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1987–1989 Lhasa Protests and Martial Law

On September 21, 1987, the Dalai Lama presented his Five-Point Peace Plan to the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus; six days later, 21 Drepung Monastery monks raised the snow-lion flag on the streets of Lhasa, opening nearly two years of protest. After the March 5–7, 1989 Lhasa riots, Li Peng signed a martial-law decree — the first in PRC history — and the script was replayed almost verbatim in Beijing two months later. Tibet Party chief Hu Jintao's handling of the crackdown won him Deng Xiaoping's favor and launched his rise to the top.

Time

September 27, 1987 – March 1989 (protests); March 8, 1989 – May 1, 1990 (martial law, 13 months)

Place

Lhasa, Tibet Autonomous Region (centered on the Barkhor and Jokhang); also Tibetan areas of Sichuan, Qinghai, Yunnan and Gansu

Decision-makers

Li Peng (Premier, signed the March 7, 1989 Lhasa martial-law decree); Hu Jintao (Tibet Party secretary from December 1988, requested and enforced martial law); Deng Xiaoping (final arbiter); Zhao Ziyang (urged restraint in February 1989, later purged)

Executors

TAR public security and People's Armed Police; after martial law, PLA troops entered Lhasa (about 60,000 troops and police); all foreign journalists and tourists expelled

Background: the Five-Point Peace Plan and 1980s Tibet

The first half of the 1980s saw a relatively relaxed period in Tibet under Hu Yaobang: religious policies were implemented, some monasteries rebuilt, and Tibetan language and culture given breathing room. Party secretaries Yin Fatang and Wu Jinghua pursued comparatively moderate ethnic policies, and tourism boomed — the New York Times reported in April 1988, citing official statistics, that 43,500 foreign tourists visited Tibet in 1987, spending over USD 15 million, with international chains like Holiday Inn opening in Lhasa. Columbia scholar Robert Barnett noted the reforms "created an opportunity for rebuilding from the ground up the rudiments of a Tibetan civil society devastated by two decades of communism."

But the relaxation was limited. On September 21, 1987, the Dalai Lama presented his Five-Point Peace Plan to the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus, describing Tibet as "a fully independent state when the People's Liberation Army invaded the country in 1949–50" and demanding troop withdrawal, an end to Han migration, and restored human rights. Beijing rejected it outright on September 23, declaring "Tibet is an inalienable part of Chinese territory." The diplomatic clash ignited Lhasa's streets — Tibetan monks read the Washington trip as a signal of international support.

Notably, the protests were led by monks of Lhasa's three great monasteries (Drepung, Sera, Ganden) rather than laypeople at first. Anthropologist Ronald Schwartz, in Circle of Protest, analyzed the theme as "decidedly political rather than religious" — the overwhelming demand was Tibetan independence.

Who decided

Li Peng (Premier): signed the State Council martial-law decree on March 7, 1989, imposing martial law on parts of Lhasa — the first use of martial law in PRC history. Two months later he drove the same decision in Beijing.

Hu Jintao (Tibet Party secretary): took over Tibet in December 1988, succeeding Wu Jinghua, and faced the March 1989 riots just three months into the job. According to accounts cited by heritage.org, as the 30th anniversary of the "suppression of the rebellion" approached in February 1989, parades appeared in Lhasa; Hu called Beijing three times, and General Secretary Zhao Ziyang three times urged him to let Tibetans "blow off steam" and "overcome the hard with the soft." Hu initially restrained police, but on February 20 ordered 1,700 People's Armed Police to march through Lhasa in formation as a show of force; after the March 5 protests turned into full riots and police opened fire, Hu requested martial law from Beijing. He then issued five successive martial-law decrees, sealed Lhasa with troops, and expelled foreigners. After June Fourth, Hu was among the first provincial leaders to send a congratulatory telegram to Beijing. Journalist Jim Yardley wrote that Hu's support for the bloody 1989 Tibet suppression "earned him the good will of Deng Xiaoping, then the paramount leader, and led directly to his elevation to the Politburo Standing Committee and eventually to China's top leadership posts."

Deng Xiaoping: approved the Lhasa martial law as supreme decision-maker. The "success" of the Lhasa operation — troops in the city, foreign media expelled, long-term control — provided the template for the decision two months later in Beijing.

Zhao Ziyang: urged restraint when Lhasa tensed in February 1989, but his moderate line was already on the defensive within the Party and he was fully purged after April.

Timeline: September 1987 – March 1989

September 27, 1987: 21 Drepung Monastery monks took to Lhasa's streets waving the snow-lion flag and shouting "Long live the Dalai Lama" and "Tibetan independence," in support of the Five-Point Peace Plan. Laypeople gradually joined. Authorities broke up the march, arresting all 21 monks and five civilians. Foreign media called it the "black night."

