Empty Stomachs and Unforgivable Crimes

This chapter focuses on the aftermath of the Amdo Rebellion and its pacification. It highlights the scale of the violence committed in 1958 and afterward and considers its impact on both the lives of Amdo Tibetans and the Chinese state's nation-building ambitions. Evidence of this violence is littered throughout official Chinese sources and a spattering of Tibetan eyewitness accounts. If the latter are to be believed, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and auxiliary security forces responded to the rebellion with a campaign similar in tactics and cruelty to many of history's infamous counterinsurgencies. This included the widespread use of torture, extrajudicial killings, the emptying of population centers, mass incarcerations, and strategy-induced famine and epidemics. State security forces were not the only ones to commit acts of brutality. One report accused the insurgents of massacring livestock, looting, arson, sabotage, and even murdering and dismembering cadres and activists. Nonetheless, Chinese documents tend to buttress Tibetan descriptions of the state's systematic use of violence and terror against Tibetan and other communities.