Fang Lizhi

Born on 12 February 1936 in Beijing, Fang Lizhi was an astrophysicist, political dissident, and human-rights advocate. Fang studied physics at Beijing University. After earning his degree in 1956, he joined China’s Institute of Modern Physics but was expelled from the Communist Party a year later for criticizing government repression of China’s educational system. In 1958 Fang was assigned to the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), where his research focused on solid-state and laser physics. He continued to be outspoken on such subjects as democracy and human rights, and with the rise of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in 1966, Fang found himself imprisoned and forced to do manual labor. He managed to hang onto one book, Lev Landau’s text on classical field theory, and his intense nighttime study of it led to his changing his research focus to cosmology. In 1972 he resumed his duties at the USTC, rising to the rank of professor in 1978 and vice president in 1984. After the death of Mao, Fang began to be allowed to attend conferences abroad, but his travels reinforced his doubts about Communism. In 1986, in the wake of student rallies for democracy, Fang was again expelled from the Communist Party and removed from the USTC . He was finally forced to leave China after the 1989 student rebellion in Tiananmen Square, which the Chinese government accused him of instigating . After temporary research appointments in the UK and the US, Fang was offered a tenured position as a physics professor at the University of Arizona in 1992. He continued to advocate for human rights, through his writings and his participation in such groups as the American Physical Society’s Committee on International Freedom of Scientists. Fang won many awards for both his scientific work and his political advocacy, including the Chinese Academy of Science’s 1978 National Award of Science and Technology, the 1989 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award, and APS’s 1996 Dwight Nicholson Medal for Outreach. Over his career, he published more than 360 physics papers, and he authored or edited more than two dozen books, including Creation of the Universe (1989). Fang died in 2012 at age 76. (Photo credit: Melirius, CC BY-SA 2.0 )

Date in History: 12 February 1936