A Tale of Torn Loyalties for Tibetan Officials

Chunphel’s rebellion came early in life, when his stomach overruled his scant faith in Buddhism. “Even though it was sacrilege, I used to steal offerings of fruit from the temples because I was hungry,” he recalls.

The eldest of 10 children in a poor family, Chunphel was a nangsen, or hereditary domestic servant, stoking fires and brewing yak butter tea on the estate of a Tibetan county official.

But when Beijing quashed a Tibetan rebellion in 1959 and the region’s top theocrat, the Dalai Lama, fled into exile, Chunphel joined a Communist Party-led work team that redistributed aristocrats’ land and livestock to poor peasants.

“I’d lived through a lot of hardship and poverty. I was enthusiastic about the work and was a natural ‘activist’ ” whom the Chinese groomed for Communist Party membership, he said. Chunphel, who, like many Tibetans, uses a single name, joined the party in 1960.

Today, Chunphel is vice chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Region, the No. 2 official in the local government.

Beijing has carefully cultivated Tibetan officials such as Chunphel, many of whom are also former serfs. More than half a century of Chinese rule in Tibet has produced a group of elite Tibetans who have cast their lot with China and against the Dalai Lama.

China claims that 75% of Tibetan officials are ethnic Tibetans and cites that as proof that the region enjoys autonomy under Chinese rule.

Last year, Chinese President Jiang Zemin proclaimed that Tibetan officials are “fully trusted by the [Communist] Party and people.”

But the Dalai Lama has said: “Naturally, 99% of [Tibetans]--be they young, old, cadres, officials--are deeply resentful of the Chinese occupation of Tibet.”

So where do Tibetan officials’ loyalties lie?

In the polarized debate between Beijing and Dharamsala, India, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile, it is easy to dismiss Tibetan officials as either Beijing’s powerless puppets or the Dalai Lama’s closet allies. But such viewpoints oversimplify the question of Tibetan officials’ loyalties, which are far more complex than either side wants to admit.

“Tibetans can never go back to their previous state of uniformity; they have already split into different, irreconcilable groups,” writes Wang Lixiong in his Hong Kong-published 1998 book, “Sky Burial,” the most critical assessment of China’s Tibet policy by a mainland Chinese author.

Wang argues that the walls between Tibetan officials and exiles, nationalists and Communists are for now insurmountable.

He adds that these divisions are symptomatic of deeper fissures in Tibetans, who are pulled apart by tradition and modernity, secularity and spirituality. “This spiritual schism is the Tibetans’ greatest tragedy,” he writes.

Without this disunity, it could be very difficult for Beijing to control Tibet, which used to be ethnically and religiously cohesive.

“We feel that Tibetan officials working for the Chinese establishment in Tibet are basically creatures of circumstance,” said Thubten Samphel, a spokesman for the Tibetan government in exile.

He paraphrased a high-ranking Chinese official who reportedly told his Tibetan colleagues, “Your stomach is with the Communist Party, but your heart lies with the Dalai Lama.”

Among Tibetan elites, the stomachs are increasingly winning out.

Getting ahead in Tibet these days requires being savvy in the lingo and culture of Chinese officialdom. It often requires an education in one of the many schools Beijing has established to train and inculcate Tibetan bureaucrats.

And it often entails joining the party, which, at least theoretically, requires one to be an atheist and take part in the chorus of official denunciations of the Dalai Lama.

To some Tibetan officials, falling in line with Beijing is less a matter of loyalty than of self-interest. In a strategic bid to bolster political stability and its own public image, Beijing has vastly increased its spending on development and infrastructure projects in Tibet.

For the Tibetan officials in charge of these projects, this creates opportunities for corruption. Last year, China’s railway minister pledged to prevent the embezzlement of funds from one of Beijing’s largest projects in the region: the $3-billion, 700-mile Qinghai-Tibet Railway.

But Beijing must keep the funds flowing and the Tibetan officials sated to avoid the social discontent that can spark calls for Tibetan independence. When pro-independence riots rocked Lhasa in 1989, central government funding for Tibet rose 20%, according to official statistics. In 1990, it rose 84%.

Beijing’s spending is evident all over Lhasa, which has ballooned to many times its historical size and begun to look like a typical Chinese city. But it is also evident that urbanites, officials and employees of state-owned companies--the people Beijing counts on to maintain stability in Tibet--are the main beneficiaries of the gleaming new hotels, museums and department stores.

While publicly professing trust in Tibetan officials, privately Beijing has been alarmed during the last decade about their sometimes-ambivalent political loyalties.

At a key meeting of Tibetan and central government officials in 1994, Tibet’s Communist Party Vice Chief Ragdi warned that, because of the Dalai Lama’s persistent influence, “some of our party members believe in religion and have participated in religious activities. Some cadres and leaders have prayer rooms and altars in their houses and hang up the Dalai’s pictures.”

Even more disturbing, he said, “some cadres act as secret enemy agents and collect confidential information for the Dalai clique.”

One such figure was Chadrel Rinpoche, a national parliamentarian and part of a group of Tibetan clerics selected to search for the reincarnation of the 10th Panchen Lama, the second-highest monk in Tibetan Buddhism. In 1995, he leaked the results of the search to the Dalai Lama. Two years later, Beijing jailed Chadrel for six years, and Tibet now has two Panchens, one recognized by the Dalai Lama and the other by Beijing.

The 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union also prompted some Tibetan officials to question the region’s political future. Some marry their children into the old Tibetan aristocracy or, as Ragdi noted, send “their children abroad to be educated in schools run by the Dalai clique to leave leeway for themselves” in the event of a regime change in Beijing.

Critics contend that the real power in Tibet lies with the Han, or ethnic Chinese, officials. They note that the proportion of Tibetan officials is lower in the top levels of government and that Tibetan officials are often overshadowed by their Han deputies or Communist Party secretaries.

According to official statistics, Tibetans make up more than 90% of the region’s legislature, courts and police force, but the Han dominate many leadership positions and the military in Tibet.

Still, the thousands of Tibetan officials who constitute the region’s elite are an interest group that neither Beijing nor Dharamsala can leave out of its calculations.

The Dalai Lama has proposed that in a future, independent Tibet, “the existing administration in Tibet, with all its Tibetan functionaries, will be retained.”

But some officials in Tibet doubt this pledge and fear retribution at the hands of the exiles. “Tibetan cadres will come to no good end if the Dalai Lama returns,” predicted Chunphel.

Ordinary Tibetans’ attitudes about their officials are seldom black or white. Though they often scoff at Tibetan leaders’ incessant public tirades against the Dalai Lama, they are also concerned about how the leaders perform.

One young Tibetan entrepreneur said of his uncle who serves as a local official: “When I was young, I thought he was stupid, and that officials’ work was all for show. Now I realize that he was trying to do something for his own people.”

Many of the conflicted loyalties of Tibetan officials are due to the violent reversals in Beijing’s policies on Tibet.

During the 1950s, Beijing tried to rule Tibet through its traditional government and aristocracy. The young Dalai Lama was given an official Chinese position and feted in Beijing by the leadership.

But the policy failed to win Tibetans’ support, and beginning in 1959, Beijing rallied poor serfs such as Chunphel under the banner of class struggle in order to smash the old order.

During China’s 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, Chunphel, Ragdi and many other Tibetans in power today joined the Red Guards, gangs of fanatical Maoist youths who went around Tibet smashing Buddhist temples. Chunphel traveled the country and saw Chairman Mao in Beijing twice.

“Mao Tse-tung was our idol and we worshipped him fervently,” he said. “In our hearts, we were most grateful to him for liberating us from the oppression of serfdom.”