October 1, 1987 (National Day): Sera Monastery monks marched again for independence and demanded the release of the September 27 detainees. Onlookers swelled the crowd to about 3,000. The march turned violent: protesters threw rocks at police, overturned and burned vehicles, and set a police station ablaze. At least six Tibetans died. Authorities arrested hundreds of suspects and imposed a curfew.

October 4, 1987: a 10 p.m. curfew imposed on Lhasa.

October 6, 1987: about 50 Drepung monks marched demanding the release of detained monks and again calling for independence. A force of 250 armed police broke up the peaceful demonstration, reportedly beating protesters with various weapons and arresting the monks (released soon after).

October 8, 1987: authorities ordered foreign journalists to leave Tibet within 48 hours or "face the consequences."

From September to December 1987 Lhasa saw eight protest incidents. In 1988 there were more than 17 demonstrations, 14 of them explicitly pro-independence.

March 5, 1988: riots during the Monlam Prayer Festival. Chinese sources reported 3 deaths; the Tibetan opposition claimed 30.

June 15, 1988: the Dalai Lama delivered his Strasbourg Proposal at the European Parliament, adjusting his demand to high autonomy "in association with the People's Republic of China" — the formal debut of the "Middle Way." Beijing did not respond positively.

December 10, 1988 (International Human Rights Day): further riots in Lhasa. Official sources reported one death; unofficial sources twelve. Dutch lawyer Christa Meindersma was shot and wounded by Chinese soldiers, becoming an internationally noted individual case.

January 1989: sentences for those arrested in the 1988 riots, ranging from three years' imprisonment to suspended death sentences — deliberately harsh for deterrence.

January 28, 1989: the Panchen Lama died at Tashilhunpo Monastery in Shigatse, four days after publicly criticizing CCP Tibet policy: "the price paid by Tibet for its development over the last thirty years has been higher than its gains. This mistake must never be repeated." The cause of his sudden death remains a mystery; Tibetans widely question it.

February 1989: commemorative marches around the sensitive 30th anniversary of the "suppression." Hu Jintao initially followed Zhao Ziyang's "soft overcomes hard" line, then on February 20 sent 1,700 PAP troops marching through Lhasa.

March 5, 1989: nuns, monks and Tibetan youth raised the snow-lion flag in the Barkhor and shouted independence slogans; several hundred quickly gathered. As police intervened, tensions escalated into violence. Tibet Watch reports the violence erupted when a policeman threw a bottle at the crowd; Chinese media said protesters first threw rocks at the police station. Accounts differ.

March 6–7, 1989: violence continued for three days. PAP soldiers shot at unarmed protesters. Chinese journalist Tang Daxian, then in Lhasa, later wrote in The Observer that 387 Tibetans were killed around the Jokhang on March 6 alone, citing a Public Security Bureau internal report he claimed to have seen — single-source hearsay, marked unverified.

March 7, 1989: Li Peng signed the State Council martial-law decree. Hu Jintao issued five successive implementing decrees.

March 8, 1989: martial law took effect; PLA troops entered Lhasa. The Los Angeles Times reported about 60,000 troops and police arrived, with checkpoints every few meters.

March 10, 1989: all remaining foreign journalists and tourists expelled; the information channel was fully cut.

Martial law lasted 13 months, lifted only on May 1, 1990. No further large protests occurred in Lhasa afterward.

Who executed

Execution chain: State Council (Li Peng's decree) → TAR Party Committee (Hu Jintao) → TAR Public Security Department and PAP Tibet contingent → PLA units after martial law.

• September–October 1987: Lhasa public security and PAP broke up marches and made arrests; curfew from October 4; foreign journalists expelled October 8.
• 1988: force used against the Monlam Festival riots and Human Rights Day riots; harsh sentencing in January 1989.
• March 1989: PAP opened fire on protesters (March 5–7); after martial law about 60,000 troops and police sealed Lhasa, conducted house-to-house roundups, thousands of Tibetans arrested; all foreigners expelled, media silenced.
• Martial-law period (March 1989 – May 1990): military administration of Lhasa, monasteries under tight surveillance, large numbers of monks arrested and sentenced.

Scale & methodology

Who opposed

1. Monks of Lhasa's three great monasteries: Drepung (September 27, 1987), Sera (October 1, 1987) and Ganden monks led the protests. The March 5, 1989 action was jointly initiated by nuns, monks and Tibetan youth.

