(13 Jul 2017) The death of China's most prominent political prisoner, imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, sent shudders through the generation of Tiananmen Square student activists now living in the United States.
Yang Jianli, who spent several years in a Chinese prison and was given a medical release to the US over a decade ago, was one of those students.
Liu Xiaobo's death - at a hospital in the country's northeast, where he'd been transferred after being diagnosed with liver cancer - triggered an outpouring of dismay among his friends and supporters, who lauded his courage and determination.
Yang knew Liu Xiaobo since their student days at Beijing University.
The 1989 pro-democracy protests centered in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, by Liu's account, were the "major turning point" of his life.
Liu had been a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York but returned early to China in May 1989 to join the movement that was sweeping the country and which the Communist Party regarded as a grave challenge to its authority.
When the government sent troops and tanks into Beijing to quash the protests on the night of June 3-4, Liu persuaded some students to leave the square rather than face down the army.
Liu became one of hundreds of Chinese imprisoned for crimes linked to the demonstrations.
A year later, he was awarded the Nobel Prize. The Norwegian committee lauded Liu's "long and nonviolent struggle for fundamental human rights in China."
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