by Fang Lizhi
One day in early 1949 I went to a school outhouse to urinate. The outhouses had no roofs, but other than that they were secluded places. A schoolmate about four or five years older was there, and no one else was, and at one point he turned to me and asked, “Would you like to join an organization?”
“What organization?” I asked.
“A revolutionary organization—one that belongs to us students.”
“What would I have to do?” I asked.
“Nothing special, but you might learn something.”
“Would I have to leave home? I wouldn’t want to do that.”
“No, you can stay at home.”
We exchanged a few more words and then I said, “Okay, sounds good.” The deal was done by the time we left the outhouse.
Two days later this classmate took me to a meeting at the Peking University medical school. A dozen or so Fourth High students, mostly upperclassmen, were already there. This group was FDY’s secret branch at Fourth High, and I was introduced: “This is our new comrade, Fang Lizhi, from ninth grade, section D.”
I knew very little about the revolutionary principles of the FDY except that it opposed the KMT. I can’t remember if it had a charter. I had little sense of whether my actions were dangerous, but I did enjoy the mystique of joining a secret group. In any case, my decision meant, later on, that I had “joined the revolution” at age twelve. According to Chinese Communist personnel regulations, anyone who had joined a Communist organization before the establishment of the People’s Republic of China qualified as a “senior revolutionary cadre.” So I was one, in theory. Later I read memoirs by other “senior revolutionary cadres” in which they told how everyone viewed them as boy geniuses and expressed amazement that they could grasp the truth of Communism at the tender age of twelve or thirteen. I was that age when I joined the FDY but (dare I admit this?) was not nearly so precocious. Moreover, I couldn’t figure out how the precocious ones, way back then, had managed to get clear on those jargon-laden, German-flavored texts.
After I joined the FDY I found that I liked it, and I indeed did learn new things. The first long novel I ever read cover to cover was one the FDY recommended to me: Nicholas Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered. The author had been a soldier in the Soviet Red Army during the October revolution, and the book recounts his experiences before and after signing up to be a soldier. Everything in it was entirely new to me. The first time I read Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto was also with the FDY. It was hard to understand, but there was one line I really liked: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” I wasn’t in any chains yet, but the whole world? I wanted it! Step by step, I was drawn completely in. Before then I had had no political concepts. Communist concepts were my introduction to political thinking.
The siege of Beijing in the civil war ended peacefully on January 31, 1949. General Fu Zuoyi handed over his weapons (it wasn’t called “surrender”) and the People’s Liberation Army entered the city to take over administration. Two or three weeks later, the FDY came up from underground and we all revealed our identities. On May 15, the Chinese New Democratic Youth League was officially established. The two groups that had been underground (the Federation of Democratic Youth and the Alliance of Democratic Youth) were folded into it, and any member of either group automatically became a member of the new League. All of us—a total of about five thousand in the city of Beijing—gathered in the auditorium of the engineering school at Peking University for the inauguration of the League and a collective swearing-in ceremony. The League’s charter stated that a person had to be fourteen to join. I was only thirteen. So at least in this one very small way, the charter was violated right from the start.
July 1, 1949, was the twenty-eighth anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. The total victory of the Communists was imminent, and Mao Zedong himself was on his way to Beijing. On the evening of June 30 a huge celebration was scheduled at the Xiannongtan Stadium. Every Communist Party and Youth League member was invited, and by 7:00 p.m. we were all there. It was raining, and we were in an open-air stadium, but we couldn’t have been more excited as we waited for Mao. People were not yet viewing him as a deity, but with the impending victory in the civil war—the sense that we were about to “get the whole world”—he was already a major hero. The rain seemed only to increase the excitement. Eventually we broke into dance—in part to keep warm, in part to express our joy. Finally—it was now past midnight, already the early hours of July 1—Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, and other Party leaders filed into the stadium. By then the rain was getting heavy, so their talks were short and the event ended quickly.
That was the first time I saw Mao and the other top Communist leaders. The next morning the major newspapers all carried Mao’s article called “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship.” Still aglow from the night before, I read it with special excitement and veneration. In that mood I could never have imagined that less than a decade later, a large number of young people (including me) who had been Mao’s dancing followers at the Xiannongtan Stadium would become victims of this same “people’s democratic dictatorship.” Still less could I have conceived that the same dictatorship, in less than two decades, would bring an appalling death to Liu Shaoqi, the man who had been standing next to Mao and would soon be president of the country.
I was also present on October 1, 1949, at the great celebration of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in Tiananmen Square. It is easy to find newsreels of this historic event, so I won’t give a detailed description here. All of the major figures in Chinese history, including those whose roles in history were yet to arrive, and excluding only those who had escaped to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek, were there, splendidly attired, standing atop the Tiananmen Gate. Down below—although this does not show up very clearly in the newsreels—a crowd of more than a hundred thousand people had gathered. I was one of them. My attire, while not splendid, was trim. The formal program took less than an hour, and Mao Zedong’s talk was its high point. Critics have later pointed out that Mao’s historic speech drew applause from the high-ranking leaders and the honored guests on top of the Gate but apparently no cheers or jumping up and down from the masses below. To me, as an eyewitness, this is easy to explain. Tiananmen, although well known as a historic site, had never before been used to hold a giant meeting, and its broadcast equipment was far from ideal. It had no high-volume speakers. A lot of the people down in the Square couldn’t hear a thing being said up on the podium.
