![]() ![]() In this way the monasteries were made into barns and barracks.” The frugal, strong-saving, clothes-patching, shoe-mending Chinese saved each reusable brick. ![]() Brick by brick, timber by timber, the monasteries were taken down. "When the order went out, Smash the feudalistic nests of monks!," the writer Paul Theroux wrote, "the soldiers, Red Guards and assorted vandals made chalk marks all over the monasteries save these timbers, stack these beams, pike the bricks, and so forth. The first part of the book documents in considerable detail the escalation of inter-factional conflict in Lhasa, with violent battles being fought between the two factions by early 1967, and government offices and neighbourhoods in Lhasa controlled by one or the other faction. With the arrival of new Red Guards from inland China the campaign against established leaders within the Regional Party Committee intensified, with the radical revolutionary groups eventually combining to form the Gyenlo faction (the Revolutionary Rebels), while organisations supportive of the Regional Party Committee became Nyamdre (the Alliance). Ronald Schwartz wrote in China Perspectives, “As the Cultural Revolution began to unfold throughout China in 1966, the Party leadership in Tibet was uneasy about the prospect of unleashing Red Guards in Tibet. Mao sought to mobilize the masses to discover and attack what he called bourgeois and capitalist elements who had insinuated themselves into the party and, in his view, were trying to subvert the revolution.The first activists were young students called Red Guards, who began attacking their teachers and administrators, searching to uncover those who were following the capitalist road and had sneaked into the party. ![]() Unlike the standard Chinese Communist Party purges that took place entirely within the rarified air of the party itself, in the Cultural Revolution, the driving forces of the cleanup- Red Guards and revolutionary workers-were outside the party. In his book “On the Cultural Revolution in Tibet,”Melvyn Goldstein wrote: “In 1966, Mao unleashed the Cultural Revolution to eliminate his enemies and reshape relations within the party.
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