same thing all over again through his interpreter. I gave him tea, and an observer who had not known what was in our hearts might have thought the whole meeting was perfectly cordial.

His arrival in Lhasa was not so successful. I sent instructions to the Cabinet that he would have to be properly received and treated as a guest of the government. So two members of the Cabinet went out beyond the Norbulingka to meet him with suitable ceremony, and on the following day the Prime Ministers and the Cabinet gave a dinner party in his honor.

But that did not satisfy him. He complained that he had not been given the reception due to the representative of a friendly power. So we were made to see that he was not quite as wholeheartedly friendly as he looked.

However, under these circumstances I was compelled to go back to the Norbulingka, and there I witnessed the next extensions of Chinese military rule.

Two months after the arrival of General Chang Chin-wu, three thousand officers and men of the Chinese army marched into Lhasa. Soon after that, another detachment of about the same size arrived there, under two more Generals, Tang Kohwa and Tang Kuan-sen. The people of Lhasa watched them come with the apparent indifference which I believe is usually shown at first by ordinary people in the face of such national humiliation. At first there was no contact between the Chinese commanders and our government except when the Chinese demanded supplies and accommodations. But these demands soon began to cause havoc in the city.

The Chinese requisitioned houses, and bought or rented others; and beyond the Norbulingka, in the pleasant land beside the river which had always been the favorite place for summer picnics, they took possession of an enormous area for a camp. They demanded a loan of 2,000 tons of barley. This huge amount could not be met from the state granaries at that time because of heavy expenditure, and the government had to borrow from monasteries and private owners. Other kinds of food were also demanded, and the humble resources of the city began to be strained, and prices began to rise. And then another general, and another eight to ten thousand men appeared.

They seized a further area for camps, and under the burden of their extra demands for food our simple economy broke down. They had brought nothing with them, and all expected to be fed from our meager sources of supply. 
The prices of food-grains suddenly soared up about ten times; of butter, nine times; and of goods in general, two or three times.
For the first time that could be remembered, the people of Lhasa were reduced to the edge of famine.

Their resentment grew against the Chinese army, and children began to go about shouting slogans and throwing stones at the Chinese soldiers—a sign that the adults were barely keeping their own bitterness in check. Complaints began to pour in to the offices of the Cabinet, but nothing could be done. The Chinese armies had come to stay, and they would not accept any suggestions, or help our government in any way at all. On the contrary, their demands went on increasing every day. Soon they demanded another 2,000 tons of barley, and it had to be found.

It was called a loan, and the Generals promised to repay it by investing its value in the development of industries in Tibet, but that promise was never fulfilled.

While conditions were going from bad to worse for the people of Lhasa, high Chinese officials were constantly arriving in the city, and a long series of meetings was convened by General Chang Chin-wu. Members of my Cabinet were requested to attend them, and it fell mostly to Lukhangwa, as my lay Prime Minister, to try to find a balance between the essential needs of the people and the requests of the invaders.

He had the courage to tell the Chinese plainly that Tibetans were a humble religious community, whose production had always been just sufficient for their own needs. There was very little surplus—perhaps enough to support the Chinese armies for another month or two, but no more—and a surplus could not be created suddenly. There was no possible reason, he pointed out, for keeping such enormous forces in Lhasa. If they were needed to defend the country, they should be sent to the frontiers, and only officials, with a reasonable escort, should remain in the city.

The Chinese answers were very polite at first. General Chang Chin-wu said that our government had signed the agreement that Chinese forces should be stationed in Tibet, and we were therefore obliged to provide them with accommodation and supplies. He said that they had only come to help Tibet to develop her resources and to protect her against imperialist domination, and that they would go back to China as soon as Tibet was able to administer her own affairs and protect her own frontiers. “When you can stand on your own feet,” he said, “we will not stay here even if you ask us to.”

Lukhangwa forebore to point out that the only people who had ever threatened our frontiers were the Chinese themselves, and that we had administered our own affairs for centuries.

But at another meeting he told the General that in spite of his assurance that the Chinese had come to help Tibet, they had so far done nothing at all to help. On the contrary, their presence was a serious hardship, and most of their actions were bound to add to the anger and resentment of the people. One action he mentioned, more important to us than it may appear, was the burning of the bones of dead animals within the Holy City of Lhasa: this was very offensive to the religious feelings of Tibetans, and had caused a great deal of hostile comment.

But rather than discuss the causes of the people's obvious hostility, Chang Chin-wu expected our government to put an end to it. Among other complaints, he said that people were going about in the streets of Lhasa singing songs in disparagement of the Chinese. He suggested that our government should issue a declaration calling for friendly relations with the Chinese, and he wrote a draft and handed it to Lukhangwa.

