- Born
- Died
- Fang Lizhi was born on February 12, 1936 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China. He died on April 6, 2012 in Tucson, Arizona, USA.
- Chinese physicist and dissident who was exiled from China after his protests stemming from the crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests that resulted in the deaths of many dissidents.
- He is survived by his son, Fang Ke, of Tucson, Arizona. He was born to a postal clerk and his wife in Hangzhou, China. He studied at Beijing University in physics and participated in the Communist Youth League. He joined the China's Institute of Modern Physics after graduating in 1956 and was expelled from the Communist Party in 1957 during Mao Zedong's Anti-Rightist Campaign. His crime was writing an essay criticizing political interference with scientific research.
- He was a loyal member of the Communist Party in China but he became a dissident in the 1980s with his views shaped by persecution in China and exposure to Western political concepts abroad. In 1989, he published an open letter to China's leader, Deng Xiapoing calling for the release of political prisoners which helped galvanized the pro-democracy student moment in spring when on June 4, 1989, the Chinese troops killed hundreds of student protesters at Tiananmen Square.
- He and his family sought refuge at the United States Embassy in Beijing, China. President George H.W. Bush granted him protection and allowed his family to leave China in June 1990 for medical treatment.
- He was a professor of physics at the University of Arizona in Tucson where he spoke out on human rights until his death.
- If we are the democratic country we say we are, these rights should be stronger here than elsewhere. But at present they are nothing more than an abstract idea.
- Human rights are fundamental privileges that people from birth, such as the right to think and be educated, the right to marry and so on. But we Chinese consider those rights dangerous.
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