"This is one of the great untold stories of modern Tibet. Phuntso Wangye is a man who has never stopped fighting for his people, and the story of his life is both heartbreaking and inspiring, and essential for understanding what has happened in Tibet since the 1930s. Tibetan history has never
This is the as-told-to political autobiography of Phuntso Wangye (Phunwang), one of the most important Tibetan revolutionary figures of the twentieth century. Phunwang began his activism in school, where he founded a secret Tibetan Communist Party. He was expelled in 1940, and for the next nine years he worked to organize a guerrilla uprising against the Chinese who controlled his homeland. In 1949, he merged his Tibetan Communist Party with Mao's Chinese Communist Party. He played an important role in the party's administrative organization in Lhasa and was the translator for the young Dalai Lama during his famous 1954-55 meetings with Mao Zedong. In the 1950s, Phunwang was the highest-ranking Tibetan official within the Communist Party in Tibet. Though he was fluent in Chinese, comfortable with Chinese culture, and devoted to socialism and the Communist Party, Phunwang's deep commitment to the welfare of Tibetans made him suspect to powerful Han colleagues. In 1958 he was secretly detained; three years later, he was imprisoned in solitary confinement in Beijing's equivalent of the Bastille for the next eighteen years.

Informed by vivid firsthand accounts of the relations between the Dalai Lama, the Nationalist Chinese government, and the People's Republic of China, this absorbing chronicle illuminates one of the world's most tragic and dangerous ethnic conflicts at the same time that it relates the fascinating details of a stormy life spent in the quest for a new Tibet.

Tibetan Revolutionary, Goldstein, Dawei Sherap, and William R. Siebenschuh, University of California Press, Hardcover, 2004, 357 pp., $24.95

Melvyn C. Goldstein is John Reynolds Harkness Professor in Anthropology and Codirector of the Center for Research on Tibet at Case Western Reserve University.

Dawei Sherap is a Tibetan-born intellectual living and working in China. He has written extensively on Phnwang.

William R. Siebenschuh is Chair of the English Department at Case Western Reserve University.