Shifting Views of Ngaphö Ngawang Jigme Within Tibetan Society
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chapter 6 Shifting Views of Ngaphö Ngawang Jigme within Tibetan Society Chung Tsering When Ngaphö Ngawang Jigme (b. 1910) died in 2009, both the exile Tibetan government and the Chinese government issued statements giving their views about his life. He had been the most prominent of any of the former aristocrat-officials who had remained in Tibet over the previous half-century. As a senior official in the Tibetan government under the Dalai Lama in the 1940s, he had overseen the battle of the Tibetan army with the PLA at Chamdo in 1950, the signing of Seventeen-point Agreement with China in 1951, and rela- tions between the Tibetan government and the new Chinese rulers throughout the 1950s. After the Dalai Lama and many of his officials fled to India in 1959, Ngaphö had remained in China, holding a series of top positions over the fol- lowing forty years, including chairman of the TAR, first deputy commander of the Tibet Military Region, chairman of the Regional People’s Congress, and vice-chairman of the National People’s Congress (see Figs. 6.3 and 6.4). Yet his death was marked by praise from both the government-in-exile in India and by Beijing. The announcement by the exile government stated that “Ngaphö was an upstanding patriot who tried to tell things as they truly were, despite very adverse circumstances” (Kashag 2010: 43). The Chinese govern- ment’s statement held that Ngaphö was “a great patriot, a renowned social activist, a good son of the Tibetan people, an outstanding leader of China’s na- tionality work and a firm friend of the Chinese Communist Party” (Bod ljongs nyin re’i tshags par 2009: 1 and China Tibet Information Centre 2009). 1 Views of Ngaphö in the 1950s From a young age, Ngaphö Ngawang Jigme was regarded in a variety of differ- ent ways within Tibetan society. Born in 1910, he first became an official of the Tibetan government in 1936 and by 1950 had risen to the rank of cabinet min- ister. In July that year he travelled from Lhasa to the eastern town of Chamdo to take up the position of Commissioner for the Eastern Areas (Mdo smad spyi © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004433243_011 240 Chung Tsering khyab),1 placing him in charge of the Tibetan troops on what was then the border with China. He was thus the leading figure in the historic defeat of the Tibetan army at the hands of the PLA as they began their advance into Tibet that October. His role in the loss of Chamdo was satirised in a popular song: Nga phod ngar nas phyin song // Chab mdo bskyal nas log byung / Ngaphö set off All keen and fired up— Lost Chamdo and Came back again. There were even those who said that he had been bought off with Chinese silver and had abandoned his loyalty to his own country (Goldstein et al. 2006: 221–22). However, whilst in Chinese custody at Chamdo, he had succeeded in sending secret reports to the Tibetan government several times, and the government had such undiminished faith in him that it appointed him as its representative to the Sino–Tibetan negotiations in 1951.2 Despite comments circulating among the public, it does not seem that during the years from 1950 to 1959 he was blamed by the government or any published writers for the loss of Chamdo. Later, after the 1959 division between those Tibetans who fled into exile and those who remained within Tibet, three opinions emerged about the loss of Chamdo. The Tibetan government described the battle of Chamdo as a matter of “bigger insects swallowing smaller insects”, where defeat was the result of unequal military forces rather than shortcomings in Ngaphö’s lead- ership abilities. Secondly, some Tibetans began to write books claiming that Ngaphö had made a relationship (’brel lam) in secret with the Chinese and had deliberately allowed them to take Chamdo (Phu pa dpon 1998: 19–25; see also Bar zhi 2004: 95–97). Thirdly, there were debates over Ngaphö’s order to set fire to the armoury as he fled the Chinese advance on Chamdo: some saw this as a skilful move (Pha lha 1996: 103–94), while others saw it as an act of cowardice, or even as an outright sell-out to the Chinese (see Phu pa dpon 1998). The Seventeen-point Agreement between China and Tibet was signed on May 23, 1951, and Ngaphö was the chief Tibetan representative and signatory 1 In this chapter, italicised words in parentheses are the Tibetan equivalents, transliterated according to the Wylie system, of the preceding terms. 2 Lhalu, the Tibet government’s former Commissioner in the Eastern Areas, was removed from his position as cabinet minister in 1952 after falling under suspicion..