by Fang Lizhi
The general policy of the Party leaders in those years was to trust us students. They saw the Youth League incident as just a bump in the road in their larger project, which was to replace our professors—and other intellectuals of their generation, whom they generally did not trust—with us, their new homegrown generation. They thought of us as proletarian intellectuals.
In an authoritarian regime based in class struggle, the “trust” question is ubiquitous. There is no way to stand outside it. Every person, at every moment, belongs to one or another category according to the degree of trust the organization has in the person. The categories, top to bottom, are: can be relied upon, can be used, can be recruited, condition unclear, cannot be trusted, and opponent to be fought against. The way people who live in this kind of authoritarian system watch the risings and fallings of their political value, and the values of the people around them, is not all that different from the way people in a market economy who own stocks monitor the rise and fall of stock prices. In my forty years of living under Chinese Communist Party rule I have spanned the gamut; I have lived in every category, top to bottom, at least once. During my college years, my stock was on the rise.
In the fall of 1955, it rose to an apex when I was chosen to join the top secret academic specialty of nuclear physics. The Chinese authorities had decided to make a move to join the international “nuclear club” by obtaining an atomic bomb, and this led them to inaugurate an elite university major in nuclear physics. My interests at the time were in theoretical physics. I was casting about for a senior thesis topic when, in October, an order suddenly came down that about two dozen Peking University physics students, of whom I was one, were assigned to the nuclear major. Because the topic was so secret, we would be immediately moved off the Yan Garden campus to a sequestered site, not too far away, that also belonged to Peking University. Students from the physics departments of other leading universities were transferred there as well. There were about a hundred of us in all. We were the pioneers in China’s nuclear physics research, and many among us became important players in the production of China’s atomic weapons. The man who later became commander of China’s largest nuclear testing site, in the northwest, was in the group of two dozen or so who were drafted with me from the Peking University physics department.
In the wake of the atomic bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many Chinese people, after recovering from the initial shock, began viewing physicists with enormous new respect, as if we were some kind of modern-day kung fu heroes, masters of abstruse magical powers. “Nuclear secrets,” to them, were parallel to the secret techniques of legendary swordsmen, each absolutely unique to the holder of the secret. It was obvious that the security officer at our special research site held this view. To him, what we were studying was pure kung fu lore. Not a single word of it could leak.
This meant that all our class notebooks were regarded as secret. Each had to be numbered and registered and could not be removed outside a prescribed perimeter. The practice was quite out of tune with the spirit of physics, which pursues universals, not particulars. Nuclear physics as an intellectual field is completely open—it is only certain numbers that relate to weaponry that anyone keeps secret. Ninety-nine percent of what we were writing down in our notebooks could be found in open publications. (The other one percent were doodles, satirical sketches of our professors, or other escapes from occasional boredom.)
The location of our special site was also a top secret. We were instructed to answer the question “Where do you live?” by saying “Postbox 546.” I went back to the Yan Garden campus almost every Saturday evening to visit Li Shuxian, and when we said our good-byes I would joke, “Okay, I’m headed back to Postbox 546.” Within two months or so my bright classmates in the physics department had ferreted out the truth of where Postbox 546 actually was, but that didn’t matter. The name stuck. Everybody still called the place “Postbox 546.” All this went over the head of the security officer, however. He kept warning us, austerely, not to let the address leak: “Say you live at Postbox 546!”
Many of our classes in the postbox involved experiments in nuclear physics and nuclear electrodynamics. I had always preferred theory but was fairly good with experiments, too. In my whole college career I made only one serious blunder in a laboratory. It was junior year, and we were creating a vacuum in a McLeod gauge. As the vacuum was intensifying, I opened a wrong valve and air rushed in, shattering the gauge, causing mercury to spill, and polluting the whole lab. Evangelista Torricelli, the great Italian physicist, was right to say that “nature abhors a vacuum.” I wonder if he discovered this one day when a glass tube of his own shattered.
With the experiments in electronics, though, I was in my element. Playing with radio parts during high school had prepared me well.
My laboratory partner during the 546 era was Hou Depeng. Like me, Hou preferred theoretical physics but was drafted into 546. He was color-blind, and for that reason he really should not have been doing experimental physics, which can be difficult for a person with this affliction. In our lab, for example, the resistance values of carbon resistors were indicated by three bands of color. A color-blind person, unable to see the differences, could make potentially dangerous mistakes. But an assignment from the Party in those days obviously outweighed such considerations. If the Party asked that you do something, then, well, you were able to do it. It was like God saying “Let there be light” and there was light. It wasn’t to be, though. With or without the light of the Party, Hou could not see the band colors and did make a lot of mistakes. Eventually he gave up trying and just watched as I did those parts of the experiments by myself. In the end, though, the light of the Party did come through for Hou. Thirty years later he was promoted to the standing committee of the Party Committee in Guangxi, and this was the highest political position anyone from our class ever reached.
