Fang Lizhi (1936– )

Chinese political dissident and astrophysicist. He advocated human rights and political pluralism and encouraged his students to campaign for democracy. After the Red Army massacred the student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in June 1989, Fang and his wife took refuge in the US embassy in Beijing until June 1990, when they received official permission to leave China.

Leaving China in 1990, Fang took up a research post in Cambridge University, England, before moving to the United States, where he remains a prominent ‘exiled dissident’.

Born in Guangzhou (Canton), as physics professor at the Hefei Institute of Science and Technology in Anhui province from 1978 and university vice-president from 1984, Fang emerged during the mid-1980s as a fierce critic of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) suppression of political pluralism, democracy, and human rights. As a consequence, he became dubbed ‘China's Sakharov’, after the Russian dissident Andrei Sakharov. In December 1986 Fang encouraged his students to campaign for genuine local elections, but this pro-democracy spread and got out of hand, leading to the dismissal, in 1987, of the reformist CCP leader Hu Yaobang and in Fang's dismissal from his university posts and from the CCP. However, he found a post as research fellow at the Beijing Astronomical Observatory. Along with his politically liberal wife, Li Shuxian, who was associate professor in Beijing University's Physics Department, Fang was accused by the CCP leadership of being the ‘black hand’ behind the 1989 student pro-democracy protest movement, which shook the communist regime.