Chinese dissident Fang Lizhi, a key figure in the pro-democracy movement behind the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, has died in the United States, fellow activist Wang Dan said Saturday.
Fang, an internationally renowned professor of astrophysics, was granted refuge at the US embassy in Beijing for one year following the protests and was forced into exile in 1990.
He was dismissed from his job as vice-president of the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei because of his fight for democracy and human rights, as well as for publicly supporting the Tiananmen protests.
Wang, a leader of the 1989 demonstrations who also lives in the United States, said on his Facebook page that Fang’s wife had informed him of her husband’s sudden death in Tucson, Arizona. Wang confirmed the death in an email to AFP.
Wang wrote that Fang, who was 76, had inspired the 1989 generation and awoke in the people their yearning for human rights and democracy.
“This man was a treasure to China, but there was no place for him in his own home,” Wang said in his tribute. “He had to die in exile.”
The protests were later crushed by the government.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, are believed to have died when China’s leaders sent in tanks and soldiers to clear Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3-4, 1989, bringing a violent end to six weeks of protests.
An official verdict after the protests called them a “counter-revolutionary rebellion,” although the wording has since been softened.
Fang became a leading figure in the student movement in 1986, calling for reform, but Chinese authorities said his speeches had incited unrest and he was expelled from the Communist Party and fired from his university post.
His actions, which would culminate in the Tiananmen protests three years later, led him and his wife to take refuge at the US embassy.
American diplomats refused to hand them over to the authorities.
Having eventually settled in the United States, Fang became a professor of physics at the University of Phoenix, in Tucson.
Annual protests in memory of the Tiananmen demonstrations remain a taboo topic in Beijing.