But these little glitches—the Postbox 546 jokes, Hou Depeng’s blown experiments, and so on—did nothing to diminish our basic faith in the Communist Party or my enthusiasm for my studies. During my last half year in college, my devotion to physics was manic. At one point I was so taken by the spin matrices of Paul Dirac that I read his Principles of Quantum Mechanics almost without stopping.1 At other times I got hooked by this or that exercise book on theoretical mechanics or electrodynamics and would work through a thousand or more examples, one by one. In my final month I worked hard shaping sheets of mica that were as thin as locust wings to make beta-counter tubes. For a whole month I hardly emerged from the lab, but the results were good.
The very first slogan that the Communist Party unveiled in 1956 was “Forward March to Science!” So just imagine: Here we were, the first generation in China doing nuclear physics, which was a frontier subfield in physics. Physics as a whole, moreover—whatever its rivals might say—was the queen of the sciences, and “science” was the direction in which the whole society was going to march. Were we not like the mythic Nezha on his magical wheels of wind and fire—the very pinnacle of heaven’s selections?
Or, to put it another way, I was in the Communist system’s highest category in “trust.”
6. MY FIRST TRIP TO THE BOTTOM
After my graduation from Peking University in 1956, I was assigned to work at the Institute of Modern Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. At the end of August, I found myself with a little more than a week of free time before I needed to report for duty. It occurred to me that my student days were over and that this would be my last summer vacation, so I had better go have some fun while I still could. A classmate and I borrowed fifteen yuan from a professor and set out for the nearby tourist destinations of Shanhaiguan, Qinhuangdao, and Beidaihe. Li Shuxian had already begun her work assignment, so she couldn’t come with us. In any case she had already made her own summer trip to Beidaihe.
On a budget of fifteen yuan there was no way we could stay in hotels. At Qinhuangdao we slept one night (with permission) in the classroom o
f an elementary school. At the Beidaihe beach we sneaked into the men’s changing room at closing time and spent the night there. A third night was spent on a train. When we got back to Beijing I was exhausted but ecstatic. This had been my first trip to Shanhaiguan—“the world’s first pass,” as we call it in Chinese, and “the place where the Great Wall begins.” It was also the first time, at age twenty, I had ever seen the sea. At Qinhuangdao, looking out at the ocean waves, so dark they seemed almost purple, I saw little sailboats bobbing up and down, heading out in quest of fish, and thought that my own life, now also in its launch phase, could be compared to them. It made me feel like writing a poem—and I might have, except that another poem, one I had committed to memory during my school days, pushed its way into my consciousness and wouldn’t go away:
Farewell to you, unharnessed Ocean!
No longer will you roll at me
Your azure swells in endless motion
Or gleam in tranquil majesty.1
These are the opening lines of “To the Sea” by the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, who wrote it, I think, when he was also in his twenties. The idea of “no longer” did not exactly fit what I was feeling (I would be back to the sea, wouldn’t I?), but other than that, I couldn’t think of any words better than these, so I stifled my impulse to write my own poem.
Mao Zedong had visited Beidaihe in 1954 and (also perhaps moved by the sea?) had written a poem about it. One of Mao’s lines—“beyond Qinhuangdao, some fishing boats are drifting”—makes it clear that he, too, saw fishing boats, and they may have been the very ones we saw, because there were only a few such boats. The main difference in the poems was that the boats did not cause Mao to think of his own lifelong voyage. Still less did he think of Pushkin. What came to Mao’s mind was Cao Cao (A.D. 155–220), the ruthless tyrant and master of manipulation at the end of the Han Dynasty. Mao admired him. Another line in Mao’s poem—“Emperor Wu of Wei wielding his whip”—shows his wish that he might whip that open sea into shape, as Cao Cao might have.
A few months after my first glimpse of the ocean, Mao’s whip of power did come down, and it landed on the independent voices in China. The blow was devastating, and it lent truth, in my case, to Pushkin’s line about “no longer” seeing the sea. I did not see it again for twenty-two years.
My assignment at the Institute of Modern Physics was to study nuclear reactors. China’s leaders wanted to build their own reactor, and they had us work from an experimental heavy-water reactor that they brought in from the Soviet Union. Their ultimate aim, of course, was to build not just an experimental reactor but one that could produce the plutonium-239 needed to build nuclear weapons. The charge to our research group was to study all the relevant theory; another of our leaders’ purposes, clearly, was to hone the skills of people who could later be assigned to work on producing a bomb. There were twelve in our group. One was over thirty years old, but the others were all fresh out of Postbox 546 at Peking University or similar places. Three of us in the group were Party members. I was one of the three, and I was in charge of daily administration.
In the 1940s, Enrico Fermi and others had laid the foundations for the theory of nuclear reactors, and by the mid-1950s that theory had matured. In 1955, at the Geneva Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, the United States and the Soviet Union both decided to make public much that until then had been secret, and after they did this, the theory part of our work became fairly easy. The hard part was computation. There were no computers at the time, or even electronic calculators. Our most modern tools of that sort were calculators that ran on electric motors. But we didn’t have many of them, and there were not enough to go around. So our calculating device was often the traditional Chinese abacus, of which there were plenty. When our calculation work reached its peak periods, our whole room buzzed with the clacking of abacus beads. A person approaching might well have guessed it to be the accounting department of a bank or a commercial company. How would anyone guess that the sound of this racket was, in fact, only a prelude to the deafening boom of an atomic explosion?
