WaPo, 1989: Rebel Without a Magazine

[Chinese Intellectual’s founder] Liang [Heng] had come from his New York office, where he serves as the magazine's foreign editor, to Washington Thursday and Friday to address the board of directors at the National Endowment for Democracy -- a substantial financial backer of the magazine -- to tell it what he knows, what he thinks and what will possibly happen.

After his arrival in the United States, he earned his master's degree in literature from Columbia University and secured an initial $200,000 grant from the NED, a private corporation created in 1983 to "strengthen democratic efforts worldwide," to start his magazine.

The Seattle Times, 2011: Quiet scholar who inspired uprisings

That is not to say [Gene] Sharp has not seen any action. In 1989, he jetted off to China to witness the uprising in Tiananmen Square. In the early 1990s, he sneaked into a Myanmar rebel camp at the invitation of Robert Helvey, a retired Army colonel who advised the opposition there. They met when Helvey was on a fellowship at Harvard; the military man thought the professor had ideas that could avoid war.