The Hoover Institution Program on the US, China, and the World invites you to The Man Who Told the Truth: A Film Screening & Discussion Honoring Fang Lizhi on Friday, April 3, 2026 from 4:30-6:00 pm PT in the Shultz Auditorium, George P. Shultz Building.
The astrophysicist Fang Lizhi (1936-2012) was a towering figure in modern China’s pursuit of science and democracy. At mid-career, Fang chose to apply his prodigious intellectual integrity not only to the natural universe but to human affairs. The result was that he became known for (and, by China’s government, punished for) advocating the universal values of human rights and democracy. The Hoover Institution Program on the US, China, and the World invites you to the debut screening of the film The Man Who Told the Truth, a documentary made by Tony Tsoi. Following the screening, a distinguished panel of experts will discuss the film and Fang Lizhi’s life and legacy.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Tony Tsoi lived an interesting dual life in Hong Kong: he was on the one hand an investment banker and active participant of the business community, and at the same time a writer and outspoken media commentator. In 2012, the year Fang Lizhi died and Xi Jinping came to power, Tony founded an online newspaper Stand News (formerly House News) which became one of the most trusted and popular media organisations in Hong Kong. The Man Who Told the Truth is his first documentary film.
Ginger Duan is the founder of Star Shiner, a grassroots initiative focused on mobilizing Chinese-speaking diaspora communities to engage in civic life and free expression. Through projects such as public events, transcription of critical discussions, and community-building efforts, she works to foster a more socially conscious and participatory diaspora network. A former NGO worker in China, Ginger has hands-on experience working with diverse ethnic communities in rural Western China, where she conducted fieldwork research and community-based filmmaking initiatives. Now based in the Bay Area, she is developing an independent Tibetan–Chinese media platform (Chinese Youth Stand for Tibet) and actively advocates for Tibetan freedom in the Chinese-speaking world.
Perry Link is a scholar of Chinese language and literature who retired from Princeton University in 2008 and then taught at the University of California, Riverside, until 2024. He got to know Fang Lizhi in 1988 while serving as director of the Beijing office of the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Scholarly Communication with China. Fang’s magnetic personality, uncompromising integrity, and puckish sense of humor provided a solid basis for a friendship that lasted until Fang died in 2012.
Xiao Qiang 萧强 is a Research Scientist at the School of Information, UC Berkeley, and the Founder and Chief Editor of China Digital Times, a bi-lingual China news website. A theoretical physicist by training, Xiao Qiang studied at the University of Science and Technology of China and entered the PhD program (1986-1989) in Astrophysics at the University of Notre Dame. He became a full time human rights activist after the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989. Xiao was the Executive Director of the New York-based NGO Human Rights in China from 1991 to 2002 and vice-chairman of the steering committee of the World Movement for Democracy. Xiao was a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship in 2001.
Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society in New York. He is a former professor and Dean at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Schell is the author of fifteen books, ten of them about China, and a contributor to numerous edited volumes. He has written widely for many magazine and newspapers, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Time, The New Republic, Harpers, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Wired, Foreign Affairs, the China Quarterly, and The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.
Chenggang Xu is a Senior Research Scholar at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions, Stanford University, a Board Member of the Ronald Coase Institute, and a friend of Professor Fang Lizhi since the 1970s. He was the Chung Hon-Dak Professor of Economics at University of Hong Kong and served as the president of Asian Law and Economics. He obtained his PhD from Harvard in 1991, was a recipient of the 2013 Sun Yefang Prize and the first recipient of the Chinese Economics Prize (2016).
Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). He is also a Bass University fellow and teaches political science and sociology courses on democracy. At Hoover, he coleads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific and contributes to the Program on the US, China, and the World. At FSI, he is a core faculty member at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, leads the Israel Studies Program, coleads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, and cofounded the Journal of Democracy.
