Friday, January 11, 2002

Dissident Wang Ruoshui dies in Boston

REUTERS in Beijing

Updated at 12.43pm:
Chinese dissident Wang Ruoshui, a former senior editor of the Communist Party mouthpiece People's Daily, died of lung cancer on Thursday in a Boston hospital at the age of 75, a Hong Kong-based rights group said on Friday.Wang, a Marxist theoretician, was ousted in 1987 from his post as assistant editor-in-chief at the newspaper for liberal writings, the Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy said in a statement.Though evicted from the Communist Party and banned from publishing on the mainland for a decade, Wang continued to speak out, criticising Party elite for a lack of leadership and vision.He and his wife Feng Ai moved last year to Boston to take up post as visiting scholars at Harvard University, the group said.Fellow Harvard scholar Wang Dan, one of the leaders of student protests quashed in the bloody 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, expressed remorse over Wang's death, it said.Wang Ruoshui is the second prominent Chinese dissident to die within a month. The man known as the ''grandfather'' of Chinese dissidents, Wang Ruowang - also a defiant former party member - died in December.