by Fang Lizhi
This was the routine: before going down the well, we each took a gulp or two of a local liquor that was about 60 percent alcohol. Then, in the chilly wind, we removed all of our clothing and grabbed a rope to aid in the descent. The water at the bottom was knee-deep. We scooped sand with our two hands, so arms and legs were both always wet. We filled baskets with sand and then attached them to the rope for elevation to the surface. As the baskets ascended they dripped water continually, so we, at the bottom, were constantly soaked. After a while the heat from the local liquor wore off and a severe chill set in. The only defense against the chill was to generate body heat by scooping ever more feverishly. When it became clear that most of us could maintain such a pace for only half an hour, we reduced the shifts from an hour to twenty-five minutes. After ascending, in the still-frigid air, we had to dry off and put our clothes back on immediately. Then we took another swig of the local liquor, rested, and waited for the next call to service. For some of the farmers, if truth be told, the only reason for joining the work teams was to get those two swigs of liquor.
But there was another perk: people who went down the well could eat white-flour pancakes. The normal staples for farmers in the area were sweet potatoes and corn. Food made from white flour was available only during a two-month period in summer after the wheat harvest. So white-flour pancakes in winter were a special treat indeed, a symbol of the honor that was attached to work at the bottom of the well. It came at a price, though. People who descended wells too much could contract “cold legs syndrome,” a recurrent and incurable condition in which the knees are sore and numb. All of this—for water.
For me, the greatest reward for going down the well was neither liquor nor pancakes but camaraderie with the farmers. Our shared toil at the well bottom led them to accept me. My “thought reform,” in this sense, had succeeded, and my remaining days in the village passed more and more easily. It is worth reflecting on why this was so.
The original concept of the people who designed the policy of sending intellectuals to the countryside was that farmers would reform the intellectuals and make them more loyal to the Communist Party. The theory of class struggle held that poor farmers and other villagers, as archetypal supporters of Communist rule, would condemn and correct the “erroneous” thinking of intellectuals. Moreover, since intellectuals would be an isolated minority in the villages, the pressure to change would be much stronger than in the cities, so thought reform would be more fast and efficient.
What actually happened shows how artificial the theory was. It is true that farmers, especially the “poor farmers,” were big supporters of the Communist Party, but this was because the revolution had given them land, not because they shared the ideology of Communism. They did not behave in the way the theory of class struggle predicted.
Chinese villagers respect many kinds of local gods and spirits but generally do not live under concepts of transcendent religion. Things like religious wars are unknown, and worries about “ultimate concerns” are rare. Overarching visions of Jehovah, Allah, Communism, or whatever have little relevance to their daily life. The whole county of Zanhuang did not have a single presentable Buddhist temple; there were a few small Christian churches, but not many believers. When we sent-down intellectuals suddenly appeared, the farmers could not have cared less about our overall worldviews or ultimate concerns. It didn’t even occur to them to ask about such things, let alone offer “criticism” or “struggle.”
Viewed from the villages, the Anti-Rightist Movement’s strong emphasis on ideology stood at an extreme. A gaping mismatch separated Party goals in the cities and life in the villages, and there was no way the farmers could do what the Communists wanted them to do. For us “sent-down cadres,” life in the countryside, far from bringing more pressure on our “thought,” brought less.
The main standard that the farmers used in judging newcomers was how well a person worked. If your work was good, they accepted you and the distinction between you and them melted away. When I worked on the well with them, I became part of their community. They trusted my ability to work, and I felt a new self-confidence. There was no sense at all that anyone was “being reformed.”
When spring came I did what all the other young men in the village did. I plowed the land, carried water on shoulder poles, raised pigs, drove horse carts, and more. Finally I just moved in with one of them. He was single, two years older than I, and we shared everything—house, food, and work. The only thing that separated us was that he smoked and I didn’t. He often urged me to try, and once in a while, because I couldn’t find a way to resist his generous enthusiasm, I did take a few puffs. Those are the only times in my life I have ever smoked.
Then came the heat of the summer, when, like all the other men in the village, I went naked from the waist up. It was cooler that way, and it saved on laundry. (Customs like this have roots in poverty.) The women of the village, old and young alike, found nothing objectionable when we sent-down males observed the pattern. The only occasions that made us put our shirts back on were meetings at which sent-down females were present. That made us revert to urban custom. Photos from those years show us with bare chests, deep tans, and firm muscles. From surface appearances (i.e., without going into our “thoughts”), we looked like completely authentic farmers.
Mao Zedong wrote a famous article in which he says that intellectuals are short on intellect because they can’t plant crops or slaughter pigs. Chinese newspapers liked to reprint this article every time a campaign to criticize intellectuals came along. After the summer of 1958, though, we sent-down cadres lost our vulnerability to taking those silly claims seriously. We learned that those skills that Mao had claimed to be even more difficult than the ones it had taken us twenty years of laborious study to acquire were, in fact, things we could pick up very easily and were now doing every day. At the pace we were learning, a year might be enough—two, at most—to learn all of them. Sometimes we could actually make improvements, because we had the advantage of modern knowledge.