When Lukhangwa read it, he found it was an order putting a ban on singing in the streets; and of course, rather than issue anything so ludicrous, he rewrote it in a somewhat more dignified form. I do not think the Chinese ever forgave him for that.

Throughout the series of meetings, Chinese complaints grew more forceful Although they were trying to make it clear to the people, they said, that they had only come to Tibet to help the Tibetans, the behavior of the people was deteriorating every day. They said that public meetings were being held to criticize the Chinese authorities, which no doubt was true, and they requested the Cabinet to put a ban on meetings. That was done, but the people of Lhasa immediately began to put up posters and circulate pamphlets in the city, saying that they were facing starvation and asking the Chinese to go back to China. And in spite of the ban, a large meeting was held at which a memorandum was written setting forth the people’s grievances, pointing out that conditions in Lhasa were very serious, and asking that the Chinese troops should be withdrawn and only a few officials be left in the city. One copy of this memorandum was sent to the Chinese generals, and one to the Cabinet. The Chinese said the document was due to the incitement of imperialists, and began to hint that there were certain people in Lhasa who were deliberately creating trouble. On one occasion, Chang Chin-wu came to the Cabinet office and angrily accused the two Prime Ministers of being the leaders of a conspiracy to violate the agreement which had been signed in Peking.

The pattern of these events will be distressingly familiar in any country which has been the victim of invasion. The invaders had arrived believing—with how much sincerity one cannot tell—that they had come as benefactors. They seemed to be surprised to find that the invaded people did not want their benefactions in the least. As popular resentment grew against them, they did not try to allay it by withdrawing, or even by making concessions to the people’s wishes. They tried to repress it by ever-increasing force, and rather than blame themselves, they searched for scapegoats. In Tibet, the first scapegoats were purely imaginary “imperialists,” and my Prime Minister, Lukhangwa. But this course of action can never lead to anything but disaster. Popular resentment can never be repressed for more than a short time by force, because forceful repression always makes it stronger. This lesson, which one would have thought so obvious, has yet to be learned by the Chinese.

All through this period of mounting tension, the Chinese insisted from time to time on by-passing my Cabinet and the usual agencies of the government and making direct approaches to me. At the beginning, my two Prime Ministers 94 my land and my people had always been present to advise me when I met the Chinese generals, but at one meeting Chang Chin-wu entirely lost his temper at something my monk Prime Minister Losang Tashi said. It was rather a shock to me at that age. I had never seen a grown man behave like that before. But young though I was, it was I who had to intervene to calm him down; and it was after that that they started demanding to see me alone.

Whenever they came to see me, they brought an escort of guards who were stationed outside my room during the interview. This display of bad manners, if it was nothing more, intensely offended the Tibetans who knew of it.

The final crisis between the Chinese and Lukhangwa arose over a matter which had nothing to do with the sufferings of Lhasa. An especially large meeting was called by Chang Chinwu.

My Prime Ministers and Cabinet were summoned, and all the highest Chinese officials, both civil and military, were present. The General announced that the time had come for Tibetan troops to be absorbed in the “ People’s Liberation Army” under the terms of the Seventeen-Point Agreement, and he proposed that as a first step a number of young Tibetan soldiers should be chosen for training at the Chinese army headquarters in Lhasa. Then, he said, they could go hack to their regiments and train the others.

At this, Lukhangwa spoke out more strongly than he ever had before. He said the suggestion was neither necessary nor acceptable. It was absurd to refer to the terms of the Seventeen-Point Agreement. Our people did not accept the agreement and the Chinese themselves had repeatedly broken the terms of it. Their army was still in occupation of eastern Tibet; the area had not been returned to the government of Tibet, as it should have been. The attack on Tibet was totally unjustifiable: the Chinese army had forcibly entered Tibetan territory while peaceful negotiations were actually going on.

As for absorbing Tibetan troops in the Chinese army, the agreement had said the Chinese government would not compel Tibetans to accept reforms. This was a reform which the people of Tibet would resent very strongly, and he as Prime Minister would not approve it.

The Chinese generals replied softly that the matter, after all, was not of very great importance, and they could not see why the Tibetan government should object to it. Then they slightly changed their ground. They proposed that the Tibetan flag should be hauled down on all Tibetan barracks, and the Chinese flag should be hoisted there instead. Lukhangwa said that if Chinese flags were hoisted on the barracks, the soldiers would certainly pull them down again, which would be embarrassing for the Chinese. In the course of this argument about the flags, Lukhangwa said outright that it was absurd for the Chinese, after violating the integrity of Tibet, to ask Tibetans to have friendly relations with them. “If you hit a man on the head and break his skull,” he said, “you can hardly expect him to be friendly.” This thoroughly angered the Chinese. They closed the meeting, and proposed to hold another one three days later.