The streets around Tiananmen were narrower than they are today, too, so when the big convocation was over, it took a long time to empty the square. Our group from Fourth High waited about three hours, until nearly 8:00 p.m., to leave. Mao Zedong clearly was in very high spirits, because he, too, lingered after the ceremony. He stood above the Gate watching each group leave, one by one. When our Fourth High contingent finally passed by, he shouted down, “Long Live Fourth High!” That sentence from the podium was the clearest one I heard all day.
My three years of high school following that “Long Live!” were, on the whole, calm. Every year on October 1 we returned to Tiananmen for another big celebration. Mao Zedong was always there, but the amount of time he stayed behind on the Gate got shorter year by year.
In the larger society, though, those three years were hardly calm. Class-struggle campaigns had already begun in the villages, even though the shock waves had not reached as far as urban high schools. Then there was the Korean War. Near the end of 1950 the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army went to Korea to do battle with the United States and others, and the “Resist America, Aid Korea” campaign was launched in China. The war had a major impact on international relations and especially on power in East Asia, but it did not actually change life on the ground inside China very much. This may have been because that war, although fierce, was no match in scale for the war with Japan or the civil war. For peopl
e who had become accustomed to living through wars, this smaller one came as no particular shock. Moreover, China had been having wars with foreign powers for about a century now: Britain, France, Japan, and so on. So now it was America’s turn. It was only natural. Everybody has to take a turn.
The Korean War did exert two effects on my high school life. One was that two dozen or so of my classmates joined the army, mostly to serve as technicians in specialties like artillery or aviation. The other was that we all began to resent English class. The reason was the same as the reason, a few years earlier, for balking at Japanese, the language of the occupiers. Now the Americans were the enemy, and English was their language.
My grades in the last three years of high school, in everything except English, improved steadily. I can’t say why. It may have been simply that I matured during those years; but it also had to do with some wonderful teachers.
I started to do better even in Chinese composition, which was the subject that until then I had feared the most. Before my junior year, I had never written a composition longer than five hundred characters—not even enough to fill one page. These minimalist efforts had never earned me a good grade, either. Part of the problem was that I couldn’t see why you should have to write more words in order to do well. In plane geometry, my first love, the whole point was to prove things as tersely and elegantly as possible. Why was it different in writing essays? But finally I caught on. I realized why it was, in the old civil service exams in China, that they tested only composition, never mathematics. That was because the point of the exams was to test a person’s fitness to be an official, and the one skill an official needs, perhaps above all, is to blow up things from nothing. Math wasn’t much help there.
In my junior and senior years I had a composition teacher who no longer asked that we pad our essays and who dismissed the artificial standard of “five hundred characters or more.” Thus liberated, my essays actually started breaking through the five-hundred-character level and reached as high as five thousand. I started getting good grades, too. In 1986, a full thirty-four years after graduating from high school, I was still exchanging letters with that Chinese composition teacher. He still seemed able to recall my high school essays. I also tried my hand at poetry during high school, but it didn’t work. For young people to write good poetry, some theorists say, there has to be stimulation and inspiration from the opposite sex. Fourth High was all boys. We didn’t have any opposite-sex classmates. That must be why my poetry went nowhere.
I always did best in the sciences. My interest in radios waned as I began to get into topics with more theoretical depth. Instead of heading for junkyards after school, I spent a lot of time at the Beijing Library, China’s largest at the time, and I found that I had a special liking for physics and mathematics. One day the topic in one of our algebra classes was “solving simultaneous inequalities.” The teacher, aware of what I was learning at the library, let me do the explanations. The shame that I had been carrying because of that 60 I had received in eighth-grade algebra was wiped away in one fell swoop.
Even though I was a top student, especially in the sciences, I was never a mover or shaker among my classmates. A group interested in literature and art were the ones who generally called the shots. They were theater buffs, and they were super-active. Some of them later became directors of major Chinese film studios and drama troupes. They drew many of us classmates into helping with their productions, which ranged from simple one-act plays all the way to full-length dramas with several acts and many scenes. They attracted large, cheering audiences—sometimes as many as a thousand people. One of my best friends was the group’s leader at one point, so I was naturally drawn in and spent considerable time studying how to “enter the role” according to the great Russian drama theorist Constantin Stanislavski. My conclusion was that you needed a gift in order to do that. I did get up on stage a few times, but no matter how conscientiously I studied Stanislavski’s theories, I just couldn’t bump myself into that “in the role” state. So my contributions to my classmates’ drama projects gradually settled into errand running and logistics. I choreographed music, hid behind the scenery as a prompter, and did special effects. I especially enjoyed the latter, because to me this amounted to applied physics and chemistry. My repertoire of simulations included the light of fires (both near and distant), lightning, smoke, fog, thunder (both near and distant), rasping wind, and croaking frogs.
