Liu Gang | |
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Born | |
Alma mater | University of Science and Technology of China Peking University Columbia University New York University |
Known for | Participation in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests |
Title | Founder of Beijing Students' Autonomous Federation |
Liu Gang | |||||||
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Traditional Chinese | 劉剛 | ||||||
Simplified Chinese | 刘刚 | ||||||
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Liu Gang (born 30 January 1961) is a Chinese-born American aerospace engineer,computer scientist,optical physicist,political activist,and writer. He founded the Beijing Students' Autonomous Federation. He was a prominent student leader at the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. [1] Liu holds an M.A. in physics from Peking University and an M.A. in computer science from Columbia University. After his exile to the United States in 1996,Liu studied technology and physics at Bell Labs in New Jersey. Liu was employed at Morgan Stanley as a Wall Street IT analyst. [2]
As an undergraduate student at University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei,Liu met Fang Lizhi,a pro-democracy activist. [3] Then,at Peking University,Liu organized "Democracy Salons". Wang Dan later held a position there.
Liu was a 28-year-old graduate when the 1989 demonstrations began. He organized the Beijing Students' Autonomous Federation and joined the movement's organizing body. As a result,he was sixth on a list of twenty-one activists whose arrests were ordered by the government. Liu went into hiding as a fugitive,but on 15 June 1989,Liu was arrested and charged with attempted subversion of the Chinese Communist Party. [4] In 1991,he was convicted and sentenced to six years imprisonment at Qincheng Prison. [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]
After his release from prison in 1996,Liu continued to advocate for human rights in China and organized an underground democracy movement. [11] [12] After moving to the United States,Liu continued his studies at Columbia University in New York City. [13] [14] [15] From there,he continued to support the Chinese democracy movement and in 2011,initiated further pro-democracy protests. [16]
In 1982,Liu received a bachelor's degree in modern mechanics from the University of Science and Technology of China. He was employed by the Aviation Industry Corporation of China in Shenyang in the field of aerodynamics. He worked in partnership with Luo Yang,and was promoted to head of aircraft design. Liu's field of research was the theory of air resistance,and he worked on problems of double-sided entry and radar technology.
In 1984,Liu received a master's degree in optics from the Department of Physics at Peking University in Beijing. While there,he was an assistant teacher. [17] Liu returned to work at the China Soft Science Research Institute but was also acting assistant director at the University of Science and Technology of China.
In 1988,Liu became an assistant and associate researcher at the Wear-Resistant Materials Development Company of the National Ministry of Higher Education &the Dalian Institute of Technology.[ citation needed ] He was then transferred to research in the Department of Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
In 1996,Liu received a master's degree in computer science from Columbia University. He was invited to speak at the New York Academy of Sciences. [18] Liu gained employment as a member of technical staff (MTS) at the Mathematics of Networks and Systems Research Department at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill,New Jersey. There he worked on Optical telecommunication network design and planning,routing algorithms,optimization techniques,and economic models and strategy analysis. [19]
Liu's areas of research included:SPIDER,a design tool for fast-restoration in all-optical networks;VPNStar,a system for provisioning multi-service VPNs with Quality of service guarantees over Internet Protocol;in software design,a management system for Lambda Router in all-optical networks;and analysis of Internet pricing. [20]
During his days at Bell Laboratories,Liu introduced the A*Prune (1999, ISSN 0743-166X) with K. G. Ramakrishnan, to describe a new class of Algorithm. This opened a new research direction in theoretical science. He found that A*Prune is comparable to the current best known-approximate algorithms for most randomly generated graphs. The algorithm constructs paths, starting at the source and going towards the destination. But, at each iteration, the algorithm is rid of all paths that are guaranteed to violate the constraints, thereby keeping only those partial paths that have the potential to be turned into feasible paths, from which the optimal paths are drawn. [21]
Liu also proposed a special class of Optical devices called SPIDER (2001, ISSN 1089-7089); optical routers, dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) systems, and cross-connects of unprecedented capacities. Liu and his colleagues are developing techniques for efficient and reliable optical network design, covering decentralized dedicated protection to shared path-based mesh restoration. [22]
The Tiananmen Square protests, known in China as the June Fourth Incident, were student-led demonstrations held in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China, lasting from 15 April to 4 June 1989. After weeks of unsuccessful attempts between the demonstrators and the Chinese government to find a peaceful resolution, the Chinese government declared martial law on the night of 3 June and deployed troops to occupy the square in what is referred to as the Tiananmen Square massacre. The events are sometimes called the '89 Democracy Movement, the Tiananmen Square Incident, or the Tiananmen uprising.
Peking University (PKU) is a public university in Haidian, Beijing, China. It is affiliated with and funded by the Ministry of Education of China. The university is part of Project 211, Project 985, the Double First-Class Construction, and the C9 League.