In the eyes of the Chinese public, nothing was more glorious than working on the atomic bomb. The bomb was a supreme symbol of the nation, both its brains and its strength, and anyone connected with it was automatically a hero. But that’s not how many physicists saw it. The core value in physics is creation, not repetition. Whoever shows something for the first time is a hero; a person who confirms the result in a second experiment might also be worthy of note; but from the third time on, the results fall into the category of manufacturing, not physics. Left to their own preferences, physicists would rather find an unglamorous corner in which to do something truly creative than to join in a Great Repetition—which is what the nuclear bomb project essentially was. Moreover, physicists enjoy free and open debate, and the super-tight secrecy that enveloped the bomb project rubbed us deeply the wrong way. Eventually five of the people in our small group, offering this excuse or that, quit. They decided they could do without the tremendous honor of working on the Great Repetition.
I had some of these feelings myself. The study of nuclear reactors never really turned me on intellectually, and I did not find the idea of building nuclear weapons attractive. A number of leading physicists in the world had already announced their opposition to the manufacture and use of nuclear weapons. Agreeing with them, I made a statement of my own: “I don’t want to build weapons that kill people.” Still, I continued with my work and did not make any transfer requests. I reminded myself that I was a Party member and a member of the Party branch committee. I had weightier responsibilities than to follow my personal preferences.
There was one small area, though, where I could follow my interests—outside the scope of my duties. We were allowed to audit university courses if they could be said to fill a gap in our knowledge or to be necessary to our work. I found a course on heat transfer at Tsinghua University. The design of heat transfer is crucial in building nuclear reactors and is especially important for production reactors and the use of nuclear reactors in generating electricity. It was a major problem in the heat transfer system that caused the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl in the Soviet Union. But the Tsinghua course on heat transfer was dry as chaff and intolerably boring. After listening to two classes I couldn’t take it anymore and dropped out. I switched to a course at Peking University on general relativity. This elegant theory in physics, expounded by the great Albert Einstein, was utterly useless to the theory or design of nuclear reactors. I had to admit to myself that a person cannot always be guided solely by duty; what interests you matters, too.
I was drawn to the Peking University campus not only to audit courses but also, on Saturdays, to visit Li Shuxian. She was working in the physics department as the interpreter for a Soviet expert. Under an agreement made in the fall of 1956, the Soviet Union sent groups of specialists to Peking University to teach and do research. Each was assigned an assistant or two to do written and oral translation. The competence of these guest experts was about the same as Chinese lecturers or assistant professors, but their salaries were far higher than those of Chinese full professors. Their offices were much larger and fancier, too.
So Li Shuxian and I used her expert’s office as our meeting place on Saturday nights. We were brimming with enthusiasm and deeply in love, but marriage was out of the question. We both felt we had no right to consider marriage until our careers were launched. We even felt that Saturday sweet talk was not a fully justifiable use of time, so we replaced our romantic trysts with invitations to Ni Wansun and other classmates to come join in serious discussion. Ni was also working as a translator for a Soviet expert. In our meetings we talked about what we had learned from reading or research during the preceding week. We allowed ourselves the adolescent dream that our little Saturday salon might gradually attract more and more people until some day it turned into an influential group of some kind. Starting in the spring of 1957, we convened nearly ev
ery weekend for all-out bull sessions on topics that ranged over physics, philosophy, and politics.
I have forgotten most of what we talked about, but one item sticks in my memory. We were discussing an article by Werner Heisenberg about controversies in quantum mechanics. Heisenberg wrote, at one point, that Dmitrii Blokhintsev’s “new explanation” of quantum mechanics was nothing more than an attempt to accommodate Lenin’s political needs—or words to that effect. Seeing such a disrespectful reference to Lenin shocked us. In China at the time (and now, too), Lenin was a prophet comparable only to Marx. He was one of those four great foreigners—Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin—whose hallowed likenesses were constantly offered to the Chinese public for their adulation. It was unthinkable that Heisenberg’s quip could ever appear in a Chinese publication.
Despite the shock, the logic of physics impelled us to push ahead and consider Heisenberg’s point. This same Dmitrii Blokhintsev was the author of one of our college textbooks, A Course in Quantum Mechanics. The book was published in the 1940s, at the height of the Soviet Union’s criticism of “bourgeois science,” and its author states up front that his reason for offering a “new explanation” is to criticize and replace “bourgeois quantum mechanics.” His new explanation was not bogus science in the way that Trofim Lysenko’s far-fetched “agronomy” was. But there was no question that it was an incursion of ideology into an area where it did not belong. It was politics, not physics.
Heisenberg’s criticisms of Lenin did not completely undo the place of Lenin in my mind, but they did force me to realize that in the eyes of science, even a saint like Lenin did not have privileged status. His words, like anyone’s, were subject to science’s rules of logic and evidence. If forced to choose between science and non-science, I would have to choose science, no matter how brightly the halos shone on the non-science side. You can’t cheat physics.