The Timely Rain
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BOOK REVIEW OF THE TIMELY RAIN BY STUART AND ROMA GELDER A COMPILATION OF A SERIES OF PROGRAMS ON RADIO FREE ASIA TIBETAN SERVICE BY WARREN W. SMITH 1 The Timely Rain The Timely Rain is the title of a book written by an English couple, Stuart and Roma Gelder, about their trip to Lhasa in 1962.1 The title refers to a poem written by the Dalai Lama for Mao in 1954 in which the Dalai Lama refers to Mao as the "timely rain" needed in Tibet. In a foreword, Edgar Snow declared that the Gelders were "well prepared to understand so much of what they saw," presumably because of their previous experience in China, and that they had narrated the experience "with honesty, humor and compassion." He said that their book was "an honest inquiry made with no political commitments to any organized powers that be." The dust jacket to the Gelders' book says: "Neither of these authors is or has ever been a member of any political party. They have made their journeys in China and Tibet not as guests of the Chinese Government but as completely independent writers." The Gelders' previous book, about the Chinese Communist revolution, Long March to Freedom, published in 1960, was very sympathetic to that revolution and established their credentials sufficiently with Chinese officials, such as Zhou Enlai, that they were chosen to tell the story of the “peaceful liberation” of Tibet. Despite the claims of the dust jacket and their affecting of an objective attitude, they were clearly leftist in their political viewpoints and they were indeed guests of the Chinese Government. They were also very obviously flattered to have been the first foreigners allowed to go to Tibet since shortly after the 1959 revolt.2 They were undoubtedly influenced by the treatment they received there and by the exclusive opportunity this gave them to interpret for the outside world the "reality" of Tibet. Everything the Gelders learned was through their Chinese interpreter, assigned to them by the government. In their introduction the Gelders said that they had convinced their Chinese hosts to allow them to go to Tibet so that they could discover if the Tibetans were, as the Dalai Lama was claiming from exile, the victims of religious genocide. The Dalai Lama had written, in his autobiography, My Land and My People, that tens of thousands of Tibetans had been killed, not only in military actions but individually and deliberately, for many reasons, or for no reason at all, but fundamentally because they would not renounce their religion. They had not only been shot but beaten to death, hanged, scalded, buried alive, drowned, vivisected, starved, and strangled. These killings had been done in public; the victims' fellow villagers and friends and neighbors had been made to watch them; eyewitnesses described them to the International Commission of Jurists who compiled stories of refugees.3 Men and women had been slowly killed while their families were forced to watch; small children had been forced to shoot their parents. The Dalai Lama claimed that lamas had been specially persecuted. The Chinese had humiliated them, especially the elderly and most respected, before they tortured them, by harnessing them to ploughs, riding them like horses, whipping and beating them, and other methods too evil to mention. And while they were slowly putting them to 2 death, they taunted them with their religion, calling on them to perform miracles to save themselves from pain and death. The Dalai Lama said that many Tibetans had been imprisoned or rounded up and taken away to unknown destinations, great numbers had died from the brutalities and privations of forced labor, and many had committed suicide in despair and misery. He said that many Tibetan children had been taken away from their parents and sent to China. The Chinese had destroyed hundreds of monasteries, either by wrecking them or by killing the lamas and sending the monks to labor camps, forcing monks to break their vows, and using the empty monastic buildings as barracks and stables.4 The Gelders' rather skeptical recitation of the supposed atrocities that had taken place in Tibet reveals that their intention was to disprove the Dalai Lama’s accusations. The argument they made to Zhou Enlai and other Chinese leaders to allow them to go to Tibet was presumably so that they could do so. The Gelders' claim of objectivity quickly unravels when, shortly after their arrival in Lhasa, before they even began their supposedly objective inquiry, they write: In the onlooker who has never visited Tibet the self-exiled priests and lords may evoke sympathy as refugees from a happy country in which the people lived under their rule, inspired by a humane religious philosophy. The truth is that this society was a harsh and cruel tyranny in which, because they share the