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Fang Lizhi was a Chinese astrophysicist, vice-president of the University of Science and Technology of China, and activist whose liberal ideas inspired the pro-democracy student movement of 1986–87 and, finally, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Because of his activism, he was expelled from the Chinese Communist Party in January 1987. For his work, Fang was a recipient of the Robert F Kennedy Human Rights Award in 1989, given each year. He was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1980, but his position was revoked after 1989.
Wang Dan is a leader of the Chinese democracy movement and was one of the most visible student leaders in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. He holds a PhD in history from Harvard University, and from August 2009 to February 2010, Wang taught cross-strait history at Taiwan's National Chengchi University as a visiting scholar. He then taught at National Tsing Hua University until 2015.
Wang Youcai is a Chinese dissident and was one of the prominent student leaders in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. At the time he was graduate student at the Peking University, he was arrested in 1989 and sentenced to four years in 1991 for "conspiring to overthrow the Government of China".
The Democracy Party of China is a political party that started in the People's Republic of China, and was banned by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The history of the DPC and its foundation date is unclear because it has many historical paths under different groups of founders. According to western sources, it is generally recognized to have assembled in 1998 by democracy activists and former student leaders from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
Shen Tong is an American impact investor, activist, and writer. He founded business accelerators FoodFutureCo in 2015 and Food-X in 2014, the latter of which is recognized by Fast Company as one of "The World's Top 10 Most Innovative Companies of 2015 in Food". He was a Chinese dissident who was exiled as one of the student leaders in the democracy movement at Tiananmen Square in 1989. Shen was one of the People of the Year in Newsweek 1989, and he became a media, software, social entrepreneur, and investor in the late 1990s. He serves on the board of Food Tank.
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Xiong Yan is a Chinese-American human rights activist, military officer, and Protestant chaplain. He was a dissident involved in 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre. Xiong Yan studied at Peking University Law School from 1986 to 1989. He came to the United States of America as a political refugee in 1992, and later became a chaplain in U.S. Army, serving in Iraq. Xiong Yan is the author of three books, and has earned six degrees. He ran for Congress in New York's 10th congressional district in 2022, and his campaign was reportedly attacked by agents of China's Ministry of State Security.
Liu Xiaobo was a Chinese literary critic, human rights activist, philosopher and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who called for political reforms and was involved in campaigns to end communist one-party rule in China. He was arrested numerous times, and was described as China's most prominent dissident and the country's most famous political prisoner. On 26 June 2017, he was granted medical parole after being diagnosed with liver cancer; he died a few weeks later on 13 July 2017.
Chen Ziming and Wang Juntao were arrested in late 1989 for their involvement in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre. Chinese authorities alleged they were the "black hands" behind the movement. Both Chen and Wang rejected the allegations made against them. They were put on trial in 1990 and sentenced to 13 years in prison.
The 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre were the first of their type shown in detail on Western television. The Chinese government's response was denounced across the world; a report by the U.S. State Department said: "Foreign governments have expressed near universal revulsion over the crackdown although a few exceptions have supported China's approaches. Negative reactions range from punitive measures by Western countries to private criticisms in the East." Specifically, it said: "China's credentials as a socialist reformer were being called into question not only by Western European communists but also by progressives in Eastern Europe and, to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union." Notably however, many Asian countries remained silent throughout the protests; the government of India responded to the massacre by ordering the state television to pare down the coverage to the barest minimum, so as not to jeopardize a thawing in relations with China, and to offer political empathy for the events. Criticism came from both Western and Eastern Europe, North America, Australia and some east Asian and Latin American countries. North Korea, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, among others, supported the Chinese government and denounced the protests. Overseas Chinese students demonstrated in many cities in Europe, America, the Middle East, and Asia against the Chinese government.
The 3rd Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party was a pivotal meeting of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party held in Beijing, China, from December 18 to December 22, 1978.
Wang Juntao is a Chinese dissident and democracy activist accused by the Communist government for being one of the “black hands” behind the Tiananmen Student Movement. He was listed first on the government's “six important criminals” list, and was sentenced to a thirteen-year prison term in 1991 for his alleged work of “conspiring to subvert the government and of counter-revolutionary propaganda and agitation”. Wang was released from prison for medical reasons in 1994 and has been living in exile in the United States.
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The Beijing Students' Autonomous Federation was a self-governing student organization, representing multiple Beijing universities, and acting as the student protesters' principal decision-making body during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Student protesters founded the Federation in opposition to the official, government-supported student organizations, which they believed were undemocratic. Although the Federation made several demands of the government during the protests and organized multiple demonstrations in the Square, its primary focus was to obtain government recognition as a legitimate organization. By seeking this recognition, the Federation directly challenged the Chinese Communist Party's authority. After failing to achieve direct dialogue with the government, the Federation lost support from student protesters, and its central leadership role within the Tiananmen Square protests.
Chen Mingyuan is a Chinese scholar who works in various disciplines such as linguistics, mathematics, informatics, computer sciences, and modern poetry. On April 23, 1989, Chen gave a speech at Peking University, expressing his support for the student movements and criticisms of the government. This speech was considered a trigger for the later escalation of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre.