The Indo-Asian collision caused uplift of the Himalayan orogen, growth of the Tibetan plateau, a ~70-km-thick continental crust, and large amounts of materials escaping from the Tibetan plateau towards east, southeast and west along large scale strike-slip faults. How the Indo-Asian collision controlled tectonic transition from compression to strike slip in the convergent boundary is critical for our understanding of deformation mechanisms of the continental lithosphere. On the basis of structural, metamorphic and magmatic records in the Himalayan orogen and SE Tibetan margin since 55 Ma, we establish a 3D kinematic extrusion model of the Greater Himalayan Complex. Extrusion of the Greater Himalayan Complex was triggered by partial melting of the middle and lower crust of the Himalayan orogen in the Eocene, and accommodated by coeval southward thrusting and orogen-parallel ductile extension since the Oligocene. Since the late Eocene, the materials of Lhasa terrane and the Qiangtang terrane rotated clockwise around the eastern structure and escaped toward the southeastern margin of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau, which follows the kinetic theory of lithospheric bending folds and mid-crustal decoupling. In combination with data of plate reconstruction in Southeast Asia, we propose that the transition from the Indo-Asian "continent-continent collision" to the Indian Ocean-SE Asian "oceanic-continental subduction" was the preliminary cause resulting in the tectonic transition from compression of the Indo-Asian collision zone to strike slip in the SE margin of Qinghai-Tibet.