Ear Eastern economic Review - December 19, 1996

By Matt Forney in Beijing

Eighteen years alone in a prison cell affords plenty of time to think. Some prisoners fill notebooks with denunciatory screeds. Some re-enact every moment of their lives. Others go mad. Phuntsok Wanggyal spent his time perfecting a theory that he swore would revolutionize modem astronomy. Most people lumped him in with the lunatics. Now, they may have to change their minds.

Without even a steel-barred window from which to star-gaze, the Tibetan nationalist and amateur scientist combined Hegelian dialectics, Buddhist tenets and basic geometry to postulate something that took the Pentagon more than a decade of space exploration and $75 million to confirm: moon water. Last week, American scientists reported a frozen lake of up to 50 square kilometres embedded deep in a crater on the dark side of the moon.

"I knew it even in prison," says Phunwang-as he prefers to be known-after reading a Chinese translation of the Pentagon news item. "I knew it without so much as a telescope. They could have read my articles and saved a lot of trouble." Or they could have read his book, entitled simply There Is Liquid on the Moon, published by an obscure press in Sichuan province in 1994. If the Pentagon didn't hear of his work, others have, notably Poland's national science body, which has invited Phunwang to Warsaw for a discourse on dialectics.

Phunwang's apparent redemption adds yet another chapter to the turbulent life of one of modern Tibet's most extraordinary figures. He founded the Himalayan kingdom's first communist party, independent of the Chinese communists. Me served as Chairman Mao's interpreter and chief adviser on Tibetan affairs after the 1949 revolution, and led Beijing's government in Tibet for the next nine years, then spent almost two decades in prison for the crime of "local nationalism" communist-speak for promoting Tibetan development instead of its political indoctrination. For his commitment to Tibet, Phunwang maintains the respect of even the most anti-communist Tibetans.

At 74, Phunwang's current life is the antitheses of his solitary years in Beijing's infamous Qincheng Prison, which houses the country's most sensitive political figures and was his home from 1960 to 1978. Now, Phunwang lives in a five-bedroom apartment in Beijing's elite Muxidi district, normally reserved for ministers. On his study walls hang oil reproductions depicting Russian revolutionaries shortly before execution scoffing at offers of amnesty, as well as black-and-white photographs of himself beaming with Mao Zedong.

Even the sofas tell stories. Phunwang added leg extensions to accommodate the portly figure of his frequent visitor, the late 10th Panchen Lama. The Panchen Lama, once reviled for collaborating with the communists, was loudly critical when soldiers opened fire on demonstrators in Lhasa in early 1989.

Phunwang would rather discuss his lunar theories than his interior decorating or Tibetan politics, and conversation with him soon grows weighty. "Tibetan education is based on debate," he says, "and the topic is always permanence versus impermanence. Duality versus unity." Dialectics, he reasons, are easier for Tibetans than other peoples to grasp: It's about the relationships between improbable things.

He pulls out a complex, concentric diagram with a Chinese yin-yang symbol in the centre, surrounded by hexagrams, then by a series of four rectangles which represent the four seasons. Each rectangle is divided diagonally into two right triangles, representing the flow from one season to the next. "Summer grows cooler until this point," he says, noting where the width of the summer triangle equals that of next one, "and it becomes autumn. But look-autumn retains elements of summer, albeit steadily declining."

A similar theory works in sub-particle physics, he says, as immeasurably small particles build into solid ones, into molecules, into beings, and back around again. Now comes the leap: By understanding relationships on Earth, Phunwang can project the planet's congress with the universe. Or something like that. Complexities are difficult to convey, and even his Tibetan interpreter admits confusion.

Where did all this intellectual ferment come from? Best to start from the beginning. Phunwang was conceived in revolution. In 1922, troops from a nearby warlord army scaled the Tibetan plateau and crushed an anti-Chinese insurrection that his father helped organize.

Phunwang's pregnant mother "dropped to her knees and begged the soldiers not to burn our home," he says. "They torched it anyway." Phunwang was born that year near the burned-out remains.

Phunwang left his home in eastern Tibet-now part of Sichuan province-in 1935 to study in the Kuomintang capital of Nanjing. He pored over leftist newspapers and, more importantly, read Lenin. "Lenin wrote that in conflict between nationalities, the larger is always the aggressor," he says. "I saw that Lenin's writings could save Tibet."

He fired off letters to Stalin and Mao, requesting support in taking communism to the roof of the world. With vague orders from China's communist leaders to foment revolution, Phunwang moved to Lhasa in 1943 and became a music teacher. He translated the Internationale into Tibetan, imported crates of Lenin's selected works in Chinese from a Moscow publishing house (he buried them in his father's vegetable garden), and began recruiting.

Then the Dalai Lama expelled all Chinese from Tibet in 1949, Phunwang fled with them. Later, he made his way to Yunnan province and formed an underground communist movement, which, although independent of the People's Liberation Army, reported to its commanders after they had fought their way into eastern Tibet in 1950. Phunwang returned home long enough to unearth his crates of Lenin, then helped negotiate Tibet's surrender.

After Tibet declared independence in 1958, the PLA rolled into the territory for the second time and the Dalai Lama fled into exile. Despite Phunwang's position as the highest-ranking Tibetan in the Beijing government, Mao ordered his arrest for counter-revolutionary crimes.

"For the first nine years in prison, they refused to reveal the charges," he says between sips of sweet Indian tea in his apartment. "When they finally did, I could only laugh. I said, 'Kill me if you want, but I won't speak another word.' And for the next nine years, all I did was sing a few Tibetan songs. It took two years after my release just to regain my voice.

Such tenacity has brought praise from even the Dalai Lama. "I always felt that so long as Phuntsok Wanggyal retained the confidence of Chairman Mao, there was hope for Tibet," he once wrote.

Now fully rehabilitated, Phunwang holds an honorary position in China's parliament. And he thinks he still has something to contribute to the world beyond politics. Unlike the Pentagon's discoveries, "My theories have no war-like uses," he says. "I'm just trying to save the world the trouble of orbiting space stations. All we need is the moon."