RIP Fang Lizhi (方励之)

from the New York Times

By MICHAEL WINES / The New York Times


BEIJING -- Fang Lizhi, whose advocacy of economic and democratic freedoms shaped China's brief era of student dissent that ended with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and his exile, died on Friday in Tucson, Ariz., his son, Fang Ke, said Saturday.

Mr. Fang was 76. The cause of death was not known, his son said in a telephone interview.

A brilliant scientist -- and in his early years a loyal member of the Communist Party -- Mr. Fang had become China's best-known dissident by the 1980s, his views shaped by persecution in China and exposure to Western political concepts abroad.

In early 1989, he published an open letter to China's paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, calling for the release of political prisoners. The letter helped galvanize a pro-democracy student movement that spring, peaking on June 4, when Chinese troops killed hundreds of student protesters among the masses occupying Tiananmen Square.

Fearing arrest, Mr. Fang sought refuge with his family at the United States Embassy in Beijing. President George Bush's decision to grant him protection there provoked a yearlong diplomatic standoff with the Chinese that ended, after secret negotiations, with a decision by Chinese leaders in June 1990 to allow the family to leave China, ostensibly for medical treatment.

Mr. Fang later became a professor of physics at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he taught and continued to speak out on human rights until his death.

Word of his death initially spread on Twitter, where veterans of the 1989 democracy movement mourned his passing and proposed a rights award in his honor.

"No words can express my grief," wrote Wang Dan, who was imprisoned for four years for his leadership role in the Tiananmen protests. "Fang Lizhi has inspired the '89 generation and has awakened the people's yearning for human rights and democracy."

Mr. Fang's willingness to test the boundaries of his eventual academic discipline, the physics of the universe, seemed foreshadowed even at an early age by his penchant for questioning authority.

Born in 1936 to a Hangzhou postal clerk and his wife, Mr. Fang entered the prestigious Beijing University as a youth and excelled in physics. According to a 1988 article in The Atlantic Monthly, he quickly flouted official norms, taking over a founding meeting of the university's Communist Youth League and urging students to think independently instead of accepting party dogma on proper academic behavior.



He joined China's Institute of Modern Physics after graduating in 1956, only to be expelled from the Communist Party a year later during Mao Zedong's Anti-Rightist Campaign, a movement against intellectuals and others who were seen to have strayed from Communist principles. His offense was writing an essay criticizing political interference in scientific research.



Mr. Fang was considered too valuable to allow party censure to affect his work, and he continued to rise in academia. But when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, he was again persecuted, first imprisoned and then sent to rural Anhui Province to work with peasants. He carried with him but one book, on astrophysics, and his repeated readings of it led him to change his research focus from fundamental physics to cosmology.



Still an outcast, he continued to flout convention. In 1972, Mr. Fang and colleagues at Anhui's branch of the University of Science and Technology of China published a paper titled "A Solution of the Cosmological Equations in Scalar-Tensor Theory, with Mass and Blackbody Radiation."



"This innocuous-sounding article met with a furious response from leading theoretical circles of the party," The China Quarterly recounted in a 1990 article. "Fang et al. had broken a longstanding taboo by introducing the Big Bang theory to the Chinese physics world. Insofar as the Big Bang contradicted Engels's declaration that the universe must be infinite in space and time, Fang's paper was tantamount to heresy."



Like most of the persecuted, Mr. Fang was rehabilitated after Mao's death in 1976, and in Deng's more open China he traveled to conferences abroad, earning a worldwide scientific reputation. But his exposure to foreign political concepts sharpened his doubts about the Communist system, and he began to write and lecture on its shortcomings.



During a brief flowering of political openness, he gained a large following in China and abroad for his outspoken criticism of the Communist system. But in January 1987, after he helped organize pro-reform student demonstrations in cities across China, he was again expelled from the party and stripped of his job as vice president of Anhui University of Science and Technology.



Anger over the demonstrations among Communist Politburo members forced the resignation days later of Hu Yaobang, the reform-minded party general secretary, who had presided over the period of openness. Mr. Hu's death in April 1989 set off the final round of student protests that ended with the occupation of Tiananmen Square and the subsequent assault on the demonstrators.



Freedom did not change Mr. Fang's disregard for authority. Not long after leaving the American Embassy for the West, he angered his host, James Lilley, the American ambassador to China, by publicly accusing the United States of holding China to a lower human rights standard than it applied to the Soviet Union and its treatment of dissidents. The charge prompted a brisk response from President Bush, who said Mr. Fang's views were mistaken and outdated.



But Mr. Fang consistently reserved his sharpest criticism for his homeland.
"Human rights are fundamental privileges that people have from birth, such as the right to think and be educated, the right to marry, and so on. But we Chinese consider those rights dangerous," he said 26 years ago in a speech to students at Tongzhi University in Shanghai.

