by Fang Lizhi
In my later career as an educator, Party officials asked me many times why it is that students stray from Communist ideology when they go to college. Where does the “counterrevolutionary” education come from? They tied themselves in knots trying to figure out why students who were carefully selected for “good thinking” when they entered universities turned into “bourgeois intellectuals” once they were there. They took out magnifying glasses to examine every detail of campus life, inside and outside classrooms, and asked school administrators to remove anything that came remotely close to “counterrevolutionary thinking.” But it never worked, and can never work, because what they call “counterrevolutionary thinking” is stuck inside science. No course in a physics department is more counterrevolutionary than Physics 1. No one who understands physics can turn around and accept a claim that Marxism-Leninism is special wisdom that trumps everything else.
This is why our weekend salon, even without any outside influences, inevitably led us to follow science and gradually to take leave of Communist orthodoxy. Some historians have held that if Mao Zedong had not launched the 1957 Anti-Rightist Movement, in which he persecuted intellectuals with such a broad brush, later conflicts between the intellectuals and the Communist Party could have been avoided. I don’t think this gets it right. The deeper reason why intellectuals left the Party’s ideology behind is that science by nature weeds out ignorance. With or without an Anti-Rightist Movement, the split between scientists and the Party was bound to occur sooner or later. The movement only sped the process up.
In March 1957, the Party Committee of the Academy of Sciences arranged that two of Mao Zedong’s recent speeches be read to all Party members in the Academy. I went to listen. Mao proposed to “let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend” and encouraged non-Party people to express their criticisms of the Party, whatever these might be. He called for “giving free voice.”
In later years, Mao explained that his call to “give free voice” had been an “open plot” (not, as some were saying, a hidden plot) whose purpose was to identify malcontents, lure them into criticizing the Party, and then round them up for a purge. The goal was to “consolidate the Party’s dictatorship.” This ex post facto explanation implies that Mao had everything figured out in advance—how the backsliders, those enemies of socialism, would all “speak out” on his cue so that he could use the Anti-Rightist Movement to finish them off.
A bit of analysis, though—no more sophisticated than what you can find in a third-rate detective novel—can show that Mao’s explanation does not fit what happened. Mao did set a trap, but it did not work as he intended, and what actually happened surprised him. This can be seen from the fact that on May 15 he published an article titled “Things Are Beginning to Change” in which he describes his movement as transitioning from the “speaking out” phase to the repression stage. So, if we accept his claim that “I saw it all in advance,” then we have to say that by May 15 most of the people for whom he had set his trap had already fallen into it. In fact, though, it was only after May 15 that the first protest posters went up at Peking University and on other campuses. What later came to be known as “the great speaking out” by students and young intellectuals—the high tide of criticism of the Party by “rightists,” as Mao later called them—all happened after May 15. It could not be clearer that Mao did not anticipate that high tide.
Mao apparently calculated that Marxism-Leninism, with Maoism added, had by 1957 achieved such a remarkable victory in China that even if things weren’t perfect, people would find them almost so, and that if he invited people to speak out, he would get only minor criticisms that would do more to help than to harm. He could appear magnanimous without sacrificing any actual power. In particular he could count on it that the “new intellectuals” whom the Communist Party had cultivated in the universities since 1949 would be his staunch supporters.
It is important to recognize that Mao’s assessment was not entirely wrong. Among the young people I knew at the time (and this includes me), it was hard to find anyone who, when it came to politics, was not a supporter of Mao and the Communist Party. Not everyone was a fanatic, but the support was solid.
My nuclear reactor group was very busy with calculations in the spring of 1957 and was not involved in the rising ferment. We were preoccupied with the march toward science—where was there time for “speaking out”? For scientists, moreover, the slogan “Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend” was unexciting. It was trivially obvious. The idea that free competition of viewpoints is necessary for scholarly progress was not something that we needed a four-hour speech from Mao Zedong in order to understand. Galileo had made the point more than three hundred years earlier. So we just kept working, our abaci buzzing.
March, April, and the first half of May passed in this way. We had no sense of any plot, whether hidden or otherwise. On Saturday, May 18, I went to Peking University as I usually did on Saturdays, and, as usual, met with Li Shuxian and others at the Soviet expert’s office for a big discussion of all things discussable. The campus was its normal quiet self.
But two days later, on May 20, Pandora’s box opened. An eye-catching poster appeared on the east wall of the main dining hall, which was one of the students’ favorite gathering places. The poster bore a poem (again we see that poems start things) whose title was “It’s Time”:
Sing, young people, open your throats and sing
Let’s put both our suffering and our love into words
Don’t feel alone in your pain, your indignation, your depression
Lay it all out—the bitter and sweet, the pungent and foul—in the light of day
The poets were two juniors in the Chinese Department. Their poster brought a torrent of response from seemingly every corner of the formerly quiet campus. In a matter of days the wall was blanketed in posters of all kinds. “Speaking out” was truly under way.