Let’s look at Mao’s example of pig slaughter. What Mao took to be some kind of great skill in fact is not hard at all, because, at the point when Chinese farmers kill a pig, it has already been tied up and cannot move. The killing is easy. The hard part is to go out into a field and catch the pig. Pigs don’t behave like sheep. Sheep move in groups and are easy to tend, but pigs fight over food and run around in all directions. When they scatter, the person tending them has to chase them down and bring them back together. Chasing pigs is hard work. Don’t be fooled by their fat bodies and short legs—they can really move. My top speed in the hundred-meter dash (with wind at my back) was 12.5 seconds, but I couldn’t catch a pig that was running in high gear.
In short, it is beyond question that catching pigs is harder than killing pigs. Mao Zedong’s august pronouncements about pig slaughter only show, I’m afraid, that he had no experience as a pig farmer. (Many of Mao’s edicts are less awe-inspiring after you have the chance to test them in the real world.)
By summer, when we “sent-down cadres” had pretty much been accepted by the farmers, some of us started getting love letters or other amorous approaches from local young women. I got a letter myself. None of these initiatives, it turned out, produced anything to write a novel about, but it was another sign that the local people viewed us sent-down types not as targets for “reform” but the opposite, as targets of pursuit. The phenomenon isn’t hard to explain, either. In general, when two different cultures are peacefully juxtaposed, the relatively more advanced of the two will influence the relatively less advanced, and this happens regardless of whether the more advanced side is a minority or a majority.
Chinese villages at the time were sorely in need of the import of something more advanced. What they got next, unfortunately—and it came by force—was the import of something more like a runaway pig. It was Mao’s “Great Leap Forward.”
In June we took in the wheat harvest. Zanhuang County had a b
umper crop of more than 1.5 tons per acre, and the farmers were elated. But then an article appeared in the People’s Daily, the authoritative national newspaper, that a certain place had made a great leap and produced eight tons per acre, more than five times as much as we had! Most farmers didn’t read newspapers, however authoritative. But I believed the newspapers, and I reported to the farmers what I had read. None of them believed it. They just said, “The scales there are wrong.” It was true that measuring standards in China were hardly uniform, and differences from place to place could be considerable. But it was hard to explain a fivefold discrepancy that way.
I didn’t press the point with my farmer friends. Then, a few days later, that authoritative newspaper reported that in some other place the wheat harvest had broken the forty-tons-per-acre level—more than twenty-five times better than ours! This time I didn’t relay the news to the farmers, but they heard about it anyway, and now they stopped saying that they didn’t believe it. The spirit of the Great Leap Forward was pushing through the land, descending level by level through the Communist bureaucracy, demanding that each locale begin its Leap by producing twice as much grain, then five times as much, then ten. The farmers, who were not in the habit of opposing what the Communist Party said, did their best to obey. (I can’t say, of course, whether they might have privately had the thought that the Leap would work if we just adjusted the scales.)
When the Leap started, I was assigned to write slogans, and for two weeks I wrote them on every conspicuous wall in the village. My characters were big, about two meters square. The instructions said that the bigger the characters were, the bolder readers would be and the greater the Leap would be. The two slogans that I wrote the most were:
More, faster, better, cheaper!
Struggle upstream with all you’ve got!
And:
One year is enough
For a ten-year plan!
The first of these was a headline that appeared in that same authoritative newspaper almost every day, and the latter was a slogan I had seen on many other walls. I never did know what “ten-year plan” meant, and it seemed no one else did, either.
As the hottest part of the summer arrived, the temperature of the air and the craziness of the politics ascended in direct proportion. The authoritative newspaper had a report of a place that again had increased grain production by an order of magnitude, to two hundred tons per acre. Meanwhile a new directive descended through the levels of the bureaucracy: “do deep-plowing.” Researchers at Communist Party Central had discovered that when seeds are sown after deep-plowing, harvests are much larger. Word came down that in places where plowing was as deep as half a meter, harvests increased fivefold. The spirit of the message was that the formula could be extrapolated: if you plowed one meter deep, the increase would be tenfold.
With that our village began a nighttime campaign (it was cooler at night) to deep-plow. I was in good health but still could not match many of the farmers in arm strength. So I resorted to “invention” and found a way to deep-plow faster than people with stronger arms could. The term in Chinese for “deep-plowing” was shenfan, literally “deep turnover,” and it asked only that the soil be inverted, not that it be broken into small pieces. I calculated that it would take less energy just to cut the soil into large squares and then invert them. By this method most of the work was in only two dimensions, not three. “Deep turnover” could be achieved more quickly.
Next, the spirit of the Leap leaped all the way to the heavens. As the ever-deeper plowing continued, the whole village galloped into Communism faster than an insane pig. The next month was the only one in my life spent in pure Communism. Every household in the village closed its kitchen and people ate in a communal mess hall. There was no charge for the food—currency had been abolished—and everyone took what he or she needed. During the day the commune members slept or studied the news of the Great Leap Forward, and when evening came they formed work brigades to go out into the fields, carrying oil lamps, to do deep-plowing. A canopy of stars above and an array of bobbing lights below illuminated the murky working fields, whose eerie silence was broken only by the occasional barking of a dog. Dig deep, dig deep, dig deep deep deep! Dig for the ideals of Karl Marx, right here, right now!
