Fang Lizhi, one of China's best-known dissidents, has died. He passed away in the United States, where he had spent the last two decades of his life after being forced to flee China in the aftermath of the 1989 crackdown on prodemocracy activists. The movement for a democratic China has lost a leading figure.
Fang was born in Hangzhou in 1936. He entered Beijing University, the country's most prestigious school of advanced learning, at the age of 16 to study theoretical physics and nuclear physics. Upon graduation four years later, he moved to the Institute of Modern Physics.
His love of pure science would brook no interference; he demonstrated an independent streak during his university years when he challenged the subordination of scientific principles to party dogma. That same inclination resulted in his expulsion from the Communist Party in 1957 for writing a paper that criticized political interference in scientific research.