Editors’ note: This essay by Tibetan-Canadian journalist and poet Kalden Dhatsenpa reviews the memoirs of one of the key founders and leaders of the Tibetan Communist Party, Phuntsok Wangyal. Wangyal’s memoirs are edited and translated into English as A Tibetan Revolutionary: The Political Life and Times of Bapa Phüntso Wangye (University of California Press, 2004).
“I understood what Lenin meant when he talked about the inevitable tension between the nationality that has power and the ones that do not . . . that the strong nationality would often use its power to oppress the smaller, weaker one, and that the smaller ones would fight bitterly against this. I felt sometimes as if Lenin knew exactly what I was thinking, what I cared about most.” — Phuntsok Wangyal
The existence of Tibetan communism first seemed like an oxymoron to me, an impossible object. It interrupts the rigid dichotomy of the anti-Tibet, pro-communist vs. the typical pro-Tibet, anti-communist framing that I was used to. The former denies the People’s Republic of China (PRC)’s rule as an oppressive force in Tibet, a position that obscures the fact that the PRC has inherited the nationalist and expansionist projects of the Republicans and the Qing Dynasty (two entities that the communist forces in China fought against). It was the Chinese communists who completed the project of their predecessors, sometimes with exacting brutality. It was the 18th Corps of the People’s Liberation Army’s Second Field Army that wiped out a massive portion of the male population of the tribes in my father’s pastoral lands in Amdo in the 1950s before the fighting continued westwards towards Central Tibet.1 Estimates of total Tibetan lives lost due to the invasion and occupation run from 500,000 to 1.2 million.
While this pro-communist framing often repeats wholesale Beijing’s state narrative of Tibet, the anti-communist framing of Tibet uses American foreign policy’s instrumentalization of Tibetan struggles to manufacture consent towards conflict with China. Tibetans, portrayed as victims of communism, have become useful in this way to Western imperialism. Narratives of Tibet are often forced into this rigid dichotomy, making it challenging to navigate alternative pathways of emancipatory politics in Tibet.
‘Free Tibet’: entangled with imperialism?
Like many other Tibetans in the diaspora, I’ve been attending protests for Tibetan independence since childhood. I have newspaper clippings of myself protesting that I don’t even remember. The slogans and chants from these demonstrations have become modern mantras ingrained in my memory. I continued attending these protests late into my teens, especially as the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the riots throughout the plateau brought elevated attention to Tibetan struggles. Often, the slogans of these protests posit the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a singular source of oppression in Tibet. They present the communist ideology as the culprit behind a violent, authoritarian power that requires the intervention of capitalist Western governments. This line of thinking fits conveniently within the nexus of Western foreign policy.
The gravity of US interests has long influenced conceptions of Tibet. Tibet became a cause célèbre of the 1990s and 2000s, epitomised by American actor Richard Gere’s support, as well as massive concerts headlined by the likes of Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blondie, Smashing Pumpkins, and Rage Against the Machine, to name a few. Despite the fanfare, the direct impact of these campaigns on the plateau was minimal, and remains minimal from my observations here, as Che Guevara calls it, in the belly of the beast. Mark Fisher’s critique of Live Aid remains integral, especially considering the 1998 Tibet Freedom Concert was the largest benefit concert since Live Aid. In Capitalist Realism, Fisher criticizes the cultural consumer activism that drove Live Aid, one that is also easily applied to the Tibet Freedom Concerts: “The original Live Aid concerts in 1985 have insisted that ‘caring individuals’ could end famine directly, without the need for any kind of political solution or systemic reorganization.” In this instance, we substitute “famine” with “Chinese occupation of Tibet.”
These freedom concerts were an enormous success in raising awareness of the cause of Tibetan independence, and in pushing for a rights-based approach. This has been the dominant mode of Tibetan advocacy in the diaspora, centering issues of religious freedom, biometric surveillance, political imprisonment, cultural genocide, and various other forms of violations against human rights in Tibet.2 Appealing to foreign power centres and populations, this mode of advocacy has been successful in securing funding for various Tibetan programs outside of Tibet aimed at sheltering and managing exile populations, as well as the administrative support needed to sustain them.