I did not meet the authors of “It’s Time” in 1957, but I did meet one of them, Shen Zeyi, thirty-two years later, in the spring of 1989. He had paid for his poem with more than twenty years of his life—he had been banished to China’s northwest—and in 1989 his head was mottled with gray. But his eyes still gleamed when he spoke of his poem. When he recited it for me, it was as if nothing had changed for him during the thirty-two years since he wrote it. And he was right to be proud of the poem. It was the opening salvo in the first major conflict between Chinese intellectuals (especially young intellectuals) and the Communist Party.
The posters that mushroomed in the dining hall area were aimed not at “mistakes” the Communist Party had made, but at the fundaments of its ideology. Mao, in encouraging people to speak out, had acknowledged that the Party’s “work style” had shortcomings of three kinds—subjectivism, bureaucratism, and factionalism. He called these “the three evils.” His real purpose in naming specifically three things was to define the scope within which popular criticism would be welcome. But the student posters, right from the start, leaped past those bounds and raised questions that, however obvious they may have been, Mao had not guessed anyone would raise. The central question, which took several forms, was: “If three evils have appeared, what caused them?”
But this was forbidden. Communist governance could not allow that question to be asked. To probe it would lead to an evaluation of the pros and cons of the system as a whole, and such an inquiry was off-limits because the superiority of socialism was beyond doubt. It would not matter what criteria one used or how one did the measurements in any evaluation of the system, because one began—had to begin—with the conclusion: socialism is wonderful.
When the question of the “origins of the three evils” was raised, the students who had written the posters that began the ferment were thrust into a terrible and unanticipated predicament. None of the students who had followed them had meant to put them there. Most students generally approved of what the Communist Party had been d
oing from 1949 to 1957 and were not surprised, or especially irritated, that things like “the three evils” had popped up. They had inquired into “origins” mainly because they had been trained to seek the causes of things. Why should the “three evils” be an exception? The science students among them had learned, moreover, that there are no such things as propositions that cannot be questioned. Their support for the Communist Party and socialism could not outweigh this training. This is why I wrote, above, that the conflict between young scientists and the Communist Party arose from principle.
But there was another factor that added to the problem. A year earlier, Nikita Khrushchev had delivered his “secret speech” at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, denouncing the “cult of personality” that had developed around Stalin and recounting the late Soviet leader’s abuses of power. The speech was strictly banned in China, but you could find it at Peking University in the Soviet newspaper Pravda as well as in Western news accounts. Many people had heard about the speech in greater or lesser detail, and translations in several versions circulated among the students. Until then, Stalin had been one of our demigods; when he died in 1953 some of my classmates shed tears. Were we now to believe that he had slaughtered innocent people in the name of class struggle? Even if we didn’t want to believe it, after Khrushchev’s speech we had to take the idea seriously. It was another principle of science that you don’t follow precursors blindly, no matter how godlike they seem. But this questioning, too, did not sit well with the Party.
And so the peaceful coexistence of “speaking out” and the “whip of power” (that whip that Mao admired in Cao Cao) came to an end. A clash was inevitable.
When the news that “Peking University is in trouble” reached us at the Institute of Modern Physics, we listened in silence and kept working. But the news kept coming and got more and more startling every day. I wanted to go see for myself but adhered to my pattern of waiting until Saturday to do so. I went on Saturday, May 25, for my regular discussion with Li Shuxian and Ni Wansun.
Our topic that day was the student posters. All three of us were members of the Communist Party and, during our student days, had been officers of the Communist Youth League. In theory, therefore, the people the students were complaining about included us, however we might sympathize with them. We felt no impulse to write posters ourselves, but the ones that were already up caused us to think hard. The “three evils” did indeed exist in the university, as the students claimed; and they had indeed hurt people, including some of our classmates. As Party members, should we accept some responsibility?
Our answer was yes. A cardinal rule for Youth League officers was “to be the Party’s loyal assistants.” There had been no vicious class-struggle campaigns during our tenure, but still, as we thought about it, our “assistant” work had indeed harmed some of our classmates. For example, in 1955, when Ho Chi Minh, the chairman of the Communist Party of Vietnam, came to China, students at Peking University were asked to form a welcoming party at the airport. This seemed a simple matter at first, but when we learned that Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and all the top leaders of the Chinese Communist Party were going to be there, too, the task turned into a “crucial political responsibility.” The organization asked us to use class-struggle criteria to select students for the welcoming party. Classmates with “backward thinking” were for that reason “unreliable” and should not be included. In retrospect, now, we could imagine what this likely did to the self-respect of those classmates. And we had probably been even more thoughtless during the “Movement to Eliminate Counterrevolutionaries.” None of our classmates was officially a “counterrevolutionary element” (one could not have gotten into college as such), but there were some who had “backward thinking.” During the month-long campaign, those classmates endured fierce and unreasoning invective at “denunciation meetings.” The three of us had helped to organize and convene those meetings.