I should admit that, at the time, I did not adequately perceive the falsity and lunacy of the Great Leap. The reports of cabbages weighing 550 pounds and sweet-potato harvests of four thousand tons per acre did not, at the time, arouse my doubt—I guess because I felt that agronomy was not my field of expertise. Maybe there were indeed “different scales” at work—or something I did not understand.
What did trigger my skepticism was a paper on “physics” that appeared in the People’s Daily during the time we were doing deep-plowing. The author was Qian Xuesen, a professor who had recently returned from the United States and whom Mao Zedong had praised to the skies. Qian’s argument, which still sticks in my mind, was that, based on the principle of conservation of energy, and using the solar constant (i.e., the rate at which solar radiation arrives on the earth’s surface), one can calculate the maximum number of calories that can be produced per unit of land. Qian showed that this upper limit was far higher than even the amazing numbers in the Great Leap reports. He wanted to give the Great Leap the credibility of physics, and his point was that the Leap so far was by no means “Great” enough. There was room for even bolder leaping.
But, to repeat, you can’t cheat physics. Even setting aside the question of whether Qian was using “science” to flatter political power, the science itself was just plain wrong. His calculation was based on conservation of energy as described in the first law of thermodynamics. But by 1958 it was already well known that this law does not hold for systems of plant growth. What plants “consume” is not energy in this sense but negative entropy. The flow of negative entropy from the sun to the earth is what would determine the upper limit of plant production. To use conservation of energy to calculate crop maximums is fundamentally mistaken. (And even if we were talking about energy, the amount of energy the sun sends to the earth is about the same as the amount the earth radiates back out to space.) The only thing the article really proves is that its author had no understanding of what was already known in the field of nonequilibrium thermodynamics. (I should apologize for using technical jargon in a memoir, but in this case I see no other way to say exactly what I feel a need to say.)
Freedom is vital to science; science dies without it. When Qian’s ridiculous article came out, Chinese physicists could see it for what it was, but no one had the freedom to say so. Not even purely scientific criticisms were possible, because this author was a favorite of Mao Zedong and this article’s conclusions supported the Great Leap Forward. But the even more baleful fact is that the dictator of a mammoth political party could be so benighted and reckless as to use obsequious “science” to make policies that affected nearly a billion people. How can a country that imprisons science expect anything but disaster?
On the eve of the catastrophic collapse of the Great Leap, I left the village to go to the University of Science and Technology of China to teach physics.
8. INTO THE UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
I worked at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) for twenty-eight years and four months, from the end of August 1958 until January 1987. My entry and my exit, separated by nearly three decades, shared an interesting point in common: both coincided with an expulsion from the Communist Party of China. The two expulsions were, moreover, done in the same way.
The charter of the Communist Party of China sets out the procedure for expelling a member. First, there is to be a meeting of all members in the concerned member’s branch. The concerned member has the right to attend and to present a self-defense. After full discussion, the question is put to a vote. If the vote passes, the matter goes to the Party Committee at the next highest level and, if approved there, becomes official. Plainly, it would be a lo
t of trouble to expel a Party member in this way. But the Party Charter also provides that in emergency situations, higher levels in the Party can expel a member without going through a meeting of the local Party branch or giving the person in question an opportunity for self-defense. Expulsion of this latter sort has immediate effect.
The term “emergency situations” normally refers to warfare or to events like fires or earthquakes. At such times, much can happen in the blink of an eye and there may be no time to hold a meeting—and that is when the expedited-expulsion provision in the Party Charter can take effect. On the two occasions when I was expelled from the Party, we were not on a battlefield, and I didn’t notice any earthquakes. We were holding classes at a university. Still, the provision was invoked and I was expelled immediately, without a meeting or a chance to defend myself.
The underlying reason for emergency treatment of my case, in both instances, was not really that the case was special (although it was, both times, not a common case); the more fundamental fact was that the authorities viewed universities as a kind of battlefield. Mao had said, “We [Communists] have no university professors; they all belong to the Kuomintang, and they’re the ones running [the universities].” He also said, “the real power in the worlds of scholarship and education lies in the hands of the bourgeois intellectuals, who in fact are Kuomintang people.” In short, universities continued to be viewed as KMT zones. The KMT armies had been defeated, but the universities remained battlefields on which the KMT intellectuals had not yet surrendered. This was the underlying cause of my two “emergency expulsions,” and it reveals how the Party has viewed universities for decades.
USTC was founded in 1958. When I reported for duty it consisted of only a hundred or so people doing preparatory work. My initial position was Teaching Assistant in Physics, but there were no students yet. The university’s initial charge was to create a teaching institution in science and technology using the intellectual resources of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. There were three additional, more concrete goals: atomic bombs, guided missiles, and satellites—or “two bombs and a star,” as our catchphrase put it. Plans for these were just getting under way.