Much attention has been devoted to the identification of components involved in signal transduction pathways, such as abscisic acid signaling, because they are known to participate in responses against the adverse effects of different stresses, such as salinity and drought. Stress response-specific miRNAs and some stress-responsive target genes were observed in previous studies ; for example, in rice, osa-miR169g was reported to be the only miRNA member of the miR169 family induced by drought. Application of the newly developed high-throughput sequencing technologies has led to the identification of entire sets of miRNAs, which has delivered new insights into the role of miRNAs in plant development, and stress-related regulation. However, until now, little was known about the functions of miRNAs in abiotic stress responses in L. chinensis. Here, we identified 132 known miRNAs and 16 novel miRNAs after sequencing and analyzing the sRNAs of L. chinensis. Many miRNAs with a wide range of expression levels were found in the control, drought and saline-alkaline libraries. The most abundantly expressed miRNA family across the three libraries was miR156, which includes miR156d, miR156f, miR156h, miR156b. miR156d, miR156f and miR156h are conserved in many species and they exhibited high expression levels in all three L. chinensis libraries. The most abundant was miR156d with 2,039,447 reads in the control library. Some miRNAs were differentially expressed between the two stress-induced libraries and nine of them were PCI-32765 significantly differentially expressed under the two stress conditions. Under the saline-alkaline stress conditions, four were significantly up-regulated with fold-changes.4 and two were significantly down-regulated with fold-changes.4. lch-miR396f-3p was significantly downregulated under the drought stress conditions. Previous reports found that members of the miR319 and miR393 families were stress inducible. Therefore, we speculate that miR160, miR319a and miR396f-3p can be involved in a multi-stress response to saline-alkali conditions based on our results, and also to conditions that induce maintenance of the energy supply based on other reports. The qRT-PCR results confirmed the upand down-regulated trends of the differentially expressed miRNAs in the stress-induced libraries ; in particular, lchmiR319a, lch-miR396f-3p and lch-miR397a were predicted to be associated with saline-alkaline and drought stresses. Because the differential expression of the known miRNAs was less significant, we focused our analyses on the novel miRNAs. Deep sequencing of sRNA transcriptomes yields an incredible amount of data, which can be used to characterize not only known miRNAs, but also novel miRNAs with high accuracy and efficiency. Because the L. chinensis genome has not yet been sequenced, we used complex network methods to the rice genome sequence. From the three L. chinensis sRNA libraries, 16 miRNAs were revealed as candidate novel miRNAs.