The World - News from Jan. 29, 1989

A group of China’s most outspoken dissidents launched a private magazine with speeches calling on Chinese intellectuals to be more vocal in their demands for democracy and human rights. “Intellectuals cannot just change their thinking. They have to act,” Fang Lizhi, 52, a prominent astrophysicist told listeners at Du Le Bookshop, the first private bookstore in Beijing to receive official distribution rights for the New Enlightenment magazine. Fang, who was thrown out of the Communist Party two years ago during an official attack on “bourgeois liberalism,” recently called on senior leader Deng Xiaoping to grant amnesty to political prisoners to mark this year’s 40th anniversary of the founding of Communist China.