Fang Lizhi - 1989 Democracy Movement and Exile

1989 Democracy Movement and Exile

In February 1989, Fang mobilized a number of well known intellectuals to write an open letter to Deng Xiaoping, requesting amnesty for the human right activist Wei Jingsheng who was then in prison. His wife, Li, was elected to become the people's representative of the Haidian District where Peking University is located. Fang and his wife had exchanged ideas about Chinese politics with some students of Peking University, including Wang Dan and Liu Gang. Some of those students became student leaders during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, though Fang and Li did not actively participate in the protest itself. On 5 June 1989, the day after the government began its repression of protesters, Fang and Li, feeling unsafe, entered the U.S. embassy in Beijing, and were granted asylum. The Chinese government put Fang and Li at the top of the "wanted" list of the people involved in the protest. During his time in the U.S. embassy, Fang wrote an essay titled The Chinese Amnesia, criticizing the Chinese Communist Party's repression of human rights and the outside world's turning a blind eye to it. Fang's continued presence in the US Embassy following the protests became, according to Ambassador James Lilly, "a living symbol of our conflict with China over human rights."

Fang and his wife remained in the US Embassy until 25 June 1990, when they were allowed by Chinese authorities to leave the embassy and board a U.S. Air Force C-135 transport plane to Britain. This resolution partly came about after confidential negotiations between Henry Kissinger, acting on behalf of US President George H.W. Bush, and China's paramount leader Deng Xiaoping. Other factors were a false confession by Fang, an attempted intervention by US National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, and an offer from the Japanese government to resume loans to the PRC in return for the resolution of "the Fang Lizhi problem."

In 1989, he was a recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award. In 1991, he gave a conference on the issue of Tibet in New York, one of the first open dialogues between Chinese and Tibetans. He also was an advisor for the International Campaign for Tibet.