When these caring individuals appeal for human rights in Tibet, they often end up manufacturing consent for continued hostilities towards China that feeds a centuries-old Sinophobic foreign policy position that Western governments hold.
But Tibet is no freer for all the fanfare we have received from “caring individuals” and stars in tuxedos. Much of such ‘aid’ has only deepened Tibetan advocates’ dependency on institutions affiliated with the US State Department. Furthermore, funding for actually Tibetan-led initiatives has grown inconsistent in recent years. What tends to happen, rather, is that when these caring individuals appeal for human rights in Tibet, they often end up manufacturing consent for continued hostilities towards China that feeds a centuries-old Sinophobic foreign policy position that Western governments hold. Meanwhile, the repression in Tibet continues apace. Given that past and present tactics, from protest slogans to benefit concerts, haven’t moved the needle in a meaningful way for Tibetans in the plateau, new horizons must, at a minimum, be considered. To grow and sustain Tibetan revolutionary politics, we must align ourselves with other political movements. What lessons lie in our history that could inform our future?
I’ve come to believe that to recover a politics of liberation and solidarity with Tibetans, we must first confront the legacy of Tibetan communism. In this vein, I studied A Tibetan Revolutionary: The Political Life and Times of Bapa Phüntso Wangye, the founder of the Tibetan Communist Party (TCP), as if I were a coroner. Curious about his trajectory and that of the TCP, I hoped that by dissecting his autobiography, I would find old Tibetan organizational designs that could inform how Tibetans today could organise—a leftist vision for Tibet imagined by Tibetans rather than the exogenous one imposed by China. For this, Bapa Phuntsok Wangyal’s pathway to resistance offers much to us, as his efforts helped pluralize the visions of Tibetan modernity that came to a head in that era. Going into the book, I wondered how they organized and mobilized people on the plateau. What led to their demise? My “autopsy” revealed the details of incredibly difficult forces that the TCP could not overcome. Its lessons then give even more weight to the current juncture in the Tibetan struggle. The same nationalist tendencies that silenced the TCP have become the main crux of China’s policy, not just towards Tibet, but also towards other minoritized groups. The axis of this struggle should then be of central concern to Tibetans and our allies alike.
The origins of Tibetan communism
How did Tibetan communism emerge, and why does this matter? If one follows common historical trajectories in the West, one might imagine Tibetan factory workers rising against their bosses. In reality, Tibetan communism was born out of opposition to increasing Chinese control in eastern Tibetan areas. Kham and Amdo, during the Republican era, were two Tibetan regions under the violent rule of Chinese warlords, a logical extension of the expansionism of the Manchu-led Qing dynasty, which sought to expand China’s borders into areas it had little to no administrative control over. These militarists took the expansion of China into Tibet into their own hands. These embattled areas include parts of Amdo and Kham that were too far from the reach of the central Tibetan government of the 13th Dalai Lama, known as the Gaden Phodrang, which was based in Lhasa—a distance of nearly 2,000 kilometres. In these areas, Lhasa had few political structures in place. In Amdo, a tribal system of clans reigned, while in Kham, power coalesced around chiefdoms. In the 1930s, Lhasa’s troops tried to retake territory held by warlords Liu Wenhui and Ma Bufang, but they were rebuffed.