universal instinct for survival, the people made the best of their lot. Serfs of the European Middle Ages did no less. Jews in Hitler's concentration camps did no less. …But the indomitable fortitude and optimism of oppressed human beings in Tibet or anywhere else can only be confused with contentment by those not personally involved in their lives or who profit by such subjection and exploitation. One may wonder how the Gelders became such experts on the reality of old Tibet after only a few days of a visit to a society that had already been overturned under Chinese rule. One also wonders at the comment that only those not personally involved in the lives of Tibetans could mistake their oppression for contentment. The Gelders were not personally involved in Tibetans' lives, so perhaps they refer to the experience of the Chinese in Tibet. Their portrayals of the Chinese working in Tibet are entirely positive, while the Tibetans are portrayed as formerly oppressed and now liberated and making a new life, but still dirty and smelly. The Gelders make much of the eyewitness veracity of their own account of reality in Tibet, while dismissing the accounts of native Tibetans in exile in India. The Gelders seemed unaware and unconcerned about the fate of any, whether still within Tibet or in exile, who had opposed the Chinese "liberation." The Gelders began their visit to Tibet at Kumbum, the monastery near Sining (Xining) in Gansu. They revealed that only 400 of the original 3,000 monks remained. They accepted the Chinese explanation that most of the monks had left the religious life because they had never voluntarily been part of it in the first place. They cited Chinese government financial support for the maintenance of the monastery and for old monks who were unable to work. They believed without question a Chinese official who proclaimed a generally benevolent attitude on the part of the Communist Party toward 3 religion and accepted that the monks had left, pilgrims no longer came, and donations were down because the lamas had lost their power to deceive and exploit the people. The Gelders greatly exaggerated the dangers of their subsequent flight into Lhasa, in a chapter titled "Flight into Danger," in which they implied that the plane was nearly scraping the sides of mountains and battling ferocious winds all the way. They also glorified the PLA's pioneering of the air route into Tibet as well as their road building. They even portrayed the jeep ride from the airport (at that time at Damshung, near Yangpachen) as something like an expedition, all for the purpose of emphasizing the uniqueness of their journey. Throughout the rest of their account they adopt the "we were there, you weren’t" attitude to bolster their opinions. They also took film equipment and made a film that they showed upon their return to England. Upon their arrival in Lhasa they were advised to rest for a few days. However, a festival was to begin at Drepung Monastery the next day that they wanted to film. At Drepung they were taken in hand by a "tall lama who had noticed our strange faces in the crowd." They depicted this encounter as entirely serendipitous, without any possibility that it could have been stage managed, thus portraying the information they received from the lama as entirely objective and free of government interference. The Gelders made every effort to depict their visit as uncontrolled and they imagined that they were free to visit any place they wished or talk to anyone they wanted. However, as Paul Hollander's Political Pilgrims points out, visits to communist countries typically left nothing to chance. This was particularly the case in China. The guide was responsible for the impression the visitors received. Guides were not above misinterpretations or additions to interpretations in order to achieve the desired effect. Those to whom the visitors spoke were carefully selected, and even if they were to have an unscheduled encounter the local people were usually well aware of what they could and could not safely say.5 The Gelders were constantly accompanied by their Chinese interpreter and by local Chinese and Tibetan officials. The "tall lama" who so casually offered to escort the Gelders around Drepung was probably a carefully selected "patriotic lama" and a member of the monastery's "democratic management committee." They were not just casual visitors, after all, but the first foreigners allowed into Tibet since Anna Louise Strong three years previously. They were, like Strong, important to the Chinese for the impressions they would convey to the outside world. The Gelders, like Strong, would certainly write a book and they were making a film as well. Later, when they interviewed the remaining abbot of Drepung, they were joined by three monks who identified themselves as representatives of the National Minorities Commission.