Acknowledgements

I conducted research during three trips to Labrang over a four-year period between 1992 and 1996, with a return trip in 2002. The research was sponsored by the Committee on Scholarly Communication with China, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, a Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship, a National Science Foundation pre-dissertation grant, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan, and the University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School fellowships. Research in 2002 was supported by a Reed College summer research grant. Paid Leave at Reed College was generously supported by the Levine Fund.

Every effort has been made to secure necessary permissions to reproduce copyright material in this work, though in some cases it has proved impossible to trace copyright holders. If any omissions are brought to our notice, we will be happy to include appropriate acknowledgments on reprinting in any subsequent edition.

In the Tibetan Buddhist monastery town of Labrang, located in southwest Gansu Province, China, the past is a heavy, and very often hidden, burden for residents and visitors alike (figure 1). This is not readily apparent amidst the bustling ‘nowness’ of commercial activities in this tourist site and model town for the profitable coexistence of Tibetan Buddhist monasticism and Chinese state-sponsored development goals. But as I discovered over the course of my fieldwork there in the mid-1990s, and again in the summer of 2002, for a population living with unsanctioned memories of the traumatic ruptures of the Chinese Communist-led revolution beginning in 1949, the ‘unsaid’ of history spoke loudly in implication—in implied dialogue with multimedia official histories, in the gaps in written and oral chronologies of events, in the revived performance of the lay and monastic ritual calendars, and in the dodges and silences of my Tibetan interlocutors during our many conversations about their pasts: “I don't know anything! I'm too young, you know!” (Tibetan [Tib.] ngas shes ni ma red, nga lo chung gi mo). Ama Drolma, a village matriarch in her late fifties, repeated this adamantly to me after I and my Tibetan woman assistant had asked her for a taped interview about local “history” (Tib. lo rgyus).¹

Location of Labrang in the People's Republic of China (by the author).

That awkward encounter occurred in 1995, only a few months into my stay in Labrang, and during an early attempt at “collecting” villagers' “oral histories” based on a brief interview schedule. At the time, I thought I had understood Ama Drolma's metamessage to me: as an uneducated lay village woman, she did not consider herself a legitimate narrator of “history.” It was not until much later, when I tried to write about the life-stories I eventually heard from some sixty elderly Tibetans in Labrang, that I realized Ama Drolma was also telling me something crucial about the category of “history” itself.

Socialist Transformation and Mnemonic Politics

In this article, I address the problematic relationship between memory and historiography by exploring the cultural politics of history among Tibetans in the People's Republic of China. The analysis will demonstrate that amidst the persistent efforts of post-Mao Chinese state officials to shape and delimit memory and forgetting among Tibetans, a vigorous alternative historiography flourished in Labrang. I argue that this alternative “practice of time” (Mueggler 2001:7) elucidates local Tibetans' active relationship to a state that many experienced as fearsome and repressive. The Labrang region, considered by Tibetans to be part of a broader cultural region called Amdo, is a particularly important place to consider these issues. Since the great Tibetan lama Jamyang Shepa founded the famous monastery of Labrang Tashikhyil in the Sang river (Chinese [Ch.] Daxia) valley in 1709, Labrang has been both an edge of empires and a powerful center of religious and political economic life.²

In this context, the radical changes and unprecedented reach of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-state during the Maoist years (1949–1980) both highlighted and rendered extremely dangerous any expression of local memory vis-à-vis the ascendant official history of the new nation under Mao. In the post-Mao rush to delimit and purge the suffering of that period amidst the reform-era push to economic development, it was particularly dangerous for Tibetans to publicly remember the Maoist years. Unlike Han Chinese individuals and groups participating in a range of public memorializing activities,⁴

View of Sang river valley looking east. Labrang monastery is at lower right, Labrang town and Xiahe County seat upper left. Summer 1993 (photo by the author).

It is perhaps not surprising then that in decades of international contests over the national status of Tibet, Chinese state agents and dissidents abroad have all presented memories elicited from Tibetans, most often in the form of first-person narratives, as authentic historical evidence in opposition to what are considered to be the politically motivated silences of opponents' histories of the Maoist years in Tibetan regions.⁵

But as many theorists have pointed out, the opposition between “memory” (or subjective accounts of the past) and “history” (or objective accounts of the past)⁷

I address these issues by considering the elderly Tibetans' stories I heard in 1995 and 2002 not as reified individual memories revealing a repressed “history” of Labrang, but as interactions in which we all participated in the on-going construction of a collective local memory of the painful years of socialist transformation in Labrang. I draw on the work of linguistic anthropologists and literary theorists who treat narrative as a fundamental speech genre in which people work together to order relationships between selves and others in space and time by placing them in the unfolding plot of a story (Volosinov 1986 (1929); Bakhtin 1981 [1937–1938]; Ricoeur 1981; White 1981; Hanks 1989; Tedlock 1995; Ochs and Capps 1996).⁸

Ama Drolma was not the only Tibetan villager in Labrang who rejected my early requests for interviews on local history. When like others she adamantly declined, she was not refusing just to narrate a fixed but hidden “history.” She was denying some of the crucial historiographic assumptions embedded in the terms of our discourse and in the interview genre of interaction that I had proposed. Even though in other long conversations she had readily talked with me about being born and raised in Labrang, about her family and village affairs, here Ama Drolma refused the requirements of being the subject of testimony. As Charles Briggs has argued, the ubiquitous and unexamined nature of interview practices in contemporary societies both contributes to and masks the crucial role of this discourse genre in recruiting people to produce objective, and therefore authoritative knowledge. In his view, interviews attempt to control the type of narrative elicited from interviewees by asking for metalinguistic statements in which selves must stand apart from experience and report, describe, and evaluate (1986:2). Further, in the case of eliciting historical knowledge, interviews most often ask for first-person narratives providing valued “real history” (White 1981:5), that is, a subject's experiences only as they pertain to historical events in a particular chronology of calendrical time (cf. Gyatso 1998:109).

