 He was dismissed in 1990 due to blunt criticisms of the June Fourth events in Tiananmen, and took medical retirement in 1995.There has been controversy about Li's liberal-democratic credentials, focusing on his failure to completely break with the Communist Party.According to contemporary critics like Cao Changqing (a US-based journalist) and Zhong Weiguang (a scholar and writer based in Germany), he compares poorly with Eastern bloc liberals like Milovan Đilas (Djilas), or, in China, resolute non-collaborators like Chen Yinke and original, if tragically persecuted thinkers like Gu Zhun.