The PRC’s angle on Tibet is a revisionist one that imagines the invasion as a liberatory one that freed Tibetan “serfs” of their feudal theocratic chains. As socialist writer Charlie Hore points out, “the same argument could be used to justify conquests in Africa, Asia, and Latin America on the grounds that the conquered were already subjected to oppressive social systems.” In fact, China initially made no claim of “liberating serfs.” As Chinese scholar Wang Lixiong puts it,
As long as Tibet ‘returned to the arms of the motherland’s big family, Beijing was quite willing to tolerate the preservation of the ‘feudal serf system’ there”. He continues, “local affairs continued to be administered by the Tibetan authorities, and a ‘one country, two systems’ mechanism was set in place. The name given to this tactic was the United Front. What it meant in practice was an alliance between the communists and the Tibetan ruling class, who would cooperate in the consolidation of Chinese sovereignty.
Thus, Tibet was, and remains, an incredibly politicised place, subject to competing historiographies from dueling political ideologies and world hegemons—whether the United States or China.
The Tibetan communist project was founded in 1943 by Phuntsok Wangyal and other Tibetans residing under Liu Wenhai’s vicious rule over “Xikang,” the name given to the project of Chinese expansionism that ruled Kham. It’s crucial to note here both the age and economic background of the Tibetan communists. In standard form, the students who had the time and intellectual resources to develop Tibetan communism belonged to a certain class. Tibetan historian Tsering Shakya notes that this group “were all children of wealthy merchant or aristocratic families.” They were all teenage schoolmates who desired a Leninist-style Soviet system that would grant Khampas greater autonomy and sovereignty within a Chinese state. They were introduced to Lenin’s Nationality and the Right to Self-Determination by Mr. Wang, their teacher at a school administered by Chiang Kai-Shek’s Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission. In his biography, Wangyal describes the feeling of reading Stalin and Lenin covertly in his Kuomintang-administered school.
I understood what Lenin meant when he talked about the inevitable tension between the nationality that has power and the ones that do not . . . that the strong nationality would often use its power to oppress the smaller, weaker one, and that the smaller ones would fight bitterly against this. I felt sometimes as if Lenin knew exactly what I was thinking, what I cared about most.
It was Lenin’s reflections on self-determination, as well as Sun Yat Sen’s, that Wangyal and his teenage schoolmates envisioned a Tibetan communist project of its own right. They would begin organizing around student issues at the school, challenging issues such as the school’s Han chauvinism, the oppression of Khampas by Kuomintang (KMT) soldiers, and calling for better accommodation of Tibetan students. Wangyal even recounts being chastised directly by Chiang Kai-Shek before they were eventually expelled. The tenor and backdrop of their organizing places the Tibetan communist project squarely as a youthful, if not naive, endeavour. Despite the setbacks he experienced, Phuntsok Wangyal would continue to pursue Tibetan communism. Shakya details Wangyal’s political goals in the following way:
… to win over progressive elements among the students and aristocracy in ‘political Tibet’—the kingdom of the Dalai Lama—to a programme of modernization and democratic reform, while building support for a guerrilla struggle to overthrow Sichuan warlord Liu Wenhui’s rule in Kham. The ultimate goal was a united independent Tibet, and its feudal social structure fundamentally transformed.
A troubled road to power
While their ambitions were grand, one is left with the impression that the young Tibetan communist revolutionaries were never taken seriously. The Lhasa political elite rebuffed the young communists’ vision. The biography pins this rejection on the indifference of the Lhasa elite to regionalist Tibetan antipathies. However, the majority of Tibet’s pastoral and religious population, especially outside the frontier regions of Kham and Amdo, also saw little relevance in this Tibetan-led communist project. Wangyal and his schoolmates, driven by youthful idealism, attempted to translate communist songs into Tibetan, hoping to ignite broader Tibetan mobilization. Their revolutionary tunes, it seems, lacked a material basis.