Acting as a foreign social science researcher seeking an “objective” story of the recent past in Labrang, I had not fully realized the particular historicizing power of the interview in that milieu. In the context of the overwhelming might of the Chinese Communist state since 1949 in those regions, and the state's foundational narrative of a traumatic, revolutionary rupture between past and present, interviews have been associated for Tibetans with both the obligation and the felt need to provide testimony. Testimony could be seen as a now transnational type of first-person narrative that takes on powerful legal and moral weight in the context of a perceived crisis of truth related to past, often traumatic events and the legal agencies of nation-states.⁹

In these narratives, speakers are required to take a particularly marked stance toward their stories—they must (implicitly or explicitly) evaluate the past events and agencies they describe and they must promise to authorities that their speech is material evidence for the truth (Felman and Laub 1992:5). Ama Drolma's expectation that this was the type of speech genre in which she was being asked to participate perhaps explains why she immediately assumed, when I tried to explain that I was interested in what had changed in Labrang, that I wanted her opinion on which was better, life “before” or life “nowadays.” In effect, narrators of testimony must present as self-conscious, individual selves and then publicly attest to the “autobiographical pact”: that the narrating self and narrated sel(ves) are one and the same (Gyatso 1998:107; Crapanzano 1996:109), all the while anticipating potentially serious consequences for their speech acts.

As I mentioned above, collecting testimonies from Tibetans about Chinese state repression has been a widely assumed role among Westerners, and the appeal of such a stance was perhaps not lost on me. In the transnational participation framework of the genre, one can style oneself a seeker of the truth, and assume that this will produce an alliance with Tibetans. But the danger is that any provisional cooperation achieved within the genre can obscure crucial differences in participants' subject positions, notions of personhood, and worldviews, and turn foreigners' attention from the importance for locals of other (multimedia) forms of metacommunication about the past (Briggs 1986:2; Hall 1998:440; cf. Germano 1998). Ama Drolma's refusal (and those of many others) made it clear to me that Tibetans in the PRC do not necessarily share Westerners' faith in the moralizing historiography of testimonials.¹⁰

Speaking Bitterness: The Violence of Statist Remembering

Indeed, the state-sponsored violence Tibetans in the valley experienced during successive social reform and anti-rebellion campaigns beginning in 1958 was largely narrativized by Chinese state cadres as a battle for their self-consciousness as participants in the nation's linear historical trajectory now under the proper guidance of the Communist Party (cf. Duara 1995; Dreyer 1976; Wen Ho Chang 1989; Chang 1997; Cheek 1997).¹¹

In interviews with state agents, and at compulsory group meetings, Tibetans were required to produce and listen to testimonials of their participation in the Communist-led revolution, that is, life-stories attesting to their consciousness of past class-based oppression in the “Old Society” (Ch. jiu shehui, Tib. ءjig rten rnying pa) and their present “liberation” (Ch. jiefang) in the “New Society” (Ch. xin shehui, Tib. ءjig rten gsar pa).¹²

Yet unlike for many Chinese villagers elsewhere, or for the few local Tibetans who sought training as cadres in the new regime,¹⁵

Detail from life-size clay sculpture exhibit “Wrath of the Serfs,” Lhasa Museum of Revolution, 1976. Depicts a monk pushing a boy into a box, to bury him under a new monastery as a “sacrificial offering” (photo courtesy Clare Harris).

Oppositional Practices of Time

Of course, traumatic rupture notwithstanding, this was not a case, as some more romantic notions of popular “memory” versus rational “history” would have it, of an unself-conscious people finally becoming aware of history and thus entering (voluntarily or not) the “modern” world (i.e., Nora 1989; cf. Kansteiner 2001:183). Tibetologists have noted the centuries-old avid interest of Tibetan scholars in a wide variety of historiographic genres, a preoccupation that distinguished them from their models in Indian literary traditions (Van der Kuijp 1996:40; cf. Gyatso 1996; Robinson 1996).¹⁹

“Speaking bitterness” meetings on grasslands west of Labrang, c. 1958. American writer Anna Louise Strong took these from an exhibit in Beijing. Captions are from her pro-CCP book, Tibetan Interviews (1959).

In fact, Tibetans' reverence for life-writing exemplifies a fundamental orientation of selves and agencies to time and space that was operative among Tibetans in Labrang, and which I argue crucially structured their alternative “mnemonic communities” (Kansteiner 2002:189) under Chinese rule. Tibetan accounts described the lives of individuals presented almost exclusively as acting according to Mahayana Buddhist principles of altruism, and, as fully enlightened persons, their lives were meant as models for others (Gyatso 1998: 103).²¹

In Labrang, the central role of the famous Geluk sect monastery meant that the most exemplary of individuals were incarnate lamas or trulkus (Tib. sprul sku)—men considered to be incarnations of deities or previously enlightened lamas. As such, they were quintessential Tibetan historical agents. As enlightened beings, trulkus' life stories construct the biographical person as grounded in the absolute time of the pure Buddha Dharma (Tib. chos) while he, in order to aid sentient beings trapped there, intentionally inhabits successive mortal bodies within the relative time of karmically conditioned history. Importantly, this altruistic positioning between absolute and relative time and space is what leant incarnate lamas awesome and ultimately unintentioned power over the mundane world of karmic causation (Tib. ءjig rten), and hence it was the basis of their charisma for locals and of their authority to guide and to teach (cf. Keane 1997:11). For Tibetans in the Labrang region, selves were fundamentally constructed in a Buddhist cosmology through their worship of lamas.

