Fang Lizhi's difficulties arose in a different and perhaps surprising way.
Physicist and dissident
Fang Lizhi, who died Friday at age 76 in Tucson, Arizona, was Communist China's first independent intellectual.
media's tendency to overstate the dissident
Fang Lizhi's
Dissidents like Wei Jingsheng, who wrote the well-known manifesto, "The Fifth Modernization: Democracy," and
Fang Lizhi ("China's Andrei Sakharov"), who has argued that democracy is not just a Western political concept but also a human right, are only two of the most recent examples.
Among the writers were University of Arizona physicist
Fang Lizhi, who was a university vice president at the time of the student demonstrations in 1989; former People's Daily writer Liu Binyan; and Harry Wu, who spent 19 years in Chinese labor camps and has secretly returned on several occasions to document atrocities inside the camps.
Miller's study focuses on a small group of post-Mao scientists, mainly
Fang Lizhi and Xu Liangying and, to some extent, Li Xingmin and Jin Guantao, and explores the scientific roots of their political dissent.
A fourth section, 'After the Empire', is more of a rag-bag, encompassing, amongst other things, several reviews of books on modern China, a lecture on film and politics, and a discussion of the work of Bei Dao and
Fang Lizhi, two latter-day critics of the People's Republic of China.
Fang Lizhi, a physicist who was China's leading dissident, had been invited to the American-hosted dinner.
In defying state power in defense of human rights, an Andrei Sakharov, a
Fang Lizhi, a Paulo Evaristo Cardinal Arns of Brazil or a Gibson Kamau Kuria of Kenya may have enormous impact.
Scientist
Fang Lizhi earned the special hatred of the Chinese authorities when he traveled abroad in the fall of 1988 and was interviewed by the Hong Kong press that circulated in China.