Having read Lenin and Stalin, they made multiple attempts throughout their existence to contact the Soviet Union. They preferred this to direct meetings with the Chinese communists, who were being actively persecuted by the KMT. They encountered some success during their trip to the USSR embassy in Chongqing around 1941. The Soviets greeted the Tibetans warmly, but there was a sense that they approached these interactions with polite curiosity rather than with serious consideration for supporting these young students’ revolutionary ambitions. At the time, the Soviets prioritized their resources on supporting the Second United Front between the KMT and the CCP against Japanese invasion. Fei Delin, the first secretary of the Soviet Embassy in Chongqing, would provide Wangyal with financial support during their meetings, as they discussed Wangyal’s vision for an independent communist Tibet. Delin sent a report to Moscow detailing these students’ initiative, but word never came back from the capital. A plan to trek to Moscow via “Xinjiang” was suggested, but the German invasion of the USSR in the summer of 1941 dashed these plans. Wangyal suggested returning to Kham to begin setting up a revolutionary project there. Delin agreed and gave Wangyal a generous sum in yuan, US dollars, and British pounds.
Still, Phuntsok Wangyal was determined to reach Moscow by liaising with the Communist Party of India (CPI) in Calcutta. Unfortunately, despite a warm and generous reception there as well, the CPI was concerned that it could not guarantee his safety, as it was itself embroiled in a struggle against British imperialism. The routes to Moscow were simply not safe enough for Phuntsok Wangyal’s passage. Meeting up after these failures, the group refocused on organising a guerrilla force to wage war against Sichuan-based warlord Liu Wenhui. They were able to find a sympathiser in Gonbo Tsering, a local militia commander who had been involved with the Red Army’s efforts during the Long March, as well as the KMT in its preparations to defend against potential Japanese military excursions into the region from Myanmar at the time. He agreed with the group’s ideals of a modern Tibetan nation made by and for Tibetans. Crucially, he had the armaments the group was lacking: about 400 to 500 guns. However, these plans would be dashed before they could ever really be set into motion. Local Tibetans went into an uproar when they discovered that Gonbo Tsering had sold guns to the young communists and went searching for the boys. The Tibetan communists were able to escape before they were discovered by the mob, lying low for a few years.
In 1949, upon hearing the news of a forthcoming Chinese ground invasion of Tibet, Wangyal and the other Tibetan communists sought to meet with the CCP military in Yunnan. It was there that they were convinced to abandon their project and to allow themselves to be subsumed into the CCP’s larger nationalistic framework. Tsering Shakya details the dissolution:
In the spring of 1949 the Tibetan communists heard that the Chinese CP had established guerrilla bases in Khampa areas of Yunnan, and that the Burmese CP also had a strong force in the area. While making plans to join them, Phünwang and his comrades were expelled from Lhasa by the Tibetan government, now jumpy at the prospect of imminent communist victory in China. Travelling via India, the Tibetan Communists reached the field headquarters of the Western Yunnan forces in August 1949. Here, however, the Red Army commander, a Bai named Ou Gen, demanded that the Tibetans dissolve their party into the CCP as a condition of joint guerrilla activity. After much argument, Phünwang agreed.3 Forced to abandon his goal of ‘self-rule as an independent communist Tibet’, he explains here that he still hoped that working through the Chinese Communist Party would lead to ‘the restructuring of Kham, and possibly the whole Tibetan area on both sides of the Drichu River, as an autonomous republic that would function in a similar way to the autonomous socialist republics in the Soviet Union . . . it would be under Chinese sovereignty, but it would be controlled by Tibetans.
After the dissolution, Phuntsok Wangyal would play an important role in the negotiations of the Seventeen-Point agreement between the Dalai Lama’s representatives and Beijing.4 The agreement would later be repudiated by the Dalai Lama in 1959. From 1954 to 1955, he acted as the official interpreter for the meetings between the young Dalai Lama and top CCP brass, including Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. Phuntsok Wangyal was shown great trust by the party after the dissolution of the TCP, but this trust would disappear as his advocacy for Tibetans came to be regarded as suspicious. From inside the CCP, Phuntsok was, as Shakya writes, “critical of the chauvinism and ‘top-down’ attitude of many of the CCP cadres.”