The last of Labrang's ruling trulkus who reached adulthood before CCP intervention was the fifth Jamyang Shepa. The main Tibetan biography for him, written by the lama scholar Shabdrong tshang (1896–1960) in the early 1950s,²²

Shabdrong's erasure of such a pivotal event for Chinese state historiography in his life story of Labrang's main lama exemplifies a Tibetan “oppositional practice of time” (Mueggler 2001:7) that had arguably emerged since the monastery was founded in symbiosis with the ascendant Qing dynasty in this frontier zone. Crucially, such life stories were not presented as “myth.” Instead, they often leant the narrative force of eyewitness to strong claims to historical truth; their practical efficacy for local Tibetan readers or listeners depended on this historicity (Gyatso 1998:9).²³

Images of local trulkus and deities for sale in Labrang street market. Largest photos: left: Gongtang; right: current Jamyang Shepa, a layman, Summer 1993 (photo by the author).

The Said and the Unsaid: Displacing Tibetan Agency

In mid-1990s Labrang, these interpretive politics and the violence that constituted them just a few decades earlier heavily structured both the said and the unsaid—in everyday interactions, as well as in dealings with foreign researchers like myself. Under the Chinese Communist party regimes of the post-Mao “reform and opening up” period (Ch. gaige kaifang), the official media of memory in Tibetan regions still insisted, under pain of arrest and interrogation, on the basic historiographic parameters laid out in Maoist “speaking bitterness” narratives.²⁴

In this light, the full import of Ama Drolma's temporal opposition to my request for an “oral history” interview in 1995 becomes clearer. She insisted that she was too young to “know history,” yet she was born in the early 1940s, several years before the People's Liberation Army (PLA) marched in and “liberated” Labrang. She lived her adult life under Chinese rule. Thus against our use of the Tibetan term for “history,” “lo rgyus,” which recalled its recent redefinition as a gloss for the Chinese “lishi,” Ama Drolma insisted on referring lo rgyus to a time, emphasized in her repetition of the time-word “early, early, early,” well before Chinese Communist intervention in Labrang, when the region was under the authority of what elders commonly referred to as bla ma dpon po, (Tibetan) lamas and lay male leaders. In this way, she erased the Maoist years as narratable “history,” referring narrative agency to old men, those traditionally charged with transmitting local lore, and thereby avoiding the danger of testifying to her personal experiences therein.

Ama Drolma and other elders who refused in similar ways to be interviewed about recent history no doubt had a range of personal motives for doing so.²⁶

When I finally gave up my attempt to explicitly control the type of historical narrative locals produced, I was able to appreciate not an objective flow of events to which Tibetans were mere witnesses, but the particular ways in which differently positioned locals actively imagined, and thereby helped to constitute, the structuring power of the state in their lives past and present, even as some explicitly resisted it (cf. Mueggler 2001:4). Importantly, the main elements of these processes were pervasive among Tibetans, regardless of their positioning vis-à-vis the new regime in the transition years. As I myself, in order to participate, began to partake of the categories structuring the life stories Tibetans offered, I shared in an on-going process by which Tibetans appropriated the narrative forms and historiographic premises of the “speaking bitterness” discourse genre to construct alternative arrangements of selves, agencies, and moralities in space and time, often doing this even if their accounts were not posed in conscious opposition to official histories.

As we have seen, the socialist transformation of Labrang was not a simple process of cadres giving locals a self-consciousness where none existed. Instead it amounted to an imposition, simultaneous with many rural Tibetans' experiences of radical disenfranchisement, of new socialist realist metalinguistic practices through new media of memory that were deployed to usurp existing ones. Marxist historiography in Maoist practice required people to express themselves as radically social; that is they were to see themselves as constituted exclusively by historical forces immanent to socioeconomic structure (Dirlik 1978:9; Unger 1993:2). Their representations of self-process were thus expected to strictly imitate observable, “material” changes in social relations, that is, class conflict, that inevitably moved forward towards socialism.

Perhaps the crudest forms of usurping media of memory beginning in 1958 in Labrang simply involved replacing one central chronotope for another in local practice, such as replacing tantric representations of lamas and deities with realist depictions of Mao in the honored high places on household and meeting hall walls (cf. Harris 1999:120) (see figure 4).²⁹

Importantly, “speaking bitterness” narratives have been state officials' response of choice in the face of Tibetans' oppositional practices in public spaces up to the present.³⁰

But the stark polarities of subjects and motivations generated by the use of such stories and resistance to them can obscure the painfully subtle mutual constitution of state and local subjectivities that actually shaped socialist transformation in Labrang, as well as Tibetans' memories of it decades later. For one thing, by the 1990s Tibetans widely assumed the (limited) validity of a social-scientific time-space posited in Marxist historiography. The almost exclusive focus among Tibetans on life-stories of enlightened individuals had given ground to widespread acceptance of the idea that ordinary people's lives revealed important information about the nature of society,³²

Yet I also found that through the subtle processes of language choice in everyday talk, locals also persistently set themselves apart from the socialist realist time-space introduced by the Chinese communists. In my conversations about their pasts with elders variously positioned vis-à-vis the state, all would regularly insert Chinese loanwords in otherwise Tibetan language talk for events and concepts indexing major spatiotemporal changes during the socialist transformation of Labrang. The type and frequency of loanwords varied with a narrators' status in relation to the state. Rural Tibetans most often inserted words for the spatial organization of the commune system and its leadership, such as dui (team), dadui (brigade) and she (commune). Cadres and former cadres used more, inserting Chinese terms for major events especially, such as jiefang (liberation 1949) and panluan (Tibetan rebellion 1958). In the case of one elderly Tibetan man, a retired highly placed county party official, in the midst of a long Tibetan language conversation about local custom, he switched to Chinese completely to describe his career as a state cadre during the transition years.

