Fang Lizhi

Early Life and Three Political Persecutions

Fang Lizhi was born on 12 February 1936 in Beijing and studied physics at Peking University, joining the Chinese Communist Party in 1955. During the 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaign he was labelled a "rightist" and expelled from the Party for the first time. During the Cultural Revolution, he and his wife Li Shuxian were sent to Anhui and Jiangxi respectively for manual labour, separating the family for eighteen years.

USTC and the 1986 Student Movement

Fang was later rehabilitated and returned to academic life. On 17 September 1984, he became First Vice President of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), establishing China's first university astrophysics laboratory and serving as director of its astrophysics centre, a post he held until 12 January 1987. In a series of lectures at USTC and other institutions in the autumn and winter of 1986, Fang argued explicitly that China's modernisation could not be confined to the economic sphere but must encompass political democratisation. These lectures directly inspired the student movement that erupted at USTC in December 1986 and spread across the country. In January 1987, he was expelled from the CCP for the second time, for 'spreading bourgeois liberalisation,' and removed from his position as Vice President of USTC.

The 1989 Open Letter to Deng Xiaoping

On 6 January 1989, marking the 40th anniversary of the People's Republic and the 70th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, Fang wrote to Deng Xiaoping urging a general amnesty, specifically for political prisoners including Wei Jingsheng. He posted the letter in a public mailbox outside the Beijing Observatory and gave a copy to Perry Link, a representative of the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China; Link passed an English translation to journalists that evening, turning the private letter into a widely circulated public document. It prompted a wave of follow-up open letters signed by dozens of scholars at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and elsewhere calling for amnesty for prisoners of conscience; authorities later identified it as one of the sources of that year's Beijing student movement and, ultimately, the June Fourth crackdown.

June Fourth and Refuge in the US Embassy

Following the Tiananmen crackdown of 4 June 1989, Fang and his wife Li Shuxian sought refuge in the United States Embassy in Beijing, remaining there for approximately a year before being permitted to leave China in June 1990.

Later Years and Legacy

After being permitted to leave China, Fang was appointed a tenured professor of physics at the University of Arizona in January 1992, focusing his research on the structure of the early universe, galaxy formation, and the distribution of dark matter, pioneering the use of wavelet and log-normal methods in the field. He continued to speak out for democracy and human rights in China until his death in Tucson on 6 April 2012, at the age of 76. The Chinese edition of his autobiography was published a year after his death; the English edition, translated and edited by Perry Link under the title The Most Wanted Man in China: My Journey from Scientist to Enemy of the State, has become an important record of the fate of Chinese intellectuals during the reform era.