Wang Juntao

Wang Juntao, an economist and renowned human rights and a pro-democracy activist, was arrested as he tried to flee to Hong Kong after the Tianamen Square massacre in 1989. Wang is a veteran human rights activist who was first jailed for his activism when he was sixteen. He served as an adviser to Wang Dan and other student leaders of the pro-democracy movement in China in the late 1980s. The Chinese government denounced him as a "black hand" of the student movement. Wang was sentenced to a thirteen-year prison term and spent four-and-a-half years in solitary confinement. He was released from prison in 1994 and traveled to the U.S. to seek medical treatment for hepatitis, which he contracted in prison. Wang Juntao currently resides in New York where he is earning a doctorate in political science at Columbia University.

AAAS awards and honors:

• Science and Human Rights Reception, 1995.