On the Sino-Tibetan frontier, such unconscious language shifts are themselves historical markers; they are echoes of encounters with a state discourse that was imposed in Chinese by Han officials in opposition to local Tibetan discourses. In the words of Ochs and Capps, “as narrators shift between [linguistic] codes they iconically represent the radical displacements that define their life history” (1996:27; cf. Hill 1995). Indeed many of the local Tibetans who went on to play important roles in the new regime in Labrang, including the party official just mentioned, were those who had secular, Chinese language education prior to the Communist victory,³³

Constructing Spaces of Memory

Traces of the alternative histories embedded in unconscious language choice could be encountered throughout public spaces in post-Mao Labrang. But conscious alternative historiography was relegated to private (Tib. sger) frameworks, refigured in contradistinction to state-mediated public spaces first imposed in the 1950s. This largely meant conversations kept within a network of trusted familiars in the informal gathering places of households and monks' quarters. This was strikingly apparent in my conversations with Apa Dondrup (age fifty) and his wife Ama Deji (age fifty-four), farmers in one of the main villages. They did not tell me detailed stories of their experiences of the Maoist years until many months into our friendship. Then, as we sat comfortably next to their stove and ate one day, they emphasized how the first mandatory meetings under CCP auspices were held in 1958 in their village manikhang, the small temple and communal space devoted to the invocation of village protector deities originally tamed to the service of Buddhism by Jamyang Shepa. In their subsequent description of the meetings, both Apa Dondrup and Ama Deji used only the new label given to those spaces at that time—zhungkhang, or state/public meeting halls.

Before they were all destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, the zhungkhang were focal points for state-local encounters during “Democratic Reforms” in the 1950s, centers for the rapid re-spatialization of the valley's population into militarily loyal collectives (i.e, “production teams,” shengchan dui, and “production brigades,” shengchan dadui) working state-arbitrated public property (Tib. gzhung, Ch. gongjia) for the public good.³⁵

Importantly, many elders across the community narrated this period as a time when state and local agents suddenly acted according to motives inexplicable at the time, a time when all villagers knew that survival in the face of public pressure to reconstitute themselves on narrative premises they did not understand required a drastic split between narrating and narrated selves, between the heart (Tib. khog, sems) and the mouth (Tib. kha).³⁶

In the 1990s then, the shift from Maoist attacks on inter-household ties and the consequent extreme dependence on the state to inter-household competition in the reform era market economy had heightened the insularity of household and village groupings in Labrang.³⁷

In this context, I could not help but enter Tibetans' private conversations about the past at the highly charged juncture of two historiographic genres—elders' traditional oral transmission of local lore (cf. Briggs 1986:83) and the more recently emergent genre of oppositional testimony to “foreigners” (Tib. phyi rgyal pa), a racialized category of favored alien others that Tibetans used to refer to white people they assumed to be both highly educated and sympathetic to Tibetans. For many elders, a foreigner who spoke Tibetan was a powerfully therapeutic opportunity—in the midst of a sense of local distrust and ignorance to speak to such a high status outsider about their pasts. Amnye Gompo, a well-respected village patriarch and former monk in his seventies, agreed to tape an interview with me (one of only two elders, both men, who did) largely due to his great pride in being asked to talk about local lo rgyus, associated for him, as it was for Ama Drolma, with a time safely prior to Chinese intervention.³⁸

Living Oppositional Testimony

The most intense (and dangerous) conversations were those in which certain elders took the opportunity of an apparently well-meaning foreign listener to offer bitter stories of the suffering they experienced and witnessed during the Maoist years. The powerful expectations of and almost compulsive need for oppositional testimony hit home for me when many elders launched with great emotion, even tears, into such stories upon learning I spoke Tibetan, and with little introduction to me, sometimes before I had even expressed an interest in local history at all.³⁹

These encounters, as I discovered, were not at all a matter of a simple “liberation” of a repressed, monolithic “Tibetan” voice. Instead, as narrators recruited me to participate in their narratives, knowing that I moved through the community talking with a variety of people, I found myself awkwardly caught up in a bitter class politics among Tibetans. This I would argue was the most profound of the hidden legacies of the Maoist years in Labrang, differentiating Tibetans in the 1990s in ways not accounted for in “speaking bitterness” depictions of class struggle. As Ann Anagnost and others have pointed out, those narratives sought to constitute villagers as first and foremost class subjects; they were part and parcel of the class-labeling process that simultaneously marked locals' most important social status in the new regime and posited it as the locus of deepest inherent conflict (1994:263; cf. Hershatter 2001). For Tibetans in Labrang, this was as alien a concept as it was for most Han villagers, expressed by an awkward neologism that directly follows the Chinese, gral rim 'thab rtsol for jieji douzheng, itself a neologism directly glossing the English, “class struggle” (Shakya 1994:160).⁴¹

Mao of course radically reworked Marx's notion of class in his efforts to apply it to rural China (cf. Dirlik 1978; Anagnost 1994). When the rote forms of class struggle were angrily implemented in the Labrang region, this meant not delineating the owners of the means of production, but subsuming the intricacies of ethnic difference under a schema of economic difference by associating all forms of lay and monastic wealth with the feudal exploitation of “serfs” (Tib. mi ser). In this framework, all types of high social status, such as that of lamas, or anti-state resistance, such as that of local Tibetan men who took to the hills in 1958, could be assimilated to an economic model of exploitation regardless of actual personal wealth, and locals found themselves interacting as members of “classes,” from serf-owning landlords and their agents, to rich and middle class traders, farmers, and nomads to the small percentage identified as poor serfs (cf. Dhondup Choedon 1978:32). These last, including women and former monks, were among the first Tibetans that Han work-teams cultivated, and throughout Tibetan regions they were among the first Tibetans, voluntarily or not, to “speak bitterness” against local Tibetans identified as “class enemies” (ibid.).

