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92-year old Phuntsok Wangyal Goranangpa, popularly known as 'Baba', died in Beijing on March 30, 2014 morning at 0710.
Born in 1922 in Bathang (Chinese: Batang), Kham now in Sichuan province, he was one of the first Tibetans to attend an academy run by Taiwan's Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission in Nanjing, where he secretly founded the Tibetan Communist Party. He was the highest-ranking Tibetan in the Chinese Communist Party in the 1950s and spoke fluent Chinese.
Soon after Tibet was fully under control of the Chinese Communist Party, Phuntsok Wangyal Goranangpa was placed in solitary confinement at a prison near Beijing for 18 years.
He had recently been advocating changes in China's Tibet policy and wrote 'open' letters to Hu Jintao and, in a new biography released a few weeks ago in Hong Kong, called for the Dalai Lama to be allowed to return to Tibet arguing that would be a stabilizing force in Tibet.
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