2. The Dalai Lama: his September 21, 1987 Five-Point Peace Plan and June 15, 1988 Strasbourg Proposal provided the political program. In October 1989 he received the Nobel Peace Prize, reaching peak international standing — Beijing read it as proof of Western interference.

3. The Panchen Lama: his January 1989 public criticism of Tibet policy at Tashilhunpo, four days before his death, circulated widely in Tibetan areas as recorded audio and inspired protesters.

4. International community: foreign journalists (later expelled) and tourists documented parts of the crackdown; leaked CCTV footage of the March 1989 brutality circulated internationally; the U.S. Congress passed Tibet-related resolutions continuously from 1987.

5. Moderate voices inside the system: Zhao Ziyang's February 1989 "soft overcomes hard" line; former Tibet secretary Wu Jinghua's moderate ethnic policies, replaced by Hu Jintao's hard line. Their defeat marked the end of the 1980s relaxation in ethnic policy.

Link to June Fourth martial law: the rehearsal

The Lhasa and Beijing martial laws were just over two months apart, strikingly similar in decision logic and execution. Researchers widely treat the former as a "rehearsal" for the latter:

• Same signatory: Li Peng signed both decrees (Lhasa, March 7, 1989; Beijing, May 20, 1989).
• Same script: troops enter the city → foreign journalists expelled → information cut → mass arrests → prolonged control. The Lhasa model was copied in full in Beijing.
• Same decision-makers: Deng Xiaoping approved both; Hu Jintao's "decisiveness" in Tibet won Deng's trust and paved his path to the top.
• Timeline warning: Lhasa's martial law (March 8) came before Beijing's student movement had begun. When mass protests erupted in Beijing in April–May 1989, decision-makers already carried the psychological expectation that "the Lhasa experience proves martial law works." Scholar Jeremy Brown devotes discussion in June Fourth: The Tiananmen Protests and Beijing Massacre of 1989 to the Lhasa–Beijing martial-law connection.

After the Dalai Lama's Nobel Peace Prize in October 1989, Beijing concluded the Tibet issue was stage-managed by "Western anti-China forces," and Tibet policy turned unambiguously hardline.

Impact

End of the 1980s ethnic-policy relaxation. The relatively moderate Tibet line begun under Hu Yaobang (1980–1987) was fully discarded. Tibet entered prolonged high-pressure control: monastery "patriotic education," monk "evaluations," and travel restrictions continue to this day.

Hu Jintao's career springboard. His 1989 Tibet performance directly led to his 1992 elevation to the Politburo Standing Committee (at 49, its youngest member) and his 2002 succession as General Secretary. The Tibet years remain the most controversial page of his political résumé.

Shift in Tibetan resistance patterns. After 1987–1989, Lhasa saw no street protests of comparable scale until 2008. Resistance moved into more dispersed, more desperate forms: Tibetan self-immolations have exceeded 150 cases since 2009 (per exile-Tibetan counts).

Formation of the international Tibet movement. The 1987–1989 protests internationalized the Tibet issue: routinized Tibet legislation in the U.S. Congress, the Dalai Lama's 1988 address to the European Parliament, and the founding of "Friends of Tibet" groups worldwide.

Psychological groundwork for the June Fourth crackdown. Lhasa's martial law demonstrated the effectiveness of the "troops in + information blackout" model, lowering decision-makers' psychological threshold for using the same means in Beijing.

Political prisoners, monastery control and the international response

The crackdown did not end when the streets cleared. Tibetans arrested between 1987 and 1989 were held mainly at Lhasa's Gutsa detention center and the Tibet Autonomous Region No. 1 Prison, known to Tibetans as Drapchi. Monks and nuns made up a high share of those sentenced. Beyond the monks of Drepung and Sera, nuns from Lhasa's convents began staging repeated small-group protests from 1988 — three to five women at a time, shouting slogans and scattering leaflets on the Barkhor pilgrim circuit. Dozens of these brief actions took place in 1988 and 1989, and participants typically drew prison terms of three to seven years. The fate of this prisoner generation echoed into the 1990s: in 1993, fourteen Drapchi nuns had their sentences extended after a secretly recorded tape of songs praising the Dalai Lama and Tibetan independence was smuggled out of the prison — the "Singing Nuns" case of international rights reporting. Most of those women had first been imprisoned for the street protests of 1988–1989. For long stretches, families received no reliable notification of sentences and visits were intermittent; these details survive in interview records kept by exile Tibetan organizations and appear in no official mainland publication.