Those elders who risked the political dangers and chose to narrate to me dissenting testimonials of that time—twenty-five of a total sixty—were those who felt themselves to have been grievously victimized in this process, either targeted and attacked as class enemies, or as farmers and nomads at the time they found themselves at the bottom of a practical chain of command that left them powerless to resist change.⁴²

Thus, in the very regular forms such narratives took, in the patterns discernible in both the said and the unsaid, I could glimpse the emotional toll such unresolved violence had taken on the entire Tibetan community. The burden of the Maoist years in Labrang was fundamentally an ongoing contest over the nature of human agency and morality. I came to realize that the unspeakable among Tibetans was not just the product of state repression; it was also a marker of locals' grapplings with the nature of their own and other Tibetans' agency in (and responsibility for) the unprecedented shape and scope of violence beginning in 1958. Bolstered by public evidence of their contemporary Buddhist piety,⁴³

In this light, perhaps the loudest silences within these oppositional testimonies make more sense. Of all these accounts, only a very few came close to describing the actual content of public “struggle” sessions or “speaking bitterness” accusations, and no narrator mentioned the Chinese names or goals of campaigns nor explicitly reiterated any fragment of Marxist ideology. On one hand, given the massive quantities of Marxist media (in Chinese and in Tibetan translation) imposed on the valley beginning in the 1950s,⁴⁴

Instead, elders' dissenting accounts dialogued by implication with those of “speaking bitterness” class struggle sessions. They did this by asserting a very different chronology of pivotal events that reversed the moral consequences of revolution, ignoring 1949 and making 1958, the very year “speaking bitterness” sessions were introduced, the point of historical rupture leading to unprecedented fear and suffering.⁴⁶

Contending with Father State

In striking contrast to official historiography, the discursive power of 1958 in elders' oppositional accounts was such that events prior to that time under Communist rule were obscured, barely mentioned at all. Thus, their accounts repudiated the retrospective posited in “speaking bitterness” stories they heard that year which claimed the benevolent, didactic nature of the state's intervention in the valley since 1949. Instead, these elders tended to associate the arrival of the Chinese state with the overthrow of the monastery and forced reorganization of their lives in 1958. Indeed, throughout these conversations, and in many other contexts, Tibetans widely depicted the Chinese state as a unitary, radically alien and uncannily powerful paternal agent—Apa Gongjia, Father State. As Eric Mueggler has recently argued, understanding the process by which locals imagine their relationships to state agents, especially in the case of ethnic others within the PRC, is essential for grasping the practical efficacy of state projects locally, despite the actually fragmentary and variable nature of state institutions and their capacities to control subjects over space and time (2001:4; cf. Anagnost 1994; 1998).

The arrival of Apa Gongjia as a fearsome colonizing agent thus is the threshold to which all uses in these stories of the contrasting time words “before” (Tib. sngan na, sngon chad) or “in the past” (Tib. nyin dus) versus “now” (Tib. da) or “nowadays” (Tib. dengseng) referred. The dignified Apa Denzin, seventy-seven-years old and a former monk servant of a high status trulku, had traveled widely as a trader then and after he left monkhood in 1945 upon his lama's death. Despite all the change this cosmopolitan man had seen during his adult years before CCP intervention, his stories over several conversations were always punctuated with the stark temporal contrasts of “before” versus “now.” He would eventually tell me about being labeled a wealthy trader and “struggled” as a class enemy in his village, but he framed our first conversation by asserting that nothing changed until Apa Gongjia came (Tib. Apa Gongjia thon dang), and he insisted on explicitly teaching me this phrase for the Chinese Communist state: “we say ’Apa Gongjia.'” By then though, I had been routinely and unconsciously referring to Father State in casual conversation for months.

Apa Gongjia was a particularly important protagonist in elders' oppositional testimony. In those narratives, he actively “arrives” (from elsewhere) in exactly the same way Chinese Communist campaigns do; narrators used the same active verb and past tense complement for an action consciously undertaken, thon dang, to describe both Apa Gongjia and events glossed in speech as “'58” (Tib. lnga brgyad lo) or with Chinese loanwords: “Wenhua Da Geming” (Cultural Revolution). “When Apa Gongjia arrived,” said Ama Deji, describing events that did not occur until 1958, “we had to cut off our headdresses or else we were accused of clinging to old ways of thinking (Tib. bsam pa rnying pa).”⁴⁸

