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.
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.
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.
