Wangdu (Tibetan: དབང་སྐུད་, dbang sdud; Chinese: 旺堆, also romanized Wangdui) is a Tibetan former monk and HIV/AIDS outreach worker serving a life sentence imposed after the 2008 protests in Lhasa.
Wangdu was born in Dagzê County, east of Lhasa, and became a monk of the Jokhang monastery, where he was known for his fluency in Chinese and for leading tours of the monastery. He took part in the 1989 protests in Lhasa and was arrested on March 8, 1989, the day martial law took effect. Initially sentenced to three years of “reform through labour,” his term was extended to eight years’ imprisonment after he and ten other political prisoners signed a petition stating that the 1951 Seventeen-Point Agreement had been forced upon Tibet. He was released in 1995 but barred from re-entering his monastery.
After his release, Wangdu worked with a British nongovernmental organization on social development, and then as a health worker with the HIV Prevention in Lhasa Project, a program supported by Australian aid and the Burnet Institute that provided HIV/AIDS education in Lhasa.
On March 14, 2008, during the protests in Lhasa, public security officials arrested Wangdu at his home in Lhasa. On October 27, 2008, the Lhasa City Intermediate People’s Court sentenced him to life imprisonment with lifetime deprivation of political rights on charges of “endangering state security,” reported in official media as an espionage case. The court alleged that he had set up an underground intelligence network in Lhasa that provided information about the protests to contacts outside China. He was reported to have been transferred to Chushul prison, and by 2011 official reports placed him in Drapchi prison in Lhasa.
In 2012, Wangdu was seen in a Lhasa hospital under police guard; Tibetan rights monitors reported signs that he had been beaten in custody. Human Rights Watch’s 2019 compilation of Tibetan political prisoners lists Wangdu among those serving long sentences in connection with the 2008 protests and calls for his release. His current whereabouts and condition have not been independently confirmed.
Name note: Wangdu is not the former Nyingchi mayor of the same Chinese name (旺堆), a government official investigated for corruption in 2022 — a different person.
View the Wangdu (旺堆) Media Profile & Archive for full source detail, the case chronology, and provenance.