Akhu Jamyang, a seventy-year-old monk scholar in the monastery who told me his life story only under conditions of great secrecy, recalled how in 1958 Buddhist texts and images were destroyed. When I asked who did the destroying, he replied, “The Chinese,” and his young lay male student clarified, “Apa Gongjia destroyed them” (Tib. Apa Gongjia gis bshigs dang). Similarly, Ama Gazang, a sixty-eight-year-old village woman and wife of a retired Tibetan party cadre, and her friend Ama Dukar began their account of the collectives established in 1958 with the common observation that there was no food at that time. When I asked why, Ama Gazang replied matter-of-factly, “because Apa Gongjia confiscated all the produce” (Tib. hanebo Apa Gongjia gis moshui byas dang). The two women then went on to describe the hard work required in their “production team” (in Chinese, shengchan dui), mentioning no other active agent and depicting themselves as having been passive participants. Ama Dukar described how they were forbidden to worship at the monastery and had to do farm work all day long, opening up “wastelands” (she used the Chinese kaihuang) by plowing new fields on high grassland plateaus. Finally, the sense of a sudden loss of vital agency among local Tibetans in 1958, which is still felt today, was perhaps most poignantly emphasized in the narrative of a forty-eight-year-old professional. He ended his anguished account in Chinese of the waves of “movements” (Ch. yundong) that came through Labrang, not with the seeming resolution offered by Deng Xiaoping's post-Mao reforms in the 1980s, but by recounting a friend's 1958 suicide at the age of twenty, just after the monastery was closed and the first communes were established.

Thus, the hybrid form of the phrase “Apa Gongjia” for the Chinese Communist State encapsulates well local Tibetans' struggles to account for the radically altered time-space introduced in the 1958 campaigns, as well as for the new premises for human agency that transformation entailed. By attaching “Apa,” the local Tibetan term of respectful address for lay male familiars of one's father's generation, to the Chinese loanword for public property and hence the state (gongjia), elders effectively condensed into one agent powerful, yet abstract and dispersed disciplinary forces, anthropomorphizing them so as to recognize both their Chinese origins and their appropriation by Tibetans.⁵⁰

In the context of oppositional accounts told in private spaces, the term “Apa Gongjia” refers, through safer forms of implication, to a scathing critique of the Chinese state. Contrary to claims made in “speaking bitterness” narratives that the ordinary “masses” were the primary subjects of the revolution and owners of communal property, elders' use of the name Apa Gongjia recognized the otherness and the primary subjectivity of the Chinese state in the transition. The use of the Chinese loanword does this, but the choice of that word—“public property”—also sarcastically reduces the state's main goals to its will to confiscate Tibetans' private possessions, and by extension the markers of their ethnic difference. Further, by referring to this usurping ethnic other as a familiar father figure and head of a lay household,⁵¹

Perhaps most importantly, the name Apa Gongjia allowed elders to construct a certain type of powerful agent in relation to themselves in the past and the present. By persistently referring to Father State as a conscious, active agent in the virtual absence of any other named protagonists, elders asserted that the ultimate responsibility for the trauma they experienced lay far away from the Labrang locality, with the central Party leaders sending policies down to local cadres. Indeed “Gongjia” also operated in everyday Tibetan speech as a gloss for the Communist Party. And crucially, as Apa Denzin's remark above makes clear, for elder narrators of oppositional stories of the Maoist years, Father State as an actively dominating agent was a continuing presence. Against contemporary official historiography that relegated “mistakes” of the past to the actions of a few named party leaders during the circumscribed period of the Cultural Revolution, the name Apa Gongjia indexes a refusal to name specific leaders,⁵²

In elders' narratives of Maoist violence, Apa Gongjia reveals their awareness of the awesome might of the state in the public imaginary past and present, and their resolve that the violence was thus fundamentally state violence. Apa Gongjia's incomprehensible motives reduce to arbitrary and amoral social domination and impart impunity to his agents for outrageous violence. Ama Dorje, seventy-one, and the wife of Apa Denzin, told me that she was arrested with her husband in Lhasa in 1959 and spent four months in prison before being trucked back to Labrang to work in the communes. She said that before she returned, one of her younger brothers was among the many Tibetan men executed by firing squad (in Chinese, qiangbi) for resisting land reforms. I asked why they executed him, and she ventured only, “I don't know, it was Apa Gongjia, you know” (Tib. mi shes gi, Apa Gongjia red mo).

In the telling, the might of Apa Gongjia as an agent also empties local Tibetans of agency. Thus as against the gross embodiment of class victims described in “speaking bitterness” narratives, the vast majority of elder's dissenting accounts focused on violations of their embodied selves under Father State. People tended to enumerate such events, emphasizing numbers of times their property was confiscated, or they or relatives were arrested or struggled against. Finally, most narrators who had been villagers at the time highlighted the pervasive physical victimization of the majority of Tibetan locals in the unprecedented famine that accompanied confiscations and collectivization in the early 1960s. One of the most widespread narrative elements in these stories was the weed broth (Tib. ldum bu) that Tibetans had to eat in communal kitchens. Ama Gazang, demonstrating how the soup was made from scraps of vegetable leaves and barely edible wild weeds, and looking to her friend Ama Dukar for confirmation, insisted that then “everyone was hungry,” and she repeated again and again that many many people died. Ama Dukar emphasized that many children died as well, and described how everyone's face swelled with malnutrition. All of this, and they still had to work incessantly in the fields.

Negotiating Local Dilemmas and Class Hatred

But their focus on such physical suffering of “everyone” at that time and the narrative clarity afforded by the figure of Apa Gongjia as the conscious agent responsible for it, was not enough to remedy elders' deep ambivalence in accounting for new divisions among Tibetans then and the consequent moral dilemmas that period still raised. As Bakhtin put it, narrators of histories observe the past from their “own unresolved and still evolving contemporaneity” (1981:255). Ama Gazang's situation illustrates this particularly well. Her embittered stories of the famine were framed by other remarks about her fear and anger about being old, isolated by her relatives, and uncertain in what she considered to be the social chaos and moral flux of newly market-oriented Labrang. She was always lamenting that she and her husband had no children and survived only on the small pension he received as a retired party cadre. But she never admitted that her present anxieties were fundamentally shaped by the moral predicament produced by her husband's participation as a lishaypa in the Maoist regime and by his ongoing impunity.

