Fang Lizhi

Chinese political dissident and astrophysicist. He advocated human rights and political pluralism and encouraged his students to campaign for democracy. After the Red Army massacred the student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in June 1989, Fang and his wife took refuge in the US embassy in Beijing until June 1990, when they received official permission to leave China.

Leaving China in 1990, Fang took up a research post in Cambridge University, England, before moving to the United States, where he remains a prominent ‘exiled dissident’.