Control of the monasteries tightened in parallel. After the 1988 Monlam Festival riots, the authorities stepped up control of the three great monasteries: registration of monks entering and leaving, expulsion of monks from outside the region, and deeper intervention in monastic affairs by the monasteries' "democratic management committees." During the 1989 martial law, Lhasa's major monasteries suspended normal religious activities for a time and monks were assembled for compulsory "study" of policy documents. The monasteries reopened after martial law was lifted, but fixed quotas for monks and nuns, political vetting and permission systems for travel were institutionalized year by year thereafter — the forerunner of the large-scale monastery "patriotic education" campaigns rolled out from the mid-1990s. In other words, the basic instruments of Tibet policy after 1989 — administrative management of monasteries, identity screening of clergy, and the systematic severing of the Dalai Lama's influence — were all fixed in place in response to the 1987–1989 crisis.

The international response completed its shift from "concern" to institutionalization in this period. After news of the October 1987 crackdown in Lhasa reached the outside world, both houses of the U.S. Congress passed resolutions condemning human rights abuses in Tibet, and the Foreign Relations Authorization Act passed in December 1987 wrote Tibet human-rights provisions into law, requiring the U.S. government to factor Tibet into its China policy. The European Parliament's invitation to the Dalai Lama to deliver the Strasbourg Proposal in 1988 was itself a gesture of formal recognition at the parliamentary level. After martial law in March 1989, foreign tour groups were evacuated from Tibet en masse, Lhasa's international hotels emptied, and tourism shrank drastically for years — against the 43,500 foreign visitors recorded for 1987, the post-martial-law collapse in visitor numbers and tourism income was among the costs of the crackdown most directly felt by Lhasa residents. In October 1989 the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to the 14th Dalai Lama, its citation noting his advocacy of solutions "based on tolerance and mutual respect"; Beijing summoned the Norwegian ambassador in protest and denounced the award as interference in China's internal affairs. From that point, the Tibet question's place on the international agenda could not be reversed — the starting point of Beijing's treatment of Tibet diplomacy as a core-interest issue ever since.

After martial law: policy hardens, memory is sealed

Martial law in Lhasa was formally lifted on May 1, 1990, with a State Council announcement stating that social order had returned to normal. In July that year, CCP General Secretary Jiang Zemin inspected Tibet and stressed in his remarks that Tibet work must center on safeguarding national unity and ethnic solidarity; the formula "stability overrides everything" was invoked in Tibet policy repeatedly from then on. Lifting martial law did not lift its logic. The Third Tibet Work Symposium in 1994 fixed the framework applied for decades afterward: economically, sharply increased central fiscal transfers and aid-Tibet investment; politically, an explicit designation of the struggle against the "Dalai clique" as the outstanding contradiction in Tibet work. From 1996, monastery "patriotic education" campaigns were rolled out across the region at scale, requiring monks and nuns to publicly denounce the Dalai Lama and affirm that Tibet has been part of China since ancient times, with the uncooperative facing expulsion and detention. Read together — the 1989 martial law, the 1994 symposium, the 1996 patriotic education drive — the protests of 1987–1989 were answered by a permanent transformation of the Tibet system, from lenient co-optation to development and control in tandem. That reading is consistent with this site's 1959 and 2008 pages: 1959 established the rule; 1989 established its everyday method.

As for memory, 1987–1989 is a systematically sealed period on the mainland. Mainland textbooks and official histories of Tibet do not record the protests and martial law of these years in any detail, while "March" has become a fixed sensitive season in Tibetan areas. After the March 14, 2008 incident in Lhasa, closing the Tibet Autonomous Region to foreign tourists every March gradually became routine, and Lhasa's March reinforcements of patrols and checkpoints recur year after year — a practice whose historical source is March 1989. In Tibetan memory, three Marches overlap into a single month: the uprising of March 10, 1959, the martial law of March 8, 1989, and the protests that began on March 10, 2008. When exile Tibetan communities mark Tibetan Uprising Day every March 10, those commemorated include the dead and the political prisoners of 1959, of 1987–1989, and of 2008 alike; the Tibet Museum in Dharamsala exhibits the three periods side by side. Two memories — systematic sealing on one side, annual commemoration on the other — continue in parallel to this day.

A final methodological note on the numbers. For every incident between 1987 and 1989, no independent investigation led by any party has ever established the death and arrest tolls: Chinese archives are closed, exile statistics rest on survivor testimony and name lists carried out at great risk, and research organizations — the Tibet Information Network and its successors — have built political-prisoner registers name by name over many years while offering only range estimates for total deaths. This page applies the same standard as this site's 1959 and 2008 pages: official figures are labeled with their time window and occasion of release, unofficial figures with their source and method, single-source hearsay is marked unverified, and no party's number is adopted as the conclusion. A complete casualty roll for 1987–1989 may only become possible the day the archives open; the purpose of this page is to fix what is known before it disappears.