For instance, Phuntsok openly disagreed with the policies of a brutal Qinghai general, Fan Ming. Herein lies the fruit of the PRC’s minzu classification project of the 50s to intensify state control over old Qing border populations even better than the Qing dynasty. Tibetans, like Kazakhs and Mongolians around Chinese border regions, were labeled as “backwards,” and the Chinese state put their areas under its control in order to bring them into “modernity.” Fan Ming sought to increase the pace of socialist reforms, whilst Wangyal believed in a slower, more collaborative approach to build trust with local Tibetans.
In the years following the anti-rightist campaigns (1957-1959), where party officials punished those they deemed not loyal enough, Phuntsok was imprisoned for his sympathies to Tibetan self-determination. In 1960, he was sent to the Qingqeng high-security prison, a place some have called China’s Bastille. Fan Ming would also be sent to Qingqeng for his associations with Peng Duhai, a Chinese General who fought in the Korean War and had criticized the party just enough to earn himself and others around him a target. This was characteristic of these campaigns.
Phuntsok’s account of those long years in his cell is nothing short of harrowing. He describes a constant series of torture and interrogations, trying to wring some form of confession out of him, but which only resulted in agonizing psychotic breaks. These accounts of his time in prison in chapter 21 of his biography are required reading to understand the extent and depths of Beijing’s state-sanctioned brutality. He and his young Tibetan cadres were placed in solitary confinement for most of their time there. After a grueling 18 years in solitary confinement, Phuntsok was freed in 1978 at the age of 57. He spent the rest of his life in Beijing, continuing his criticisms of China’s Tibet policy well into old age.
Phuntsok Wangyal’s simple crime was that of advocating for Tibetans, which was deemed as “local nationalism,” an object of scorn for China that continues to this day.
Phuntsok Wangyal’s simple crime was that of advocating for Tibetans, which was deemed as “local nationalism,” an object of scorn for China that continues to this day, as it is seen as an impediment to creating a more efficient Chinese-speaking labour force in Tibet. This chauvinism is what is presently driving the Chinese language education program in Tibet today. The Tibetan language, and often the entire culture, is considered ill-suited for the management and production of Chinese capital.
The limits of Tibetan communism
Reflecting on the short-lived Tibetan Communist Party and the life of its founder, Phuntsok Wangyal, we gain crucial insights into China’s nationalist trajectory. Tibetan communism was a youthful dream fuelled by desires for self-determination against a much larger, more experienced, and industrious Chinese military force. The focus of the work of the Tibetan communists was to convince the aristocracy of “political Tibet” of a project of modernization and unity, and to form a guerrilla force to repel Liu Wenhui’s advances in Kham. Wangyal and the other students were on the back foot on both these fronts. Many members of the Tibetan ruling class opposed such projects. Rather than engaging in nation-building, they preferred to hold on to their titles and estates. Phuntsok Wangyal captures the essence of this conservative thinking: “the arrogance of certain members of the traditional elite, the cruelty of some of the monks he encountered during his travels, and the poverty of the peasants—worse than in China itself—under the heavy taxes and corvée labour system.” Perhaps the control that the aristocrats had was all too much. Communism as a roadmap led the Tibetans nowhere.
Chinese communism, on the other hand, had absorbed much of its state predecessors’ desires and tactics to maintain a large territorial empire. Because of this, Tibetan self-determination was seen as an existential threat that could break apart the empire. This brings into question the idealistic revisionism of campists who hold onto rigid support for repressive states that must contend with the harsh realities faced by Tibetan communists. If one is to claim the mantle of socialism and its emancipatory aims, what use is justifying the Chinese “liberation” of Tibet at the expense of Tibetan communists who were among many other Tibetan-led endeavors towards Tibet’s liberation despite the surmounting odds? Is socialism something to be yoked onto? In which case, what is stopping socialist governments from invading the rest of the Fourth World and dragging them into modernity as China did to Tibet? This line of argumentation mirrors the paternalistic logic employed in many Western colonial conquests, as in Rudyard Kipling’s 1889 poem “The White Man’s Burden,” in which he paints populations newly colonized by the British as childlike and in need of guidance.