How to account for local Tibetans' own involvement in Maoist violence was a quandary that faced all elders. In many stories, the figure of Apa Gongjia allowed for a therapeutic polarization of state versus local subjectivities in the violence. Apa Sangye, a retired trader of seventy-one who proudly told me of his close relationship to the family of Labrang's ruling lama before he was imprisoned in 1958, described with great disgust the day he and his wife were secretly circumambulating the monastery in the late 1960s and watched as Tibetan villagers “happily” tore down monastic buildings. He sardonically imitated them by raising his open hands in the air and dancing around as he sat (figure 6). But he was also careful to say that such ordinary people, the wesang (Tib. besang), were not responsible for those actions (Tib. khag med gi)—they had to do what Apa Gongjia and the lishaypa said. In his case, he emphasized that one of the main Tibetan lishaypa and “activists” (in Chinese, jijifenzi) responsible for confiscating all of his household's possessions in 1958 was none other than a granddaughter of Labrang's revered ruling family, his erstwhile intimates.⁵⁴

Ruins of a hermitage destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Labrang, Spring 1995 (photo by the author).

Thus despite rhetorical recourse to Apa Gongjia, narrators of such oppositional accounts were acutely aware of the role of Tibetan cadres as agents of Chinese state-constituted violence during the Maoist years. Their depictions of them posited a deep, binary social division that amounted to an oppositional class politics in contemporary Labrang. Contrary to the expedient class labels given to a wide variety of Tibetans as “exploiters” of the “serfs” and deployed in accusatory speaking bitterness narratives, elders reclassified subjects of the narratives, inverting the moral roles of accuser and accused and asserting a fundamentally hierarchical relationship between exploiting lishaypa (state cadres) and exploited wesang (local “ordinary” lay people, across farming and nomad regions and regardless of previous economic status).⁵⁵

This choice was the benchmark for elders' judgments about the extent of locals' participation in the state, past and present. When they referred to Apa Gongjia as an object in their sentences, it was for this purpose, as a measure of conscious, contemporary loyalties. As Ama Luji put it when angrily describing the Tibetan party secretary of their district, a man she said who had joined the PLA in the early 1950s and had helped to guide Chinese troops to Tibetan guerrillas in the mountains around Labrang, “He really likes Apa Gongjia” (Tib. apa gongjia a hon da dga' gi). Importantly, these elders interpreted this division in state versus local loyalties as fundamentally manifest not in ethnicity, but in ongoing class exploitation. In effect, in our conversations, elders appropriated the terms of the Marxist socioeconomic analysis first introduced in “speaking bitterness” narratives and, in both explicit and implicit ways, asserted perhaps the most damning of their criticisms: that the impunity provided by the brute might of Apa Gongjia allowed Tibetan lishaypa to continue to profit from the violent expropriation of the wesang that had begun in 1958.

Many of these elders depicted Tibetan lishaypa in 1958 gleefully dividing amongst themselves confiscated clothing, money, and jewelry, avoiding manual labor and eating well during the famine by beating starving villagers and confiscating their produce for the “commune.” For them, these accounts resonated strongly with their perception that those who had served the state well then continued to live well in the present, while they themselves struggled to afford butter. In urbanizing Labrang of the mid-1990s, where high inflation and the market economy required cash income for the purchase of everyday necessities, not to mention newly available luxury commodities, elders like Ama Luji consistently framed their stories of the Maoist years with angry assertions about how rich lishaypa were now, while the wesang had no recourse at all (Tib. bkod pa med). Indeed, at that time some of the nicest homes I had ever been in were those built by Tibetan party cadres after the reforms. But by 2002, village elders' estimates of the huge cash salaries and pensions given to local Tibetan lishaypa did not reflect the diminishing economic power of Tibetan state cadres relative to private businessmen. By then, elderly villagers' angry stories of binary class exploitation worked to simplify and to make sense of an increasingly complex situation in which, once again, they felt the nature of human agents and their moral responsibilities to be greatly in flux.

Ama Gazang, then, was in a particularly difficult position vis-à-vis the past and the present. Since she was married to a retired lishaypa who many insisted had been one of those who confiscated produce and beat villagers during the famine, her own angry and very detailed stories about witnessing “bad” Tibetan cadres doing this could have been indirectly condemning her own husband.⁵⁶

Conclusion: Reconstituting Trulku Space-Time and Karmic Justice

Tibetans in Labrang in the mid-1990s were variously positioned vis-à-vis the revitalized monastic community and state institutions amidst the rapid flux and intensifying inequity of a market economy. As they gradually recruited me to participate in the structures of their everyday lives, I came to realize how certain elders' dissenting narratives of the Maoist years were an important part of a much larger Tibetan “oppositional practice of time” in which Tibetans across the community and across generations were engaged. I was not the only one hearing oppositional testimonials in the Labrang region. Such stories circulated widely among Tibetans as second- and third-hand accounts from children and grandchildren, or as un-sourced legend. But elders' choice to narrate versions to me in the midst of our broad-ranging conversations about their lives highlighted the persistently antagonistic dialogue between discourses premised on clashing, moralizing logics of space and time, despite the threatening dominance of official historiography.

