Li Zehou (; 13 June 1930 – 2 November 2021) was a Chinese scholar of philosophy and intellectual history. He resided in the United States. He is considered an important modern scholar of Chinese history and culture whose work was central to the period known as the Chinese Enlightenment in the 1980s. Life Li was born in Daolin, Ningxiang County, Hunan, on 13 June 1930. (Another saying: he was born in the city of Hankou, but his family moved to Changsha when he was four years old.) His grandfather Li Chaobin () was a general in the Xiang Army under the leadership of Zeng Guofan. His father, an employee of the post office, died of illness in another province. His mother Tao Maolan () was a teacher in a primary school in his hometown. He elementary studied Ningxiang No. 4 High School and secondary studied at Hunan First Normal University. After graduating from Peking University in 1954, he was dispatched to the Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. In 1992, he moved to Boulder, Colorado, United States. Role in Chinese culture On Li's role in Chinese culture, Yu Ying-shih of Princeton University wrote, "Through (his) books he emancipated a whole generation of young Chinese intellectuals from Communist ideology" Li himself writes that "our younger generation longs to make a contribution to the fields of philosophy and that they are searching [for new avenues] to meet the nation's general goal of modernization as well as the challenge to answer the question about what direction the world is heading." Critic of Chinese government response to Tiananmen Square As a result of his criticism of the Chinese government's response to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, he was confined to house arrest for three years. Following substantial U.S. official and academic pressure, the Chinese government granted Li permission to visit the United States in 1991. Subsequently, the U.S. government granted him permanent resident status. From 1992, Li held numerous academic positions, including appointments at Colorado College, the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin, Swarthmore College and the University of Colorado Boulder. Philosophy of the human being An overriding goal of Li's work has been to promote a philosophy of the human being that was not only based on the materialistic and historical realities as analyzed and posited by Karl Marx, but which also supported the view of Immanuel Kant