Dimon Liu

Dimon Liu has been an activist on human rights since 1972, when she witnessed appalling conditions during her three-month trip to China after President Richard Nixon’s visit there. Liu was born in China and left for the United States as a child at the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1965. She was trained in architecture in New York and political economy in London and has taught architecture for fifteen years in Hong Kong and New York, lecturing on design in several Chinese cities from 1978-88. In 1989, she initiated an intervention at the UN Sub-Commission on Human Rights, which resulted in an unprecedented UN reprimand against China on human rights abuse. This was documented in “Human Rights Exception No Longer” in The Mirror Cracked: China After Tiananmen, published in 1990. In 1992, she was the lead debater at the Oxford Debating Society on the possibility of democracy in China. In 1993, she organized and represented more than 200 Asian NGOs in a speech against the notion of “Asian values” at the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, which protected the concept of the “universality” of human rights. Liu was one of the originators of the annual People’s Liberation Army Conference at Staunton Hill, Virginia from 1990 to 1998. Her writings on human rights, the rule of law, democracy, and military strategy have appeared in many publications, including the Asian Wall Street Journal, Newsday, and the Hong Kong Economic Journal. She has written for the Department of Defense, and is the co-editor of the 1996 book China’s Military Modernization.