Weeks after the Dalai Lama fled to India amid a failed uprising against Chinese rule, Beijing dissolved the Tibetan government and installed the Panchen Lama's Preparatory Committee to administer the region directly. The move ended centuries of semi-autonomous Tibetan governance and triggered decades of exile politics, resistance, and international controversy over Tibetan sovereignty and human rights.
The Tibetan uprising of March 1959 had been brewing for years as resentment grew over Chinese Communist land reforms and the erosion of religious and political autonomy promised under the 1951 Seventeen Point Agreement. When rumors spread that Chinese authorities intended to arrest the 14th Dalai Lama, tens of thousands of Tibetans surrounded his palace in Lhasa to protect him, and the standoff exploded into armed conflict.
The Dalai Lama escaped over the Himalayas into India, beginning an exile that continues to this day. Chinese troops crushed the remaining resistance in Lhasa with artillery, killing thousands. On March 28, Premier Zhou Enlai's government formally dissolved the existing Tibetan administration, replacing it with a Preparatory Committee under the more compliant Panchen Lama, effectively erasing the last vestige of Tibetan self-rule recognized even nominally by Beijing.
The dissolution marked a hardening of Chinese policy that would intensify through the Cultural Revolution, when monasteries were destroyed and religious practice suppressed. It also internationalized the Tibet issue, as the Dalai Lama's Dharamshala government-in-exile became a global symbol of resistance to Chinese rule, a status it retains despite more than six decades of Chinese governance.
Key people: 14th Dalai Lama, Zhou Enlai