Despite Fang Lizhi’s open letter demanding the release of Wei Jingsheng and respect for human rights (see Text 47 above), explicit human rights rhetoric did not figure much during the democracy movement that broke out in April 1989 after the death of Hu Yaobang, the disgraced former head of the CCP. This said, however, it is still true that demands for freedom of speech and publication constituted some of the central ideas of the movement. In some cases human rights ideas were also more explicitly discussed, as in the statement reprinted below. The drafters lamented the ignorance and neglect of human rights in Chinese society, a view shared by Xu Bing, writing around the same time in a more academic context (see Text 46 above). Many speakers and demonstrators made quite conscious references to the spirit of May Fourth and its ideals of human rights, democracy, and modernization. In the opening words of the statement below we thus hear a clear echo of Chen Duxiu’s views from seven decades earlier (see Texts 10 and 11).
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