Tibetan communism had a second life, or a reincarnation, so to speak, in exile. In May 1979, the Tibetan Communist Party in Exile (TCPE) was founded. Like its endogenous predecessor, it was comprised of a few bright young Tibetans. Kelsang Dhondup, the chairman, was a prominent literary and cultural figure of the exile world, who would often lament the outsized power and insularity of the Tibetan aristocratic elite in exile affairs. “Party” might be a generous term for the TCPE, whose membership at its peak is rumored to be around four. In actuality, the TCPE was a small ideological circle of intellectuals who produced pamphlets and contributed to the wider Tibetan exile debate. In fact, the launch of their party received support from the Dalai Lama, who, on prior occasions, has expressed interest in Marxism and advocated for continued dialogue between Communism and Buddhism. But the party was short-lived, existing for only three years and disbanding after continued harassment of its small but devoted and erudite membership. In his later years, Dhondup would ascribe these communist attempts to “an error of youth.”5
Taking a page from the West, Beijing saw no other future for Tibetans other than dragging Tibet into a wretched productivist modernity, with a facade of “autonomy” defined entirely on Beijing’s terms.
If these attempts at Tibetan communism have shown errors, it was perhaps the errors and imprecisions that come with these wide-eyed, world-mouthed endeavors. In both instances, at separate points in time and geography, Tibetans have turned to communism in search of solidarity and the means of liberation vaunted in many socialist revolutionary attempts. Unfortunately, Tibet lacked a sizeable proletarian base that suited Marxist revolution. Even the Chinese communist project, with its scattered industrial proletariat, had to mobilize a peasantry facing severe material crises and fuse ongoing military struggles against imperial Japan into its program. Tibet’s peasantry was not in the midst of either. Tibet’s largely subsistence-based agrarian economy largely chugged along fine in contrast to the dying, humiliating century of the Qing empire, which the Republicans and Communists were in a rush to save. Communism gave Phuntsok Wangyal a lens in which to imagine an alternate horizon for a modern Tibet led by Tibetans. It allowed Wangyal proximity to and access to top-level CCP officials. But it did not give him the tools to save Tibet. Beijing’s vision of history and unification deems Tibetan societies—whether lamaist, tribal, or chief-led, to be backwards—stuck at some middle rung of history. Taking a page from the West, it saw no other future for Tibetans other than dragging Tibet into a wretched productivist modernity, with a facade of “autonomy” defined entirely on Beijing’s terms.
So, I say there was no error of youth, Phuntsok and his allies made no mistakes in trying. The task at hand was simply too large for them to comprehend. There is no mistaking that Wangyal spent years of his life advocating for Tibetans, no matter the odds. In this autopsy of Tibetan communism, I see not “errors of youth” as the culprit. Instead, it is the PRC’s colonial practices, inheritances of prior Chinese state projects that rampaged over not just Tibetan communism but all grassroots efforts to build a Tibet led by Tibetans, who continue to be subjugated to this day.
If there is a lesson to be gleaned through this purported autopsy, it is that if the window for building a Tibetan movement against capitalism was too narrow back then, the opposite is true now. Tibet is no longer a lost kingdom in the imaginings of James Hilton; it is part and parcel of global capitalist infrastructure, with its rivers dammed for hydropower and a burgeoning critical mineral industry, and with extractive tourist infrastructure that turns Tibet into a veritable Disneyland of lofty ambitions. In 2025, this has powered much of China’s breakneck 7% GDP growth. Between 2012 and 2021, the TAR’s growth rate was a whopping 9.5%. The American GDP boom during World War II was only around 7-8% per year. This boom comes at a continued cost to Tibetan identity and relationship to the land.
The project of building a Tibetan movement against colonialism and capital, which Phuntsok and his comrades first demanded, remains more pertinent than ever before.
