World Tibet Network News Thursday, February 12, 1998

London, Feb 12 (TIN) - An internal 120-page report has been leaked from China which says that Chinese policies in the early 1960s led to mass arrests, political executions and widespread starvation in Tibet.

A copy of the report, written by the 10th Panchen Lama and referred to by Tibetans as the "70,000 Character Petition", is being published today by the Tibet Information Network (TIN), an independent news organsiation based in London.

The report, widely considered as the most important text in modern Tibetan history, is being published for the first time in the original Chinese with a translation in English. The text has never been seen before outside inner Party circles in China, where only a handful of copies are thought to exist.

"There has been an evident and severe reduction in the present-day Tibetan population," says the report, written in 1962, which said the famines, executions and mass deaths in prisons were "a great threat to the continued existence of the Tibetan nationality, which is sinking into a state close to death."

The report, written by the Panchen Lama when he was head of the Tibetan government and the highest religious leader remaining in the country after the flight of the Dalai Lama to India three years earlier, expresses fears that Chinese policies at the time could lead to the eradication of religion and threaten the existence of Tibetans as a distinct people.

The death of the 10th Panchen Lama in January 1989 led to a war of words between the Dalai Lama and the Chinese leadership, both of whom in 1995 recognised different children as the Panchen's reincarnation.

Yesterday Xinhua announced that the child recognised by the Chinese state as the 11th Panchen Lama had been taken to visit a Beijing monastery yesterday, a rare public showing to mark the anniversary of his predecessor's death on 28th January and of his own birthday, which falls on 13th February when he will be eight years old. The child recognised by the Dalai Lama and most TIbetans as the new Panchen Lama was taken into protective custody by the Chinese in May 1995 and has not been seen since.

- "Poisoned Arrow" -

The 70,000 Character Petition of 1962 is believed to be the most extensive known internal criticism of the Party, and Mao Zedong is said to have described it as "a poisoned arrow shot at the Party by reactionary feudal overlords". It was later judged to have exceeded the criticism levelled at the party in the famous 10,000 character letter of General Peng Dehuai, which led to his downfall in 1959.

"No Chinese, and certainly no other leader of a national minority, had dared to challenge Communist policies so fundamentally within the PRC since its founding in 1949 as the Panchen Lama did in 1962 and 1987," writes Professor Dawa Norbu, an authority on Tibetan history and on Third World nationalism, in an introduction to the report. "It thus acquires added significance in the post-Communist era and specifically in the context of widespread speculation about the future of Tibet," he adds.

The Panchen Lama wrote his petition at the age of 24, ignoring advice from his teachers and advisers not to submit the document - although they persuaded him to soften the criticism by including long passages praising the principles of Marxist ideology. The rest of the text criticises the indiscriminate killings during the 1959 uprising, the imprisonment of thousands of Tibetans in labour camps, the starvation suffered by Tibetans as a result of the Great Leap Forward, and the threat to Tibetan Buddhism and culture from Chinese policies.

"The sweet dew [of religious teaching] has dried up... knowledge is not being passed on, there is worry about there being no training for new people, and so we see the elimination of Buddhism, which was flourishing in Tibet... this is something which I and more than 90% of Tibetans cannot endure," he wrote in the report.

Two years after the report was submitted, the Panchen Lama was condemned without trial as an enemy of the people and of the party, and spent most of the following 14 years in prison or under house arrest.

In 1987, nine years after his release from prison, the Panchen Lama said in an internal meeting of Tibetan scholars that in the 70,000 Character Petition he had understated the scale of the atrocities: "In my petition I mentioned that about 5% of the population had been imprisoned. According to my information at that time, it was between 10 and 15%. But I would have died under thamzing [struggle session] if I had stated the real figure".

The debate about Chinese policy in Tibet is still continuing, with many Tibetans now claiming that their language and customs are again under threat, this time from modernisation and state-encouraged migration. "If there is no national language and other characteristics then there can be no continued existence and development of the nationality," wrote the Panchen Lama in 1962.

Twenty-five years later he succeeded in ensuring that a law was passed in Tibet which made Tibetan the official language, but there were widespread reports last year that officials were initiating moves to overturn policies giving preference to Tibetan language and culture.