We felt guilty, and we felt a strong urge to do something to change the work style of the Youth League so that this kind of abuse could not happen again. Ni Wansun suggested that we write a joint letter to the Central Committee of the Party with our own suggestions for improving the work of both the Party and the Youth League. Li Shuxian and I agreed. In some way that was hard to pinpoint, Khrushchev had influenced us. He seemed to have given new energy and life to a Soviet Communism that had grown stale. We hoped that our own Communist movement could get some new life, too.
On Sunday, June 2, when I went again to Peking University, I learned that Ni Wansun had finished a long outline for our contemplated letter. It covered the gamut of the Communist Party’s shortcomings and errors, but, to match Mao’s guidelines, he had organized it as “dogmatism” in the realm of theory, “subjectivism” in the realm of thinking, and “factionalism” in the realm of work style. We spent an afternoon discussing and revising the outline, and then made writing assignments: Ni would do the main part and Li would do the section on the Youth League. I wanted to write, too, but my workload at the reactor was just too heavy; I couldn’t spare the time.
By the time of my next trip to the campus, on Saturday, June 8, the sky had changed color. The People’s Daily published an editorial that day titled “What Is This For?” and Mao Zedong issued a document for Party members called “Organize Forces to Counterattack Against the Savage Attacks by Rightist Elements.” This marked the onset of a political campaign whose name, straight from Mao, was “Counterattack Against Rightist Elements.”
Over the past few decades the Communist Party of China has rolled out a number of class-struggle campaigns, and they have hardly differed in their methods. A single general formula can encompass them. I have no doubt that in today’s world, with its savvy computers, any human being with an intelligence level at or above that of Wang Zhen could easily use this formula to direct the sort of class-struggle campaign that the great Communist Party of China directs. The formula includes these steps:
1. Identify the target of the struggle. By definition, the enemies in a class struggle are “a small handful,” which means they should not exceed 5 percent of the people concerned. Accordingly, it is the duty of the struggle leader to home in on this percentage. The smaller the deviation from it, the better. The reason Li Shuxian was labeled a rightist and I was not had everything to do with this formula. There was room to accommodate her at Peking University, but not room for me at the Academy of Sciences.
2. Fabricate charges. By definition, XXX elements (“rightist” elements in our case, but the formula works for anything) are anti-Party and antisocialist. Accordingly, it is the duty of the struggle leader to find evidence until it reaches this level. For example, one of the student posters at Peking University had complained about shoddy service at the university barber shop. It said people emerged looking as if the haircuts had been done by nipping dogs. Well, that poster was enough to make its author a rightist. Dogs bite off hair in socialist barber shops? How reactionary can you get!
3. Ferret out the hidden cliques. By definition, XXX elements organize small anti-Party cliques. Each has a program and has plans for pursuing it. Accordingly, it is the duty of the struggle leader to denounce each small anti-Party clique organized by XXX elements. It doesn’t matter if clique members have never met one another.
4. Organize “criticism struggle sessions” of various sizes. These, too, follow a standard formula. No matter how contrite and forthcoming a victim might be, people in the crowd have to shout out “Phony! Come clean!” Then, at the end, they raise their hands in unison—just as you can see representatives to the National People’s Congress doing on television—to cast votes.
In any case, it was as easy as that. Thousands, even tens of thousands, of naive and innocent students and young intellectuals were trapped in the class-struggle machine and branded as rightists. Quite a few of them, unable to handle the insult to their self-respect, committed suicide.
The authorities knew that Ni Wansun, Li Shuxian,
and I had planned to send a letter to Party Central. When the shock of June 8 arrived we hadn’t yet mailed the letter, and now we decided not to. We assumed we were safe. After all, the Party charter permits members to write letters to Party Central. Moreover, none of what we wrote in the letter had appeared anywhere else, like in a wall poster. Since our visible actions had not crossed any line, we should still, we thought, be seen as free of any “mistakes.” And indeed, all through August, nothing happened to us.
In September, the attacks on the rightists were petering out, and the cries of “Phony!” were heard less often. It seemed the campaign was about to end.
But life is never completely free from chance. It was also in September that Deng Xiaoping, director of the office of the Anti-Rightist Movement for Party Central, and Peng Zhen, the Party Secretary for Beijing, came to visit Peking University in person. They were startled to see the protest posters that school authorities had confiscated, and Deng commented, “This school really produces some high-quality rightists!” They decided on the spot to make an exception for Peking University and to raise the number of rightists to be ferreted out on this campus a few points higher than the 5 percent that was normal elsewhere.
So the campaign at Peking University mushroomed toward a second high point. A new search for people who fit the rightist formula was launched, and that search uncovered our plan to write a letter to Party Central. Our case fit the class-struggle formula perfectly. The letter had been addressed to Party Central, so clearly it was “anti-Party”; we had first made an outline, so obviously we had a “program”; we had been meeting every week since May, so we plainly had “plans”; and there were three of us—plural!—so obviously there was an “organization.” Our case became a model for the campus purge. Our letter outline was printed and distributed, with sharp denunciation attached. Ni Wansun and Li Shuxian were both labeled rightists.