Hu,Kehui:Deeply Cherishing the Memory of the Pro-democracy Movement Pioneer-Professor Fang Lizhi
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Date: 4/16/2012 3:36:37 PM
Sender: Hu,Kehui
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Hu,Kehui:Deeply Cherishing the Memory of the Pro-democracy Movement Pioneer-Professor Fang Lizhi
胡克辉（Hu，Kehui）
In the early April, 2012, the former committee member of Chinese Academy of Science, Professor Fang Lizhi, died in the apartment in Tuscon, Arizona. Upon to the news, everybody was in deep grief.
In the national college student demonstration in the early December, 1986, he addressed that democracy is not given from top to down, but need to be fight for from bottom to top. In the spring of 1987, Professor Fang was expelled from the Chinese Community Party and also removed from his position as the vice president of University of Science and Technology of China in the activity of against bourgeois liberalization by Xiaoping Deng. Then he was moved to Beijing as a research scientist in Beijing Astronomical Observatory. Professor Fang participated in political Seminar of Beijing Universities in the fall of 1988, accepting the foreign media’s four cardinal principles, which stand for public criticism; this also gained the recognition of students in Beijing that time. In January 6th 1989, Fang Lizhi mobilized a number of well known intellectuals to write an open letter to Deng Xiaoping, requesting an amnesty for the human right activist Wei Jingsheng in the time of the 40th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. His wife, also a professor in Beijing University, supported students to appeal during Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. The next day after the government began its repression of the protests, on June 5, 1989, Fang and his wife, feeling unsafe, entered the U.S. embassy in Beijing, and were granted asylum. The Chinese government put Fang and his wife at the top of the "wanted" list of the people involved in the protest.
They were allowed by Chinese authorities to leave the embassy and board a U.S. Air Force C-135 transport plane to Britain later, then Professor Fang and his wife came to United States after half a year. Fang Lizhi became a professor of physics at the University of Arizona, working in the direction of astrophysics and cosmology, and devoted himself in the academy career for his whole life time. During his stay in the United States, he was the chairman of Chinese Human Rights Council, withdrawing from it in 2005. Lizhi Fang died suddenly at the age of 76 in his studying room in Tucson, Arizona, before going to school in April 6th, 2012.
Professor Fang’s achievement in the democratic movement and academy is quite impressive. His death is a big loss to the democratic movement, and his leading style of democratic movement gives a great deal of courage to the future generations. A pro-democracy movement instructor falls, but others will move along his path.
Hu, Kehui
April 16, 2012
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