 This process was given further impetus by the Tiananmen Square protests leading up to the massacre of June 4, 1989.The democracy movement espoused (however imperfectly) many liberal doctrines.Among the key figures were Wang Ruoshui (1926–2002), who while remaining a Marxist humanist reconfigured this doctrine along liberal lines, and Liu Xiaobo (1955–2017), initially a literary critic, who broke with Marxism to combine existentialist themes with liberalism.