The troops of the China People's Liberation Army stationed in Tibet participated in the battle to suppress the armed rebellion of the upper reactionary groups in Tibet.
The peaceful liberation of Tibet is deeply supported by the people of all ethnic groups in Tibet. However, in order to maintain serfdom, the local upper-level reactionary groups in Tibet, instigated by foreign forces, deliberately sabotaged the implementation of the Agreement between the Central People's Government of People's Republic of China (PRC) and the local government of Tibet on Measures for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet (Article 17 Agreement), plotted rebellion and created division.
On March 1959 and 10, the local upper-class reactionaries in Tibet declared "Tibet independence, and the western region independence", and successively assembled more than 7,000 armed men in Lhasa, and attacked the People's Liberation Army and the Central Representative Office in Lhasa in the early morning of March 20th. Around this time, armed rebellion also took place in other parts of Tibet. In order to maintain national unity, the China People's Liberation Army troops stationed in Tibet, under the command of Commander Zhang Guohua and Political Commissar Tan Guansan, began to counterattack the Lhasa rebels at 6: 438 on March 20th. In the afternoon, the People's Liberation Army captured Norbulingka, the headquarters of the rebels, wiped out the main force of the rebels and quickly surrounded the remaining rebels in Lhasa. Under the strong political offensive and military pressure of the People's Liberation Army, by 9: 00 on March 22, the besieged rebels laid down their weapons one after another, and the Lhasa rebellion subsided. On April 8, the People's Liberation Army launched a multi-channel counterattack against the rebels entrenched in Shannan, quickly quelling the Shannan rebellion, destroying the rebel command center and cutting off the land traffic between the rebels and foreign countries. Since then, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) has followed the central policy of "giving priority to political struggle, supplemented by military strikes" and relied on the vast number of patriotic monks and nuns in Tibet to quell armed rebellion in other regions. The quelling of the rebellion in Tibet has safeguarded national unity and national unity and opened the way for democratic reform in Tibet.