Phüntsok was born in 1922 in Batang, in the province of Kham in eastern Tibet (in what is now western Sichuan, then under the control of Liu Wenhui, an important Chinese warlord who was affiliated with the Kuomintang).

[1] Phüntsok began his political activism at the special academy run by Chiang Kai-shek's Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission in Nanjing, where in 1939 he and a small group of friends secretly founded the Tibetan Communist Party.

The strategy of the Tibetan Communist Party under his leadership during the 1940s was twofold: Influence and gain support for his cause amongst progressive Tibetan students, intellectuals, and members of the powerful aristocracy in Central Tibet in order to establish a program of modernization and democratic (i.e. socialist) reform, and wage a guerilla war against the rule of Liu Wenhui.

He played an important administrative role in the organization of the Chinese Communist Party in Lhasa and was the official translator of the young 14th Dalai Lama during his famous meetings with Mao Zedong in Beijing in the years 1954 and 1955.

"[11] In a letter to Hu Jintao in 2007, Phüntsok criticised cadres of the Chinese Communist Party who, to support Dorje Shugden, "make a living, are promoted and become rich by opposing splittism".