I was, in short, a “behind-the-scenes manipulator.”1
Sometimes our drama troupe managed to cast a spell over an audience. In those moments I would look at my classmates up there on stage, “inside the role,” weeping, wailing, and producing tears as required by the structure of the drama; and I would also see, among the theatergoers below, people who were moved by genuine feelings and who were shedding authentic tears. From my vantage point behind the curtain, seeing the contrast between the artifice on stage and the sincerity below, truth and falsity in a mirror, I appreciated how powerful drama could be. No wonder human civilization, from its beginnings, had always had drama, both tragic and comedic. There was no way physics could compete with this.
Still, I preferred physics.
Every high school student who took the college entrance exams in those days was allowed to list three preferences for a postsecondary major. I wrote down: physics, mathematics, astronomy. I was accepted into the physics department at Peking University.
5. ON CAMPUS AT PEKING UNIVERSITY
The colleges of Peking University originated in different parts of the city—Arts and Sciences at Shatan, Medicine at Xishiku, and Engineering in Chengnan. In 1952 the university was reorganized and the three parts were brought together in the suburbs, on the campus of the recently vacated Yenching University. That location was known as Yan Garden.
My freshman class was the first to go to Yan Garden. I showed up in the fall of 1952 carrying books, supplies, and a few articles of clothing, an eager first-year student in the physics department. The male student dormitory for our class was not yet ready, so we were assigned to the gymnasium next to the Nameless Lake. Several hundred of us crowded together there, on a basketball court. There were no beds; we slept on the floor. There were no tables or chairs, either, so we sat on the floor to read and to do our homework. But these living conditions did not detract in the slightest from the glow I felt inside; Peking University was where I had always dreamed of being.
When you think about it, there is something odd in the fact that Peking University, the oldest and most famous in China, was not even a hundred years old at the time. China’s civilization was among the first in the world to emphasize education; more than two thousand years ago Confucius was preaching that “learning benefits all.” But universities? Europe’s are much older than China’s. Even the wilds of Western Australia have a university that is older than the oldest one in China.
The reason, I’m afraid, is that China’s rulers in ancient times were (much as they are today) aware that universities could be sources of different views and therefore threats to their rule. In the first century B.C., Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty founded an imperial academy—something we might think of as China’s first “national university.” The school grew steadily until, a century later, its students numbered as many as thirty thousand and a number of mature scholars were emerging from it. The students grew more and more independent and offered ever more criticisms of the social order and of the dynasty’s rule until the emperor, unready to see ferment that might affect imperial power, repressed the students in what came to be known as the Calamity of the Proscription of Parties. That move brought China’s earliest and longest-lived university to an end. No later dynasty ever tried to open another school of its kind. Some of them set up offices that carried similar names, but the vital functions of learning and teaching were absent, so we can’t call them universities.
It was not until 1898, thirteen years before the collapse of dynastic rule in China, that the imperial c
ourt, now in the throes of final decline, surrendered to modern pressures and established a university. Called the Great Capital School, it was the forerunner of Peking University. Yet the end of dynastic rule did not mean, alas, that subsequent regimes would automatically embrace the academic values of teaching and research. Peking University—like other Chinese universities that came later—was fated to be a source of contention, as the ancient Han Imperial Academy was.
When I went to college I had no idea that I myself would eventually become a focus of such contention. Yan Garden seemed idyllic to me. It stood at a civilized distance from the racket of the city, from the traffic noise and the hawkers’ calls, and seemed elevated to its own plane of purity. When I walked through the campus in the cool air at night, past the semi-somnolent Nameless Lake and the Temple of the Flower Goddess that graced its bank, past the majestic water tower that reached toward heaven, and when I heard the bells that tolled occasionally from the clock pavilion, I had the feeling that all these signs were augurs of my future, which, like the scenes themselves, would be peaceful, harmonious, and boundless. A mood of elation welled inside; I felt my feet were set at the starting point of a lifetime project. What could one worry about? Upward and onward!
A spirit like this drove my life for the next few years as I advanced on three fronts: physics, romance, and Communism. At the time the three fit perfectly, like three facets of a gem.
The tide of the Communist victory reached a triumphant crest in 1953. Outside the country, the Korean War had ended—not in overwhelming victory, to be sure, but when the United States, armed with its atomic bombs, was induced to bow its head and hold its tongue—that, yes, was a kind of victory. Inside the country, still less was there any force to rival Communism. The road ahead was shining, and the arrival of the ideal future seemed only a matter of time. My four college years were unusual in that—except for a campaign to “clean up counterrevolutionaries,” which did not last long—they contained no dictatorship-of-the-proletariat class struggles. The main goal at the time was economic development. The authorities were saying that the top priority of students who were Party members or Youth League members should no longer be student movements, and need not be class struggle, either, but should be mastery of knowledge that would help to build the economy. Students with poor academic records had no chance of getting into the Party or the Youth League. So at the time, for me, not only was there no conflict between physics and Communism, the two were tight partners.