Xu Liangying

Xu Liangying (born May 3, 1920 in Zhejiang Province , † January 28, 2013 in Beijing ) was a Chinese physicist , dissident , translator of Albert Einstein and a historian of science .

Xu studied at Zheijang University from 1939. He was a student of Wang Ganchang . Studies were interrupted by the Japanese occupation. Xu joined the communist movement. After the communists came to power, he worked at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1949. He was the editor of the popular science Chinese Science Bulletin, but was expelled from the Communist Party in 1957 as a bourgeois right-wing deviator as part of the oppression of the Hundred Flowers Movement and sentenced to work as a farmer in his home village. There he began to translate Albert Einstein's works into Chinese in 1962 , which he continued in the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. The supporters of the Cultural Revolution also rejected Einstein as a bourgeois academic and counterrevolutionary. Xu not only translated the scientific works, but also political and other writings of Einstein. After the Cultural Revolution, he returned to Beijing and published a three-volume edition of Einstein's works. In the 1980s, he initiated petitions to the Chinese government to uphold human rights. In 1989, after the Tiananmen massacre , he was closely monitored by the Chinese government and was only not detained because of a heart attack. From then on, however, he lived under police surveillance. In 1994 and 1995 he initiated further petitions for human rights.

He conducted research at the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

In 2008 he received the Andrei Sakharov Prize and in 1995 the Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of Scientists Award .

Web links

• Obituary in the New York Times, Jan. 31, 2013

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Chinese. Xu is the family name here, Liangying is the first name.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Sakharov Prize 2008