In recent years the issue of human rights in China has been in the international limelight, especially since the Beijing Massacre of 4 June 1989. It is, however, not a new issue in the history of modern and contemporary China. Earlier in the 1970s and 1980s, a movement for Chinese democracy and human rights was launched by dissidents, though with little success. Nor is it widely known that during the first years of the Nationalist rule there was a short-lived Human Rights Group (HRG) made up of a small number of Western-educated intellectuals.