150 { China’s Quest
Indians recognized India’s long influence on Tibetan civilization. This con-
tributed to a spontaneous eruption of sympathy for the Tibet uprising of
March 1959. Indian media and politicians strongly sympathized with the
Tibetan uprising and condemned the brutal PLA repression. Indian Prime
Minister Jawaharlal Nehru tried to moderate this criticism, but he also
accommodated it to a degree. Nehru welcomed the Dalai Lama into India,
granted him refugee status, and established camps in Indian frontier regions
for refugees from Tibet. Over the next several years, these camps would be-
come bases of support for ongoing armed and CIA-assisted Tibetan resist-
ance to Chinese rule in Tibet.
The CCP viewed the Tibetan uprising as an attempt by the land owning
Tibetan ruling class to uphold their system of exploitation and domina-
tion, thereby preventing the “liberation” of the Tibetan laboring class by the
Chinese Communist Party. But how was it possible that so many people in
Tibet could have been duped into opposing the CCP’s enlightened path? Mao
quickly assigned responsibility for the Tibetan uprising to India and espe-
cially Nehru. Nehru was responsible for stirring up trouble in Tibet, Mao
concluded.
The Politburo met in Shanghai on March 25 to consider the situation
in Tibet. Discussion focused on the many bad things that India was doing
to encourage resistance in Tibet. But China would keep quiet for a while,
give India enough rope to hang itself, and settle accounts later, Mao or-
dered. Mao directed that a polemic exposing India’s instigation of the
Tibet disturbance be prepared, and personally shepherded that process
over the next several weeks, intervening to make it strongly and openly
directed at Nehru.^4 When Renmin ribao submitted a draft of the polemic
to Mao, he rejected it. The target should not be generic “imperialists,” Mao
instructed, but “Indian expansionists” who “want ardently to grab Tibet”
(wangtu ba xizang nale guochu). Several days later at a Politburo meeting,
Mao asked about the status of the editorial and insisted that the criticism
of Nehru should “be sharp, don’t fear to irritate him, don’t fear to cause
him trouble.”^5 Nehru had miscalculated the situation, Mao said, believing
that China could not suppress the rebellion in Tibet and would have to beg
for India’s help.
The polemic against Nehru appeared as a Renmin ribao editorial in May.^6
Nehru was condemned for the “impressive welcome” he had given to the
Dalai Lama. Nehru, the polemic asserted, was barring the return of the
Dalai Lama and Tibetan refugees to China. A “tiny number of people” in
India were waging a “slander campaign against China,” criticizing China’s
exercise of its sovereign rights in its own territory (i.e., military repression
of the Tibetan uprising), calling for submission of the Tibet issue to the
United Nations, and calling Tibet a “country.” Toward its end, the long