Physicist and seminal Chinese dissident dies

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, Arizona, writes Michael Wines for The New York Times.

Fang was 76. The cause of death was not known, his son Fang Ke said in a telephone interview. A brilliant scientist – and in his early years a loyal member of the Communist Party – 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.

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.
Full report on The New York Times site