Despite such explosive economic growth, most Tibetans still rely on herding or farming. Many of the urban jobs are fuelled by state investment and Chinese migrant labor. Most Tibetans still work in agriculture and traditional pastoral economies, and the few who work in the tertiary sector work in lower-wage service roles.6 The mining and tourist sectors, which China touts as the “two pillars” of the Tibetan economy, are mostly dominated by Chinese migrant labor. Chinese state money is used to hire Chinese labor to attract Chinese tourist dollars or to exploit minerals for Chinese mining companies that, in turn, refine them for Chinese battery companies. Tibetans in this swelling economy are largely excluded. The Chinese response to the lack of Tibetans in the urban labor force has been widespread assimilation through sinicization. Tibetans are viewed by many Chinese to be “lazy” in terms of modern Chinese labor expectations. Part of this shortcoming entails Tibetans’ religiosity and even the use of the Tibetan language itself, which the Chinese consider unfit for science and engineering. Many Tibetan schools have been shut down in recent years in this wider effort of sinicizing and proletarianizing Tibetans into a productive Chinese future. In other words, the project of building a Tibetan movement against colonialism and capital, which Phuntsok and his comrades first demanded, remains more pertinent than ever before.
Tibetan communism did not fail because Tibetans dreamed too widely, but because the horizons offered to them were already bordered by ravenous imperial tides. Any socialist worth their salt must contend with the histories of Tibetan communism and the realities of Tibet today. For instance, the current policy of the Minority Ethnic Affairs Commission was set by Pan Yue, who served as its commissioner from 2020 to 2025. In Yue’s 2002 thesis dissertation,
he called on China to learn from a trifecta of contemporary colonizers: the United States, Israel and Russia. Taking elements of each as a model of how contemporary China should further colonize Tibetan and Uyghur lands, he suggests that the Western expansion of settler colonialism in the United States and Russia’s imperial settlement of Siberia, should be combined with the more contemporary example of Israel’s controlled deployment of West Bank settlers and infrastructure in Palestinian lands.
The issues Tibetan nationalists once took with China’s practices are no longer exclusive to China. There is an immense wealth of knowledge to be gleaned from the anti-colonial struggles of the Americas for Tibetans, where the main contention is not oppression by labour relations, but by interrupting Tibetan relations to land. What Pan Yue’s thesis and ascension within the state show is an overlapping colonial playbook in which states share the same tools, study one another, and work towards the same goals. The impetus for us then is clear: it has to be a shared solidarity. We must study one another’s struggles and refine our own playbooks rather than continue on in little silos of resistance. Road and rail can be blocked in the same way, regardless of the pretext or language. For us outside the plateau, that means elevating those colonial contentions and overlaps, and creating networks and institutions devoted to solidarity outside the influence of the NED-funded groups.
Any decolonial future worth forging will be strengthened by such understandings. Any internationalist future worth forging must begin where Tibetan communism ended: with Tibetans imagining themselves not as history’s laggards, but as its authors.
Footnotes
- Lama Jabb, Oral and Literary Continuities in Modern Tibetan Literature: The Inescapable Nation (Lexington Books, 2015), 94.
- At the time of his arrest, the 11th Panchen Lama, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, was one of the youngest political prisoners ever. He was disappeared at six years old after the Dalai Lama announced him as the next Panchen Lama.
- “Phünwang” is Phuntsok Wangwal. Some Tibetan nicknames often take combine the first syllable of the person’s first name and the first syllable of their last name.
- The Seventeen Point Agreement was a document signed on May 23, 1951, between representatives of the Tibetan government of the Dalai Lama and the People’s Republic of China.
- Jamyang Norbu, Shadow Tibet: Selected Writings 1989-2004 (High Asia Press, 2004), 131.
- Andrew Martin Fischer, The Disempowered Development of Tibet in China (Lexington Books, 2013).
