Overview

"Born in 1941, Tubten Khétsun is a nephew of the Gyatso Tashi Khendrung, one of the senior government officials taken prisoner after the Tibetan peoples' uprising of March 10, 1959. Khétsun himself was arrested while defending the Dalai Lama's summer palace, and after four years in prisons and labor camps, he spent close to two decades in Lhasa as a requisitioned laborer and ""class enemy."" In this eloquent autobiography, Khétsun describes what life was like during those troubled years. His account is one of the most dispassionate, detailed, and readable firsthand descriptions yet published of Tibet under the Communist occupation. Khétsun talks of his prison experiences as well as the state of civil society following his release, and he offers keenly observed accounts of well-known events, such as the launch of the Cultural Revolution, as well as lesser-known aspects of everyday life in occupied Lhasa. Since Communist China continues to occupy Tibet, the facts of this era remain obscure, and few of those who lived through it have recorded their experiences at length. Khétsun's story will captivate any reader seeking a refreshingly human account of what occurred during the Maoists' shockingly brutal regime."

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9780231142861

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Demonstrates in full detail the human tragedy of Maoist rule in a land whose tradition it despised and tried to destroy. -- Kirkus Reviews A welcome and informative addition on this little-understood and highly polemicized subject. -- George Fitzherbert, Times Literary Supplement This book provides an important piece of the puzzle for those seeking to understand the experience of ordinary Tibetans since 1959. -- Rick Carew, Far Eastern Economic Review evocatively written and beautifully translated -- China Review International A powerful indictment of the physical and psychological exploitation of the Tibetan people and natural environment in the service of building a new China. -- Benno Ryan Weiner, The Journal of Asian Studies

Forthright, affecting eyewitness testimony on Communist China's crushing oppression of occupied Tibet from 1959 until 1979.Born to educated parents in Lhasa in 1941, the author was at first mollified and won over, like many other Tibetans, by the propaganda spread by Mao's new government after the Chinese invaded in 1950. But the young student, swept up in revolutionary fervor, soon joined the growing Tibetan resistance. After the March 1959 uprising around the gates of the Norbu Lingka palace, Khetsun, then a document copyist, was enlisted as a guard to the Dalai Lama. The Chinese embarked on severe reprisals. Recognized by a Tibetan informer, the author was imprisoned by the People's Liberation Army for four years at various detention centers and prisons, subjected to debilitating work assignments and cruelty. Supported by his devoted, religious elder sisters, Khetsun returned home from prison to horrific conditions of subjugation. He had to wear a hat (symbol of his apostasy), was deprived of political rights, lived under strict supervision and was subjected to a public struggle. Many Tibetan civilians underwent reeducation policies, were stripped of their wealth and paid exorbitant taxes; monasteries were ransacked, natural resources plundered. By June 1966, the Cultural Revolution's vicious campaign against the Four Olds (old culture, old thinking, old habits, old customs) led to the author and his family's further humiliation as class enemies. Khetsun keeps his tone modest and evenhanded, allowing his story to seize and haunt the reader without editorializing.Demonstrates in full detail the human tragedy of Maoist rule in a land whose traditions it despised and tried to destroy. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Matthew Akester is an independent researcher and translator working in the field of Tibetan history. He has published several essays and translations on the history of Lhasa and is the author of a forthcoming history of central Tibet based on a nineteenth-century guidebook.

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