In the context of great political danger associated with speaking to a foreigner, elders' alternative “speaking bitterness” testimony powerfully worked to disclaim the “autobiographical pact” to which they had all presumably testified during Maoist class struggle, replacing it with the conviction of their contemporary narrating selves. As we have seen, this was not a process of mere substitutions of narrative elements. Instead, the shared terms of their oppositional testimony circumscribed the efficacy of the state and effectively distanced their contemporary selves from its narrative premises. Unlike the vast majority of my interactions with local Tibetans, elders' dissenting first-person testimonials were limited, like Maoist “speaking bitterness” narratives, to social and thus radically secular spatiotemporal terms. In this, these stories were distinguished from and subordinated, often in the same conversation, to other, more predominant discourse genres in which space and time expanded to include other possibilities for efficacious power that overwhelmed state-sponsored socialist realism with its own realness and encompassing morality.

In fact, the truth claims of elders' oppositional testimony about the Maoist years were fundamentally linked to theirs and others' faith (Tib. dad pa) in the opposing historicity of the Buddha Dharma, as manifest especially in the power of local trulkus. Indexing the failure of cadres' attempts in the 1950s and 1960s to substitute the charisma of Mao Zedong for that of Tibetan lamas, as far as I know there are no stories among Tibetans about the supernatural (or better, supersocial) powers of Apa Gongjia. As against the highly intentioned and thus arbitrary coercive force of Apa Gongjia, elders were much more interested in registering their awed amazement (Tib. ya mtshar) in recounting local lore about the fundamentally unintentioned and thus objectively transcendant power of Tibetan lamas over time and space.⁵⁷

When trulkus reinhabited Labrang monastery in the early 1980s, most villagers and nomads quickly reoriented themselves to them as their supporting patron communities (Tib. lha sde), even before the collectives were completely disbanded. I would argue that the massive appeal of this move for local Tibetans was the opportunity to publicly relocate moral agencies in the knowable space and time of a Buddhist cosmology. As enlightened beings and community leaders centered in the monastery, lamas animated and arbitrated the karmic historical world of moral justice. Elders like Apa Dondrup most often referred to this concept with the compound jundray (Tib. rgyu 'bras), which constructed individuals' actions as causes (rgyu) that inevitably produced just effects ('bras) within and across lifetimes. For him, the split between the “old society” and the new under Chinese rule was characterized by a fundamental loss of jundray in the legal arbitrations of authorities. As people nearing the ends of their lives, I found that Tibetan elders' stories of Maoist violence were framed in their ongoing karmic preparations for death and transmigration. As Ama Luji explained, proudly showing me her elaborate altar lined with offerings placed in front of images of local trulkus and deities, “in Buddhism you must do good things like this, or else after you die your soul (Tib. rnam shes) has no place to go” (figure 5).

For those who lived with the impunity of Apa Gongjia and Tibetan lishaypa for the violence of socialist transformation in Labrang, the inevitability of death was associated with the inevitability of karmic justice. Crucially, trulkus were not necessarily direct and conscious arbiters of this justice, but in their capacity as embodiments of the Dharma, they could see, and thus witness to, the inerasable karmic fruits of any individuals' good or bad deeds in the past, and provide guidance for future moral action before one died. In a way then, trulkus' very presence in the Tibetan community laid bare hidden histories of unspoken conscience, representing always the potential to distinguish those whose choices remained “honest” (Tib. drang mo, lit. “straight,” indexing a straight line between heart and mouth/speech) during the Maoist years from those whose choices did not. Thus, like several others who told oppositional stories about that time, Ama Luji's smile was both satisfied and sarcastic when she noted that many old Tibetan party members, like Ama Gazang's husband, now quietly sought the karmic guidance of trulkus and worked hard to accumulate good merit.

But such ironic observations of cadres' public piety were not enough to assuage community rage about Maoist state violence that circulated in stories about trulkus. “Most of the Tibetan activists have died,” insisted Apa Gyalo, retired trader of seventy-five who told me that he had been horribly struggled throughout the Maoist years, and, he continued, switching to the first person plural, “we say that was jundray (karmic justice). We say that for doing such things you will die (Tib. shi ‘gro dgos).” I had heard, in other conversations, stories passionately told about the circumstances of their deaths. According to my lay male friend Kazang and his young monk nephew, neither of whom had personally experienced Maoist violence, when the great trulku Gongtang was finally released from prison in 1979 and returned to Labrang, locals responsible for violence against the monastery, its monks, and lamas, began to die horrible deaths, deaths which they described in gory detail as the slow torture of unexplained illnesses. This they interpreted as due to the wrath of Gongtang.

Such stories of karmic retribution in the presence of trulkus most vividly pitted the locally grounded empowerment of Tibetan trulkus against the alien force of the Chinese state. The graphic terms of unmerited bodily violence introduced in Maoist “speaking bitterness” stories are here reworked to describe the inevitable, karmically wrought sufferings of a Buddhist hell. In the tense political environment of reform-era Labrang, where state officials hopefully constructed Tibetan Buddhism as a benign aspect of ethnic custom and a profitable tourist spectacle, “history” was anything but a static collective story, for locals and state officials alike. Instead, as my narrative participation both triggered and foreclosed Tibetans' representations of the traumas of socialist transformation, I came to see that alternative historiography among Tibetans was an ongoing interpretive battle—with themselves as well as with the state. In the face of increasing socioeconomic inequality among Tibetans and a generation gap they feared would erase their memories among the young, elders' private counter-narratives of the past vigorously posited a radically different social and moral world from that of Maoist historiography, a world in which the Chinese Communist revolution united honest and pious lay Tibetans as exploited wesang, while the transcendent witness of trulkus both revealed and adjudicated the truly unspeakable—the un-redressed state violence of local lishaypa.