When all the representatives met again, another general, Fan Ming, acted as the Chinese spokesman. He asked Lukhangwa whether he had not been mistaken in his statements at the earlier meeting, no doubt expecting an apology. But Lukhangwa, of course, stood by all that he had said. It was his duty, he added, to explain the situation frankly, because rumors had spread throughout Tibet of Chinese oppressions in the eastern provinces, and feelings were running high. If the Chinese proposals about the army were accepted, the reaction would certainly be violent, not only from the army but from the Tibetan people in general.

At this reply, General Fan Ming lost his temper, and accused Lukhangwa of having clandestine relations with foreign imperialist powers, and shouted that he would request me to dismiss Lukhangwa from his office. Lukhangwa told him that of course if I, the Dalai Lama, were satisfied that he had done any wrong, he would not only give up his office but also his life. Then General Chang Chin-wu intervened to say that Fan Ming was mistaken, and to ask our representatives not to take what he had said too seriously. The meeting broke up again without agreement.

Nevertheless, in spite of the soothing intervention of Chang Chin-wu, I received a written report soon after this meeting, in which the Chinese insisted that Lukhangwa did not want to improve relations between Tibet and China, and suggested that he should be removed from office. They made the same demand to the Cabinet, and the Cabinet also expressed the opinion to me that it would be better if both Prime Ministers were asked to resign. So the crisis was brought to a head, and I was faced with a very difficult decision. I greatly admired Lukhangwa’s courage in standing up to the Chinese, but now I had to decide whether to let him continue, or whether to bow yet again to a Chinese demand.

There were two considerations: Lukhangwa’s personal safety, and the future of our country as a whole. On the first, I had no doubt. Lukhangwa had already put his own life in danger. If I refused to relieve him of office, there was every chance that the Chinese would get rid of him in ways of their own.

On the more general question, my views had evolved throughout this long period of tension. I had still had no theoretical training in the intricacies of international politics.

I could only apply my religious training to these problems, aided I trust by common sense. But religious training, I believed and still believe, was a very reliable guide.

I reasoned that if we continued to oppose and anger the Chinese authorities, it could only lead us further along the vicious circle of repression and popular resentment. In the end, it was certain to lead to outbreaks of physical violence.

Yet violence was useless; we could not possibly get rid of the Chinese by any violent means. They would always win if we fought them, and our own unarmed and unorganized people would be the victims. Our only hope was to persuade the Chinese peaceably to fulfill the promises they had made in their agreement. Nonviolence was the only course which might win us back a degree of freedom in the end, perhaps after years of patience. That meant cooperation whenever it was possible, and passive resistance whenever it was not.

And violent opposition was not only unpractical, it was also unethical. Nonviolence was the only moral course. This was not only my own profound belief, it was also clearly in accordance with the teaching of Lord Buddha, and as the religious leader of Tibet I was bound to uphold it. We might be humiliated, and our most cherished inheritances might seem to be lost for a period, but if so, humility must be our portion, I was certain of that.

So I sadly accepted the Cabinet’s recommendation and asked the Prime Ministers to resign. They came to call on me, and I gave them scarves and gifts and my photograph. I felt that they understood my position very well. I did not appoint any successors. It was no use having Prime Ministers if they were merely to he scapegoats for the Chinese. It was better that I should accept the responsibilities myself, because my position was unassailable in the eyes of all Tibetans. Later, Lukhangwa went to India and became my Prime Minister in exile until his advancing age made him retire, and he is still my trusted advisor. But it grieves me to say that in 1959, after I left Tibet myself, Losang Tashi, the monk Prime Minister, was thrown into prison by the Chinese and has not been released.

When that incident came to an end, the attitude of the Chinese became more friendly and conciliatory. They suggested to the Cabinet that a delegation of Tibetan officials, monks, merchants, and other people should be sent to China to see for themselves, as they put it, that the people of China had absolute freedom to practice their religion. We accepted this suggestion, and chose members for a delegation.
They were taken on a conducted tour of China, and when they came back they submitted a report which everybody knew had been written under Chinese orders.

And then I myself was invited by the Chinese government to visit China. Although there had certainly been a slight improvement in relations between my government and the Chinese authorities in Tibet, I was still greatly disappointed at their complete disregard for the interests and welfare of our people. I thought I ought to meet the highest authorities in China, and try to persuade them to carry out the promises they had made in the agreement they had forced on us. So I decided to go.
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