"If we are the democratic country we say we are, these rights should be stronger here than elsewhere. But at present they are nothing more than an abstract idea."



Mia Li contributed research.

"Love the Future"...爱未来...艾未未

Sina Weibo (microblog) editors have been busy deleting posts relating to Ai Weiwei since yesterday. (See our roundup of Ai Weiwei coverage here.) One user reported that she reposted a message about Ai Weiwei over 200 times and it was deleted each time.


However, some netizens have come up with a phrase, “Love the Future,” (爱未来) which looks and sounds very similar to Ai Weiwei’s name (艾未未). Many netizens have immediately adopted this new coded phrase to post on Sina Weibo as a form of protest; many of those “love the future” messages have also been quickly deleted.

CDT took screenshots of some of these “Love the Future” messages as examples. The majority of participants simply write, “I love the future!” Many include a photo of Ai Weiwei. Selected translations of other messages are below:

- “We love the future, not for any one person, but because we hope the future will be even better. We love it here, and we hope it can become better.”

- “It’s not that I really love the future. It’s that it hasn’t appeared. When I think about my own study, work, etc, and what I have to do tomorrow, I suddenly feel I have no power, and to think about it is no use.”

- “To love the future is to love yourself. Fill the microblogs with love. Fill the motherland with love. Donate your love to the future of the motherland."

- ”I really don’t dare believe that in this society, even love for the future can disappear.”

- “Have you loved the future today?”

- “Justice doesn’t die; faith is forever. Love the future!”



- “Love life; Love your dreams; Love freedom; Love the future! Good night!”

Dr. Chee Soon Juan: "If you walk one mile, I will walk ten"

See the Fairbank Report's piece on this courageous man.

http://fairbankreport.blogspot.com/2010/08/chee-soon-juan-courage-personified.html

You Can't Fight City Hall

Warning: Graphic Pictures of Mutilation

Red China still has a long way to go in re to human rights...

http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/7743907-village-chief-qian-yunhui-crushed-to-death

Nobel Peace Prize Winner 2010: Liu Xiaobo

Certain Things Don't Change in China

Source: pekingduck.org

LOUHE, China — Xu Lindong, a poor village farmer with close-cropped hair and a fourth-grade education, knew nothing but decades of backbreaking labor. Even at age 50, the rope of muscles on his arms bespoke a lifetime of hard plowing and harvesting in the fields of his native Henan Province.

But after four years locked up in Zhumadian Psychiatric Hospital, he was barely recognizable to his siblings. Emaciated, barefoot, clad in tattered striped pajamas, Mr. Xu spoke haltingly. His face was etched with exhaustion.

“I was so heartbroken when I saw him I cannot describe it,” said his elder brother, Xu Linfu, recalling his first visit there, in 2007. “My brother was a strong as a bull. Now he looked like a hospital patient.”

Xu Lindong’s confinement in a locked mental ward was all the more notable, his brother says, for one extraordinary fact: he was not the least bit deranged. Angered by a dispute over land, he had merely filed a series of complaints against the local government. The government’s response was to draw up an order to commit him to a mental hospital — and then to forge his brother’s name on the signature line.

South Korea's G-20 Disaster

South Korea’s HR disaster


THE ASIAN Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA) strongly condemns the denial of entry and forced repatriation of seven Filipino human rights defenders who came to South Korea to attend the Seoul G20 International People’s Conference organized by Put People First! Korean People’s G20 Response Action. We note that all of them were granted South Korean visas prior to travel, but they were prohibited from entering the country because their names were on a blacklist.

In addition to this, we also learned that a number of human rights defenders from Pakistan, Nepal and Indonesia who were invited to attend the same conference were refused South Korea visas without reasonable grounds.

The seven Filipinos are well-known activists in the region on issues of human rights and development. It is particularly ironic that Paul L. Quintos, policy and outreach director for IBON International, had been invited by the South Korean government to attend the G20 Civil Dialogue last October. This time, however, no explanation was given to them as to why they were blacklisted. We can only conclude that the denial of entry and deportation is an act of repression to curtail potential criticism of the G20 summit.

We are also highly concerned with the reports that the seven were denied access to Philippine embassy officials, physically harassed while in detention and bodily forced to board a plane back to the Philippines. We deplore this maltreatment by South Korean government officials. They violated the basic rights of the seven Filipinos.

The initiative of the government of South Korea (the first Asian country to host the G20 Summit) to include “development” as a new agenda item should be welcomed, but its actions in barring activists from developing countries, who are working on development and human rights issues, to participate in this important debate stand out in stark contradiction to its good initiatives.
FORUM-ASIA strongly urges the South Korean government to respect and protect human rights as host of the G20 Summit. The participation and the voice of human rights and development activists should be encouraged instead of being curtailed. No real development can be achieved without the participation of peoples and respect for human rights.


—YAP SWEE SENG,
executive director,
Asian Forum for Human Rights
and Development (FORUM-ASIA)