Dissident drama recalls story of Fang Lizhi

After the high drama of a 400-mile dash to freedom across northern China, Chen Guangcheng, a blind legal activist now reportedly under the protection of U.S. diplomats in Beijing, confronts more mundane challenges: filling in forms, listening to warnings about potential peril ahead, and waiting while U.S. and Chinese officials haggle over his fate.

That, at least, is what happened back in the summer of 1989 when Fang Lizhi, a dissident Chinese astrophysicist, entered the U.S. mission in Beijing a day after the June 4 Tiananmen Square massacre and asked diplomats there for protection.

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Chen Guangcheng and other Chinese dissidents: Over the years, Chen Guangcheng and several other dissidents have criticized the Communist Party and have been detained or exiled for their activism.

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Anniversary of Tiananmen Square Crackdown: Twenty-two years ago, on June 4, 1989, hundreds of Chinese pro-democracy demonstrators were killed when tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square in central Beijing to squash a six-week long, student-led protest.

The diplomats “were mildly discouraging but didn’t rule out helping,” recalled Perry Link, a Princeton University China scholar who accompanied Fang. They explained that Fang would need to get to American soil before he could request political asylum.

To get the ball rolling, Fang filled in a visa application, the first step in what he hoped would be a swift journey to safety. It was more than a year before he got to the United States, ostensibly for medical treatment.

Worried that taking refuge with American diplomats would allow China’s Communist Party to portray the Tiananmen protest as a U.S.-­orchestrated conspiracy, Fang decided after his first meeting at the embassy that he didn’t want U.S. help after all. He left the embassy with his wife, Li Shuxian, to spend the night at a nearby Beijing hotel in the room of an absent Washington Post journalist.

“We didn’t turn him away. We just talked him into giving things some more thought,” said a U.S. diplomat who was involved in the discussions.

They told Fang, for example, about the case of Hungary’s Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, an outspoken foe of communism who spent almost 15 years stuck in the U.S. Embassy in Budapest after Soviet troops crushed the 1956 Hungarian uprising.

“When somebody comes to ask for asylum, you have to make sure they have really thought through what they are undertaking,” said the former diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “You run through a checklist of things to discourage them.”

Fang later returned to the embassy in the middle of the night after U.S. diplomats sent word that President George H.W. Bush had personally approved giving him, his wife and son, Fang De, sanctuary.

Fang, with his wife, then spent nearly 13 months holed up in a windowless room that had previously served as an embassy clinic while senior U.S. officials and others, including former secretary of state Henry Kis­singer, trooped to Beijing to beg Chinese leaders to let the dissident leave China unmolested. The son, fed up with being confined to the embassy, left after just a few days and returned to his university studies without trouble.

The presence of Fang and his wife was cloaked in such deep secrecy that “only about six people in the embassy” knew of their whereabouts, James R. Lilley, the ambassador at the time, recalled in his memoir, “China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia.” Lilley’s wife found out when she stumbled on a high wall of books shielding Fang’s sleeping quarters.

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