Before Tiananmen Square, There was Lhasa

Tibet is burning again. The ongoing protest and riot in Lhasa has already caused the death of 10, or 30, or up to 100. The streets are locked down and an ensuring crackdown is looming.

Back in 1989, before the bloody massacre at Tiananmen Square in June, there was already a large-scale riot and the imposition of martial law in Lhasa in March of that very year.

The 1989 rebellion in Lhasa started much earlier in that year. The 10th Panchen Lama Choekyi Gyaltsen had passed away on January 28, 1989, five days after he was allowed to visit Tibet for the first time in decades. His death left an air of uncertainty in the spiritual leadership in Tibet. Unrests and scuffles with the Chinese armed police forces occurred on and off in Tibet throughout that February. The situation was getting tense.

A big riot finally broke out on Sunday, March 5, 1989. According to the official Chinese report, Tibetan monks, nus, and youth marched on the street with the Tibetan flag and shouted pro-independence slogans at noon. By afternoon, the crowded had expanded to many hundreds and rioting had started with looting and arson. Riots continued into the day of March 6.

On March 7, then Premier Li Peng decreed that martial law be imposed in Lhasa. Much more troops arrived in Tibet and brutally put down the uprising. The Chinese government reported that about a dozen people were killed, but other estimates put the death toll into hundreds.

The martial law and crackdown in Tibet did not receive much attention in the rest of China back then as it was quite a remote affair. However, it was only more than two months later when Li Peng had to declare martial law once again, this time in Beijing, the capitol of China.

In the aftermath of the bloody 1989, both in Lhasa and Beijing, the 14th Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. Li Peng had since retired from the political scene in China. The man who had carried out the martial law in Lhasa, then the Party General Secretary of Tibet, Hu Jintao, had just been re-elected as the President of the People's Republic of China.